It's Curious City, where we take your questions about Chicago and the region, and investigate, report, explore, from WBEZ.

Okay, let's go back 100 years. That's when the nation was facing a major killer, tuberculosis.

TB is highly infectious. It's spread through the air and can destroy

the lungs. Here in Chicago, TB was taking more than 3,000 lives a year, and so the city did

something about it. In 1915, Chicago found infected residents and plucked them from their lives, from

their homes and their families,

and they sent them away to protect the patients and the public.

The destination? A 160-acre mini-city, then on the rural edge of town.

It was called the Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium. And for more than half a century,

it's where the city's TB patients were sent until they got better, or they died. The sanitarium

closed in 1974, but some of the buildings are still there. They're part of Peterson Park on the northwest side.

And that's where questioner Lori Nader was visiting with a friend one day, when they got lucky.

They ran into the head of the park and got a tour.

And she showed us all these archives, took us to the morgue, told us about the stories about the underground, how it's all connected.

This visit only filled Lori with more questions about the place, especially.

What was it like to live here?

Yeah, what was it like?

I mean, for the quarter million patients who were treated there.

That's right, a quarter million people were quarantined in the sanitarium

often for years, as late as 1974, when it finally closed.

I'm WBEZ reporter Monica Eng, and to answer Lori's question, I tracked down members of a fading

generation. There's Chicagoans who survived TB and actually lived at the municipal tuberculosis sanitarium in its final

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