Chicago's Northwest Tollway to be Renamed the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway

Last week, the Illinois Toll Highway Authority announced that the Northwest Tollway was to be renamed in honor of Nobel Prize winner and humanitarian Jane Addams some 72 years after her death.

She never had a car of her own but loved to walk and ride a bike, and becomes the first woman to have a major road in Chicagoland named after her.

According to the Chicago Tribune, her "social justice work influenced many leaders including President Theodore Roosevelt, who put women's suffrage, old-age pensions and unemployment insurance on his Bull Moose platform...in 1912." She also established Hull House.

From the I-294 intersection all the way out to Rockford and to the Wisconsin border, the road will now be known as the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway. It will pass close to her hometown of Cedarville, Il. (where she is buried), and where she studied at the Rockford Female Seminary, now known as Rockford College.

I doubt that I will drive it as I am still VERY unhappy with the tollway's I-Pass system where if you don't have one, you have to pay double tolls. However, this name change honors a very worthy lady.

Chicago Tribune "Drive for social justice honored" by Mary Ann Fergus and Richard Wronski.

Let's Update Those Roadmaps. --RoadDog