Junk Car Pickup in West Elsdon

West Elsdon is small. The city’s community area boundary file puts it at well under two square miles, the smallest of the Chicago areas on our list, and Wikipedia calls it a twin of neighboring West Lawn (Wikipedia). For us, that size means one thing: wherever the car is, it’s only a few blocks off 55th Street, and 55th runs straight from our base on Western Avenue to Pulaski Road in a little over 2 miles.

A straight shot on 55th Street

You can almost see the route from the map. The truck pulls out of the base, turns onto 55th Street, and heads west through Gage Park until it reaches Pulaski Road, which is the heart of West Elsdon. No turns to speak of, no expressway. West of Pulaski the side streets start with K, Karlov and Komensky among them, and they’re easy to mix up over the phone, so spell yours out or give the house number with it.

That stretch of 55th is on the city’s two-inch snow route list, and so are 59th Street and Pulaski Road from 52nd Street south. Those are the streets where a stalled car gets ticketed or moved once snow piles up. The city’s winter parking page says this two-inch ban covers about 500 miles of main streets and can switch on at any hour or date once the snow is deep enough, though it isn’t activated often. The quiet residential blocks between those streets are not on the list.

Who lives here and how the blocks were built

According to Wikipedia, West Elsdon began as marshy land left over from an ancient lake. German-American and Irish-American settlers came first, Polish-Americans and other Central Europeans followed when housing went up in the 1930s, and brick houses filled in after World War II. Mexican-American families later settled in the eastern part, and today they’re a clear majority. The West Elsdon Civic Association organizes the neighborhood privately.

If your car is in a garage behind one of those houses, tell us whether the door opens onto the alley or toward the house, and whether the car rolls. Those two answers decide how we hook it up.

The 55th Street ZIP split

West Elsdon has two ZIP codes, and 55th Street is the divide. On the city’s ZIP boundary file, blocks north of 55th are 60632 and blocks south of it are 60629. Matched to 2020 census blocks, that works out to roughly 38 percent of residents in 60632 and 62 percent in 60629.

Corners worth naming when you call

• St. Turibius, at 57th Street and Karlov Avenue. The parish school closed in 2013, but the church and the old school building are still there.
• Sor Juana Elementary, a Chicago Public School in the former Lourdes girls’ high school, filling the block from 55th to 56th Street between Komensky and Karlov.
• The Midway Orange Line station, which Wikipedia notes sits in Garfield Ridge but serves many West Elsdon residents. The Orange Line was built to connect Midway Airport with downtown and opened on October 31, 1993, after the Southwest Side had waited a long time for ‘L’ service of its own.

The neighborhood’s borders are easy to list. Archer Heights is to the north, West Lawn to the south, Gage Park to the east, and Garfield Ridge and Clearing to the west and southwest.

Why the city cares about a car that won’t move

Streets and Sanitation has had a private contractor that tows abandoned vehicles, and its abandoned vehicle page says more than 500,000 vehicles have been towed and impounded since that program began. Cars that nobody redeems from the pound are sold for scrap. The owner of that car gets nothing. Selling to us before a car reaches that point means the scrap value lands in your hand instead.

Cars, motorcycles and total losses

We buy every kind of vehicle from West Elsdon, from a sedan with a blown head gasket to a motorcycle that hasn’t left the garage in years. If an insurance company has written your car off, our guide to total loss cars in Illinois explains your options before you decide. Our junk car removal page walks through the whole process, from the first call to the payment. Call between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. any day of the week.