This was my first visit to the murals, but it was clear they had changed. I was walking along an abandoned viaduct in Pilsen, one of Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods. It was gray and cold, like so many glum Chicago afternoons, and the murals struck the same tenor as the late fall weather.

Ahead of me on the viaduct were muted colors interrupted by empty, jagged, gray holes where the concrete had crumbled away, sometimes in massive sheets. In some places, the uneven holes were bigger than the splotches of faded color that clung to the viaduct wall. Presumably the artist had not wanted his work to fall apart; yet its decaying imperfections lent it a haunting beauty. The lifeless street heightened the deterioration around me. I stood on a crumbling sidewalk, absently toeing an old Corona bottle half-buried in the dead leaves, with the November wind and disintegrating murals keeping me company.

Parts of the mural were so decrepit that it took me a few moments to make sense of them. Eddies of orange, red, and blue danced on inky black; paint cascaded unevenly down the concrete and swirled as high as the wall reached. It might have been a crude solar system, or a confused fantasy, or maybe the muralist was just warming up, getting used to the color and feel of the paint on his drab and open canvas. Vacant, neutral figures of white, red, and pink ran along the bottom of the wall, and an angel reached down from the heavens, pulling one of the blank figures toward her. Another angel’s hand reached out through a skeletal sunset of bright persimmon lines, the sun’s reflection lost to time. A field of evergreens marched in neat triangles up towards the angel’s billowing blue robes.

So much had been whited out—by paint or age, I couldn’t tell—that I could only guess what the mural’s story might be. A creation story, perhaps, or a story of salvation. West of this panel was a scene that time had spared. Pastel and polka-dotted farm animals cavorted through corn stalks near a bright orange ostrich, which stood, one-legged, on the same ground where squirrels were burying their acorns. The images got stranger, more perplexing, and more intriguing: an astronaut riding in a sleigh, an oversized bird plunging headfirst into the sea, a smoking sea-chimney that rose out of the waters. I didn’t understand what was happening on the wall, but its strange mysteries were not silent. The swirling colors were cacophonous on the wall and in my head.

Crumbling as they were now, the murals had a transforming power. The murals had abruptly changed from the outlandish and bucolic scene to a panel full of ancient Mexican history. An Aztec calendar stone took center stage on this panel, and around it danced regalia-clad figures wearing feather-tipped headdresses. I knew little about what I was looking at, but was captivated by the earthy colors rendered in exquisite detail on a bright aqua wall. I guessed that these unusual figures—man or beast or god, it was difficult to tell—were in the midst of a ceremony or celebration. Framing the entire panel were serpents, whose bodies were covered in designs of dots, streaks, and eyeballs. Most of the circular calendar stone had been outlined in gold paint, but its top and bottom were left ungilded. A second calendar stone was outlined in black but had never been filled with color. I wondered why the muralist had left them unfinished.

My journey would not be left unfinished, and I continued further west down the quiet street. The most magnificent of the murals awaited me. Vast heads as tall as the viaduct wall overlapped one another, nose to ear, every face different. Orange, green, red, and purple faces stretched up and down the wall, their mouths opened in expressions of laughter or sorrow. The details here were deeply drawn: the crying face had a strong nose and chin, a wrinkled brow, and a countenance whose furrowed lines revealed years of burdens. A violet face, mustachioed in greenish-blue, was eternally opened-mouthed, whispering into the ears of the figures in front of him. Other faces smiled, some glowered, some were indifferent. Here and there, a face was missing an eye or nose or chin where the concrete had eroded, but the missing features didn’t make the murals any less breathtaking. The grandness of these faces gripped me.

Since I began writing about Chicago murals, I have instinctively known it was important to continue visiting them. Having now made this pilgrimage up Halsted Street several times, they have become “my” murals when I talk about them in everyday conversations. I have spent so much time running my hands over the craggy concrete that I can spot recent embellishments like a graffiti tag over the mysterious sea-chimney. Even so, every time I go to Pilsen and begin my trek down 16th Street, I forget how many blocks it is until I will see the first mural. I always worry a little bit walking down this street by myself, as though the murals might have moved themselves to another lonely road and I will end up at the end of the railroad track.

I still get a little light-headed when I arrive at the wall-high faces. They are as poignant close up, when their faces run into one another and they seem as tall as the sky, as they are from across the street, where I can see where each one begins and ends. And every time I am there the final face lifts me out of Pilsen and into something much greater. This vivid green man or god with arching, angry eyebrows, an open mouth, and wretchedly crooked teeth is like a hook in my gut. His eyes wrinkle with rage. From his open mouth spews a small firecracker of color that twirls and twists into a sleeping fetal shape. His tongue hooks upward as he heaves this small life out of his lungs and into the dark blue sky. Whether he is myth or fantasy or history, I do not know. But there is something about the small life heaved from the green man’s lungs that brings salvation to this crumbling place.