Man evicted from makeshift home under drawbridge

CHICAGO -- For three or four years, a homeless man achieved the impossible: He found a cheap place to live on pricey Lake Shore Drive.

Actually, Richard Dorsay lived under Lake Shore Drive, in a wooden shack built into the beams and girders of the drawbridge that crosses the Chicago River.

On Sunday, Dorsay was evicted after another man arrested in suburban Streamwood told police about the home under the bridge. When authorities went inside, they found an elaborate setup that tapped into the bridge's electricity to power a television, microwave, space heater and PlayStation video game system. There, Dorsay could relax, turn on a Chicago Bears game, invite friends over and pop open some beers.

"I've never seen this," Tom Powers, a deputy commissioner for the Chicago Department of Transportation, who was at the bridge Sunday, told the Chicago Sun-Times. "Usually, it's somebody trying to get warm at night."

The home had it quirks. Whenever Dorsay heard the bells that signal the arms of the bridge would soon rise to let boats through, he held on as the bridge slowly pitched him forward.

"The first time it was scary," he said. "After that, it was almost like riding a Ferris wheel."

Coming and going was different, too. Whenever he left, he would pop his head out of the hole to look for traffic. Then he would climb out and go about his routine of panhandling or searching for items to sell at junk yards. He also collects a welfare check.

Dorsay discovered his new home when he spotted a hole in a girder in the midsection of the lower level of the double-decker bridge and climbed in. He liked what he saw and started moving his belongings, which he had been hauling around with him, inside. Then he started bringing in other things he could fit through the 1-foot-by-3-foot hole.

Two other people also moved to the same area of the bridge, and a number of wooden huts with sleeping quarters were built. Dorsay used blankets to camouflage the huts to make them harder to spot from the water below.

"You've got to be kind of agile," Dorsay said of his living arrangements. "You can't be an idiot. ... It doesn't take long to figure out what you need to do."

Dorsay's luck ran out after last week. The man who told police about him allegedly implicated Dorsay in criminal activity and said he had a gun at his home.

Police arrested Dorsay at the bridge on Thursday. He was taken to Streamwood, where he was released without being charged. He was, however, charged in Chicago with criminal trespass to property, a misdemeanor. On Sunday, authorities searched his home. No gun was found.

Dorsay's father came by the police station Sunday to take him to his home in Burr Ridge. "I've always hoped that he would find a place and he would seek employment," Gary Dorsay told the Sun-Times. "He is strong enough and bright enough to do something." Several calls to the home went unanswered Monday.

The discovery could lead the city to change its weekly security sweeps of the bridge and block holes in the structure, said Powers, the transportation department deputy commissioner.

Mayor Richard Daley said Dorsay illustrates the homelessness problem in the city. "They're there for a reason, for shelter," the mayor said. "And that's the concern we share."