The "L"

My Southeast Asia blogging is about 2/3 done. OK maybe a tiny bit more. Time for another domestic travel story break. I'll finish up Singapore, Malaysia and everywhere else we went in February after this post.

2024 is going to be an extremely unusual travel year for me. For the first time in my career (and only like 30 years in...), I'm doing a significant amount of work travel. In an average work year before last fall-ish, I'd take one or at most two trips somewhere requiring an overnight stay in some city that I didn't call home. This year? Lots of out-of-town trips. When this year is over, I'm guessing maybe 10 or 12 total. Primarily New York, but not just New York. 

To make it even weirder, my wife is doing the same thing. So when she snagged a coveted speaking spot at a conference in Chicago with a hotel room covered entirely by her company in April, I had to tag along. This is the stuff I live for. It combines two things I love most of all: travel and mooching (free hotel!). Now I just had to figure out what to do in the Windy City for a couple of days while the love of my life was busy speaking to an audience of hundreds and listening to others do the same.

I'm very proud of her accomplishments at this conference, by the way.

This was not my first visit to Chicago. I think it was number six, although I could be wrong, but I don't think I am. But I'd never been faced with getting to the city by myself and keeping myself busy for a day plus on a Friday and Saturday all by myself. Complete freedom is daunting sometime. What to do?

As an architect, one of the things I've always admired about the city of Chicago is the way that they have sold architecture as a tourist attraction for visitors. So I looked at the Chicago Architecture Center as a source of inspiration for this trip. The classic Chicago architecture tour is a boat ride down the Chicago River, but I was pretty sure I'd be familiar with most everything they would show us on that trip and I wanted something more obscure, more architect-y. There are a lot of choices.

Buried deep in their tour list is an architecture tour conducted from the "L", Chicago's mass transit rail system that connects the downtown to all sorts of points within and outside of Chicago. I have been a longtime lover of mass transit so this instantly appealed to me to dig into a little more. Plus I had to get to the city from Midway Airport somehow and yep, the "L" serves the airport too. Seems like there was a theme developing here. And if I love anything more than mooching on travel, it's themes.

OK, so that's not true. I love mooching way more than pretty much anything.

First view of Chicago. On the "L" from Midway Airport.

This would not be my first time riding the "L". I did it on my first visit to Chicago in 1995 and honestly, it was not a good experience. I actually feel comfortable saying I hated it. We took it from wherever it was in the city we were staying down to whatever blues club we were headed to for the night. It was dirty. It was noisy. It was smelly. And it felt unsafe; the station we boarded the train at was deserted except for one or two sketchy-looking characters and somehow there is something stuck in my head about a vicious-looking dog. We cabbed back. I've never been on it since. 

But 1995 is a long time ago. I like to think I've grown a lot since then. 

Friday morning. 8 a.m. Midway Airport. Not O'Hare. Southwest goes to Midway. 10 minute walk to the "L" station. $5 day pass which gets me anywhere and everywhere on this magnificent mass transit system. Time to go to the big city!

So why is it called the "L" and why do I keep using quotes around the letter? First of all, I'll stop doing the quotes thing. Second of all, L is short for elevated. And it's short for elevated because Chicago's downtown transit rail line is unlike any other system in the world that I have experienced: it's elevated 20 feet or so above the street. If you want to board mass transit in New York or Paris or Washington or Singapore or Boston, you are generally heading underground. Not in Chicago. You are walking up a set of steps.

And just to get the whole New York perspective out of the way...yes, I know there are elevated train tracks in the Subway system and yes, I also know New York is the best city in the United States and quite possibly the world, but there are no elevated trains in most of Manhattan. Downtown Chicago: elevated trains. Downtown New York: underground trains.

The L running right down the middle of a street in downtown Chicago. Check out that steel!

Mass transit in Chicago didn't start with the L. In fact, it didn't even start with trains. The L is really the fifth generation of mass transit in the city. The first public use train tracks were laid by the Chicago and South Side Rapid Transit Railroad in June 1892. The track was just 3.6 miles in length and it connected downtown Chicago to Jackson Park to the south. That section of track is still in use today on the Green Line of the L. 

Before 1892, Chicago had gone through several iterations of private mass transit, starting with horses pulling carts, then horses pulling trains, then cable cars, then electric street trollies before finally moving to electric train service (although there were admittedly a couple of years of steam). These modes of transportation definitely overlapped in their service life but ultimately the train won out because it was faster by a factor of two and much safer. Apparently pedestrian fatalities were a bit of an issue for the street trollies.

It's perhaps worth spending a little bit of time on some history here. I mean, why is there even an elevated train in downtown Chicago in the first place? And isn't it kind of inconvenient for property owners to have a train running past their second or third floor windows making all that noise and blocking the light? Not to mention the atmosphere at street level with some giant train track supports covering up most of the facades of the buildings and blocking the light from the street level, like someone put a ceiling on the street?

Well, yes, there is all that. The quick answer to the why is the track elevated is that it was cheaper to elevate than tunnel. Why did people permit it to run right in front of their buildings? That's a little murkier because for sure when you've just built a brand new fancy building in the late 1800s (remember Chicago burned to the ground in 1871 so everything was pretty much brand new when the L started to be built). the last thing I think you'd want is a train track 20 feet off the ground running right in front of it. 

There may have been some cajoling and payments involved on this one and maybe a little more pressure than just simple cajoling, particularly in Chicago's downtown or Loop area, where a financier who was convicted of larceny and somehow got out of jail through blackmail (sketchy, right?) named Charles Yerkes worked some kind of magic to get the bare minimum of property owners to sign off on his building an elevated rail line in the heart of the city. 

The restored to almost original condition Quincy Station on the Loop, including the reconstructed station house.

The entire L system in Chicago started out as a bunch of independent operators sometimes using the same tracks (particularly Yerkes' Loop) to get people from point A to point B around the city. It was apparently a risky business because it seemed like there were a lot of bankruptcies over the decades. To clean all that up, the State of Illinois created the Chicago Transit Authority, which was given a mandate to purchase all the equity in the various independent private rail operators and bring the whole system under one banner. That happened in 1947 and when they did it, they closed a whole series of stations. There was a station about every other block, built that way to compete with the street trollies, which were long gone in 1947.

Today, the L transports Chicagoans and visitors alike over a network that is 224 miles long and features 145 different stations on a total of eight different routes. It is the fourth largest transit system in the United States and one of only three transit systems worldwide to operate 24 hours per day (along with New York and Copenhagen). In 1994, the CTA extended the Blue Line to O'Hare Airport. length of system. open 24 hours. Nine years later, they extended the Orange Line to Midway Airport, which is how I got to downtown Chicago on time for my 11 a.m. L tour with the Chicago Architecture Center.

The Willis (neé Sears) Tower. The brick warehouse in the center of the pic is a Daniel Burnham design.

The idea behind an architecture tour on the L is that you can get a good sense of a lot of Chicago's architectural history by stepping off at the some of the Loop platforms and taking a look around. We spent about 90 minutes on the L itself and covered just about two miles (there are only eight stations in the loop) but we certainly could have spent a lot more time; there's a ton to see.

We didn't get what I would consider Chicago's most publicly consumable architecture on this tour. The L doesn't go anywhere near SOM's Willis (Sears) Tower or the former John Hancock Building. Nor does it pass by Marina City or the Chicago Art Institute or the Tribune Tower. You also can't see any of the works of Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe's Lake Shore Drive apartments. True, you can see the Willis Tower from the Washington/Wells station platform, but you are not really that close at all. 

Was that disappointing? Not for me it wasn't. There's more to architecture than signature buildings and there were a lot of very fine architects practicing architecture in the late 1800s, not that every building we saw was of that vintage. But I do especially love that period of architectural history, when architects were exploring new technology and materials that had been produced and discovered (or re-discovered when it comes to concrete) during the industrial revolution. In places like Paris, that exploration and struggle brought about Art Nouveau and ultimately Modernism with a capital M. In Chicago, it helped with building higher and higher. 

Daniel Burnham's magnificent Fisher Building (1896).

I'm not going to blow-by-blow the building list but I will give the superlatives in a few categories along with the station where we saw them.

The most instantly-recognizable-by-a-non-architect building we saw was the Willis Tower. Yes, it was at a pretty good distance but SOM's and particularly structural engineer Fazlur Khan's revolutionary bundled tube design that allowed this building to be the world's tallest when it was built under the Sears name is always worth a look. Incredibly, it is now the world's 25th tallest building. Station: Washington / Wells.

The most important building from a history of architecture standpoint was the Monadnock Building. When it was built in 1891 according to the design of Burnham and Root, it was the tallest load-bearing brick building in the world. It still is. This was about the limit that traditional masonry construction could be built vertically. The Monadnock building was the last of its kind. Nobody ever tried to build a masonry load-bearing brick building that tall after this. Its achievement is both being the tallest of its kind and also making architects and engineers realize there was a better way to build tall buildings. The "most important" designation here is mine. Disagree if you want. Station: Harold Washington Library.

The building by the most important architect was the Jewelers' Row Building by Adler and Sullivan. I am once again personally assigning a "most important" label based on Louis Sullivan's innovation and influence over the profession and history of architecture. I'm not a huge Sullivan guy personally but he was clearly influential, even if for no other reason than Frank Lloyd Wright came out of his shop and Wright acknowledged Sullivan as a mentor. Personally, I think Wright succeeds with or without Sullivan but that's just me. Sullivan clearly erected some significant buildings in his life and move us towards modern architecture in ways that I feel are beyond debate. Station: Washington / Wabash.

The standout building for me on the tour was Daniel Burnham's Fisher Building. I think architects today sometimes don't appreciate Burnham enough. I think it's because of his significant involvement in the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago that legitimately set the public appreciation of and attitude to what good architecture could be back a few centuries. But there were times he got it right and the light and elegant, 20 story Fisher Building is just spectacular. I know there are some neo-gothic touches towards the top of the thing but they are less heavy-handed than the more famous and also neo-gothic Tribune Building across the river. I think the Fisher Building as an early high rise building has aged well. Station: Harold Washington Library.

Adler and Sullivan's Jewelers' Building (1881). It's the red brick and stone building.

The best thing about exploring Chicago's architecture on the L, though, was not the variety of buildings we got to see, although the selection was pretty impressive. The best thing was the different perspective you get on the buildings that are visible from the station platforms, particularly those that are super close up when you are standing waiting for the train. 

Plain and simple, the designers of most of these things never intended for their architecture to be viewed that way. And given the 100 plus years that have passed since some of these things were conceived and built, the results are surprisingly good. You can get a fantastic look at the brickwork, detailing and particularly the terra cotta panels that were in vogue in the late 1800s and early 1900s on some of these structures. Terra cotta just is not a popular cladding material in the twenty-first century so to see these prefabricated units up close literally 10 feet or so in front of your face is pretty spectacular. We were never supposed to be this close to some of these buildings because there was no L in place when they were built. This phenomenon is purely accidental. 

There is some irony, therefore, in walking along the south platform of the Harold Washington Library and looking close up at some of the details on the station's namesake building. You can get a fantastic look at the midwestern-inspired details on the facade of the building at just about platform level. The corn stalks above and below the face of Ceres are both whimsical and exactly appropriate. Good thing the details can be seen from the station because there's no way they could have been seen from the street. But the Washington Library wasn't built before the L was in place like the Fisher Building. It was completed in 1992. The designers either ignored the presence of the L entirely, or were opting to match the building's neighbors. I can't see either one making much sense.

Terra cotta panels (top); Harold Washington Library detail (bottom).

Remember that whole theme thing I mentioned earlier? I found a way to add to it. I'm a bit of a completist (or close to it) that way. So the day after my ride in from Midway and my time on the CAC tour, I thought I should get back on the L and head up to the Chicago History Museum to learn a little more about the history of Chicago's downtown mass transportation. 

Brown Line, if you must know.

So, why the Chicago History Museum? Well, it seemed like a good place to pair with my Friday time on the L because they have in their collection one of the original L cars that transported people from the Loop to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. It's located on the second floor of the Museum right at the top of the main public stairs. It is quite different from today's L cars. Train travel has come a long way in the last 130 years.

This train car was clearly built for a more refined time when going to work or just downtown probably involved wearing your finest clothing and you likely expected the accommodations inside the train to match your dress. No hard plastic seats in the 1890s. Cushioned fabric all the way arrayed across a choice of seating configurations, including some benches facing each other that looked to me like there was precious little knee space between you and the person you'd be facing. 

The appearance of the car also likely reflects the attitude toward the manufacture of train cars used by the public and probably didn't differentiate between long-distance train travel and local mass transit. What does that mean? Well to me in addition to the comfort expected in the seats themselves, the majority of the cabin both inside and out is made of wood. That likely means hand assembled with care which took a lot of effort and time. The result is something softer and warmer to the touch than the stainless steel used in L cars today. It also likely meant more wear and tear and a deteriorated appearance far sooner than today's L cars. 

1893 L car, Chicago History Museum. You can see some of the interior in the bottom photo.

I honestly hoped for a little bit more out of the L Car exhibit at the Chicago History Museum. There are other exhibits in the Museum which shed light on Chicago's history and culture but if I'd gone only to see the 1893 L car, I'm not sure I would have thought it was worth the $19 admission charge. I'm not putting down the whole museum, just cautioning future visitors like me who ONLY want to see the L.

I thought my trip up to the Museum was worth it. I needed something to do; I wanted to see as much as I could about the history of the L in my two days in town; and I had my first Chicago dog ever on the way up there. I'm not sold on the Chicago dog in total. I'm still preferring mustard and sauerkraut and leaving it at that hot dog-wise. 

But I also got something else on the L ride up there.

The Monadnock Building, 1891.

The hour and a half or so I spent inside the L system on Friday late morning and early afternoon had me standing on elevated train platforms looking at buildings while a lot of trains passed by. Multiples lines run through the Loop and it was a business day. We didn't have to wait at all for the next train because it seemed like they were passing through every station we visited at least every two or three minutes.

My trip up to the Chicago History Museum was on a Saturday. On Saturdays, trains don't run as frequently as they do on Fridays. On the way up there, I tried to enter the station at an entrance that didn't sell fare cards so I had to retrace my steps and go in a different entrance. I then fumbled around with the fare card machine and just missed a train headed north. The result of all my confusion, misdirection and not hurrying, combined with a Saturday train schedule, had me looking at a lot more on the way into the station and had me standing on the platform a lot longer with nothing to look at other than what was around me. 

And that made me notice one or two things. 

First of all, you might have heard it gets a little windy in Chicago from time to time. And it certainly was that way when I was standing on the Brown Line platform waiting for a train to take me north. To shelter from the wind, I found a three sided enclosure towards the middle of the platform that seemed like it would provide me a little relief from the cold. It did. If it had been 21 days earlier, I would have been able to get a lot warmer by hitting the heater button. These things are heated on demand from November to March. Cool. Or hot. Never seen this before. Probably because most all stations most everywhere else are underground and protected from the wind.

The other thing I noticed on my way into the station was a north arrow on the ground at the bottom of the stairs to the station. If I have a pet peeve about most mass transit systems, it's that you can't tell which way is north when you exit the station and there's nothing to help you out. It's especially bad in New York. I cannot for the life of me figure out which way to walk when exiting a New York City Subway station half the time. The perfect solution is what the CTA does: add a north arrow for people at the point where they enter the city. It's genius and very helpful. And I did not just see this in one spot in Chicago. It's like a thing. 

Now if there's a bit of an irony here, it's that I don't find the L disorienting direction-wise precisely because it's NOT underground. I feel the same way when I'm moving around the above ground stations in other cities, most recently in Tokyo. It's just a lot easier to get turned around below the surface of the Earth. Nonetheless, I appreciate the gesture and there are some L stations which are not above ground and I'm sure I'd love this helpful sign in some other spots throughout the city.

Sometimes I pick activities when I travel that have a high ceiling but often fail to deliver. When that happens, I don't spend time blogging about them. Maybe there's a post on Instagram but that would be about it. This 2024 re-introduction to the L for me was definitely worth the few hours spent on a couple of spring days exploring the history of the system and where it can take us, even if we end up spending 90 minutes getting on and off at various stations seeing what we can see and and end up getting off at the exact same spot we got on. I know next time I visit to Chicago, I'll be all about getting on the L and going wherever I need to go that it takes me.

And in this crazy travel year that has a ton of work trips, that next time would be later this month. No blogging about that trip. I'm there on that one for work, not as a tourist. I think my tourism trip to Chicago is going to end up being more satisfying than this upcoming work trip. Hey...you can't have everything you want all the time.

North arrow. Sometimes it's all about the details.