Kenosha Taxi to O’Hare Airport

New England settlers reached the mouth of Pike Creek on Lake Michigan in 1835, and for its first years the growing port town was known as Southport — a nod to its status as the southernmost harbor in Wisconsin Territory. When the village formally incorporated in 1850, it took a different name instead: Kenosha, a word scholars trace back to the Potawatomi and Menominee term for “pike,” the same fish that had already named the creek. It’s one of the few mid-size American cities named directly after a fish rather than a founder or a hometown back east.

In 1902, Thomas B. Jeffery relocated his bicycle-and-automobile works to Kenosha and began building the Rambler, one of the earliest mass-produced cars in the country. The company became Nash Motors in 1916 and merged into American Motors Corporation (AMC) in 1954; the Kenosha plant kept turning out cars, later badged under AMC and Chrysler, until it finally closed in 1988. One detail that’s easy to overlook: Jeffery’s early Ramblers were the first production cars in the U.S. built with a spare wheel-and-tire assembly — the direct ancestor of the spare tire carried in nearly every car since.

When the old AMC plant site was redeveloped into the lakefront HarborPark district, Kenosha added something very few American cities still have: a working vintage streetcar line. Since June 2000, a fleet of restored 1950s-51 PCC streetcars — several originally built for the Toronto Transit Commission — has run a 1.7-mile loop connecting downtown, the Metra station, and the lakefront, carrying riders on rails that look almost exactly as they did seventy years ago.