The building itself is Standard American Grade School with gray cement lintels over light tan bricks. Art Deco letters stating the school’s name were poured into cement, striving to make it look like the district hired a stonemason.

It’s an Art Deco starter set of a building, a school designed by someone who once heard of Frank Lloyd Wright. The windows are covered now.

There’s a relatively new but definitely crumbling playground around the back. Some plastic is melted, some chains are bent or broken. Some of the padded foam mats that replaced the mulch and gravel of my era of swingsets are missing. I don’t think children come here anymore. I later find why.

I rode this route July 30 and am typing this sentence meant for Oct. 24 late at night on Aug. 4. It’s massively hot outside and my wife is massively pregnant, lolling on the couch rewatching what, based on Clooney’s hair, is an early-season episode of “E.R.” It’s quiet, which I’m not guessing will last many more days for us.

But now I’m back in July, winding tight circles on my bike and taking mental notes about a swingset.

The homes are lovely by the school. It’s quiet but for birds and the hum of a nearby lawnmower. They’re single bungalows, classic beauties that would be sold in a second in my North Side neighborhood so they could be torn down to be replaced with lot-engulfing megamansions.

Here they sit with manicured yards.

It’s gang turf, I read later, and that makes sense. You look at cars, not houses, to determine a neighborhood’s income level. They’re old and few. It’s Jeffrey Manor GD territory, a website tells me. They beef with the Slag Valley set of the Latin Counts a few blocks to the east, and I wonder if I’m embarrassing myself by admitting I’m the type of man who has to google gang names.

I am that man though. It’s Aug. 5 now, just after 6 in the morning. My wife’s asleep, or at least still in bed. I’m watching cloudy skies roll over tree-lined North Side streets.

Chris Wormley didn’t like the gangbanging at Goldsmith School. It wasn’t Goldsmith by the time he attended the Art Deco starter set on Crandon and 102nd, but “AMIkids Infinity High School,” a Tampa-based nonprofit Chicago contracted with to run the old Goldsmith building as a high school for troubled teens after the Richard M. Daley administration shuttered Las Casas Occupational High School in 2010.

Wormley, 17, was stabbed to death in the school on March 1, 2012. A fight broke out as the students were lining up inside the doors to be waved with the metal-detecting wand. Wormley was killed and another kid was injured. The latter kid sued the district and AMIkids for negligence in 2016.

The news trail for what happened to Wormley’s killer dies after two articles — the news stops caring when the press releases don’t arrive — but I find an Illinois Department of Corrections profile of someone with the same name and, I think, face. The inmate has the same swaggery head-cock and goofy stick-out ears as the kid’s mugshot, but with a shaved head, more tattoos and about 40 extra pounds of muscle. He’ll get out in 2045, if all goes well.

I can’t find when AMIkids left the building, but it’s been up for sale since January 2017, offered alongside a slate of Rahm’s own school closures.

Across 96th Street everything changes. The manicured blocks of lovely homes instantly become a dead strip mall of battered signs and vacant storefronts. One of the sliding doors is absently open — nobody even cares. Across the street, men on ladders tinker with where the awning once was on a Dollar General.

Through an underpass, it’s homes again. But here the weeds grow longer. Here the yards are less maintained, and I hear no lawnmowers. Here there are more people walking up and down those streets — old men with four-footed canes and once-stylish hats, women hauling errand bags, a few kids riding summer bikes.

“Time to Save,” the sign over an old… bank? Church?

“Time to Save,” the sign over a dust-coated brick building at 93rd tells me as I turn onto Cottage Grove. The letters are blue, ringed in neon that will never light again.

Here it goes from run-down to straight-up musty. Empty storefronts of different designs, each decade’s stab at revitalization or urban renewal (“Urban renewal is negro removal,” James Baldwin chides from the grave) sitting vacant next to the last one.

Two men sit outside a store with resurrected Frankenstein lawnmowers. One’s wearing a wifebeater undershirt — the only other name I know for it’s the also-offensive “dago T” — and a straw fedora without a band. A cigarette dangles from his lips. He looks like a photo from the ’20s.

I ride on, faster and faster. I’m hitting a stride here, but traffic’s still busy enough I’m worried about getting creamed by a Honda. I race past bus stops and storefront churches, by little girls playing patty cake and men in dago Ts laughing and joking as they stand around cars. I race by because the road is fast and I’ve hit a good pace for cardio, trying not to think about all the stories I’m blaring by.

The laughter of children playing basketball at a summer school makes me smile. They’re about 9, 10. I slow my pace and find a graveyard, where the next story will pick up.

My mind keeps going back to the lovely homes by Goldsmith. It was peaceful and beautiful there, where the child died.

They’re in construction hardhats and neon clothing loud enough to give the engineer enough time to notice them and feel terrible forever before the train crashes into them. To a man, they’re white and fat. The old ones have burly white beards down to their collarbones. The younger ones, still in training, only have rolls of scruff barely reaching Adam’s apples.

Their morning is beginning. So is Chicago.

On July 30, I rode my bike the entire length of Chicago. On a whim, on a lark excused by the existence of this blog and a desire to go big as I near 1K, I took a day off work to ride from a Burnham golf course to an Evanston cemetery, from the southernmost point of town to the northernest north bits.

I rode past the Hegewisch train tracks, noting a spot where a homeowner had put up sawhorses to keep a spot in dibs, even though it was the dead of summer. I found the first bike path on Baltimore, turning past a military tank set out to honor the veterans and a pizza place called “Pudgy’s.” Hegewisch is bright and suburban, but poor enough to feel comfortable. It’s a place of corner bars, bored teens and a rotting commercial thoroughfare. It’s a small town gone jobless, Mayberry waiting for the factories to return.

About 128th, while unsuccessfully attempting to negotiate a series of no outlet streets, I catch sight of the first industrial structure, a massive rusting or rust-colored steel something looms over the village of cul de sacs and bungalows like a dark wizard’s tower in a children’s book. I stop to record these thoughts by an empty Little League field where teams named after pro teams play feet from a humming power transfer station.

I speak longingly of the industry, not derisively. These are jobs. A chance to build, to provide, to be. But the nature of the area is jarring slapped so close to the industrial parks. A retention pond outside a pallet company warehouse is dappled with lily pads. When I approach, the dark wizard’s tower turns out to be a bridge of the type where the middle raises straight up rather than having two sides split and tilt. There’s a deer crossing sign in front of it.

Where the sidewalk ends, I’m forced to ride alongside screaming trucks and weekday motorcyclists. There’s a hole in the berm to my right. It’s an elephantine tube of corrugated metal running under train tracks — maybe for drainage or to let animals through, but the mud rutted with tire tracks shows its current use. I ride through and find two men fishing the Little Calumet.

They’re both black with beards and floppy fishing caps. One is standing next to his bike, casting into the industrial waters amid bird chirps and leafy trees sneered over by massive metal tanks and silos on the other side of the river. The other, older man is unloading a tackle box from his car.

I should stop them, of course. I should stop them and get their stories, learn their lives, interview them, pimp my blog and otherwise do what I said I set out to do, but they’re so perfect, they’re so pastoral, they’re so wonderful and of that very moment that I just ride in a circle and say to them “Good luck.”

Tall grass leering out into the road lashes my arm as I drive down the three-foot median on the end of 122nd, but I don’t dare veer away from the grass onto the street lest I get creamed by a tanker truck that says “Quest,” one of many that suck me into a momentary slipstream as they scream by. I feel like I’m on a country road. I feel like I’m in a factory. The bike path finds me again at Stony Island.

It made sense, of course. Calumet Fisheries on the 95th Street Bridge is for all comers. Rich and poor, young and old, black and brown and white all file in by car or bike to the little shack on the Calumet River.

They don’t come from factories, though. They don’t come with the reek of molten bessamer from long hours at the steel mill.

Now, a parade of spandex-clad cyclists en route to Indiana is a more common sight. The bridge the Blues Brothers did an Evel Knievel over in the movie raises to the skies with dinging safety warning and tumbling litter and scrap. It’s not being raised for heavy industrial cargo, but a rich man’s sailboat from the nearby marina. His hobbycraft’s mast is too tall.

But Calumet Fisheries is still there, a shack serving smoked fish and deep-fried nautical what-have-you to steelworkers and cyclists since 1928.

Calling it a shack implies a certain shoddiness in construct, but that’s not the case. The little fish house is sturdy, well-constructed, but definitely within the “shack” family. Clean glass cases stacked high with smoked fish greet the entrant. Cross sections of fish, a few inch thick each, smoked in a wood fire out back of the shack and served up fresh and savory in the front.

In a case by the fryer to the side, pre-breaded and pre-portioned snippets of fish, shrimp, scallops, any water-dwelling treat you can imagine sit in paper trays and Chinese food containers ready to drop in hot oil the moment its ordered. Fries, slaw and a little bag of crackers, forks and ketchup come with automatically. The only question you answer is if you want the plastic snap-lid ramekin filled with hot sauce or mild.

You sit outside — that’s the only option. One of two picnic tables slapped on the sidewalk by the bridge. Cyclists go by. An old man escorts his older mother to the BMW, black wealth in a city where rich brings the assumption of white. A white father and teenage son fresh off their own bikes sit and sloppily devour fries and fish. It was a treat for the son who had never been. It was a treat for the father who got to take him.

Deep-fried scallops are hot, oily, insatiably good. Same for the sun, the shack, the piles of soon-to-be-smoked wood in the grass out back. The line of rich and poor, BMW and bikes grows and ebbs. The smell of fire and seafood wafts where the men used to make steel.

More from South Chicago