ANACHRONISM, WAITING, ROOMS

This reporter has had the happy use of the refreshed Damen Brown Line station on the west side of Chicago this summer.  The environs thereabout have been, still are gentrifying, fast, like a rapid heartbeat.  Just north Lawrence Avenue is getting a new surface and median planters down the street.  The “ask” for condos and homes rises with sellers wondering if they’re asking “enough.”  We are in the days of Never Enough.

The couple of blocks around this elevated train station are small, local, neighborhood businesses, eating spots that don’t rely on the week-end aggression of high-end brunching, places where you can slide in and still get a malted milk…unless the chocolate malt you’re trying to pull through the straw is actually a retro-malted “like in the day.”  Hard to tell what’s real these days when nostalgia stands for history and a higher “ask.”

But this little dot of a neighborhood has the real feel of the real deal in large part because of the way you get in and out of it:  by the Brown Line, Damen Station.  This 1907 station was the design work of CTA engineers.  No frills, a compact, functional station part of moving people through a changing city.

Today we can look on-line at Yelp comments presumably posted by the “users” of this station.  They are mixed, from completely alienated (homesick?) to delighted tourist, to wanting more attention to where Chicagoans meet Chicago, on an unsheltered el platform in any kind of weather.  And there are the posts by people who simply love the waiting room.

They and we dwell on the finishings, the glazed brick, the wood paneling and the waiting room furnishings made of suitcases.  We love to be in this waiting room because it is artful anachronism.  The old leather luggage with its brass fittings remind us of the fortitude of travelers whose empty luggage was heavier than anything they could put in it.

We recall a time when a subway station was treated like a train station, with people sitting inside, waiting for their train to pull into the station.  Even if the 1907 station was a crowded panicky place with passengers rushing to their trains, this waiting room suggested something more genteel, like a miniature Union Station, the gateway to America.

The most annoyed Yelp commenters are fixed in their own, current time.  They know they have no time to “wait” in a sheltered waiting room or sit on an artful bench.  They will never use time that way.  They “have places to go” in the words of one.  They have a device to consult that waits for nothing, even as they bound up the stairs up to the platform and closing doors of the train they are missing because someone back there on the stairs wouldn’t get out of the way.  Places to be, places to go, no time, time is money, out of time.  Damen Brown Line Station.

DAMEN BROWN LINE EL STATION
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Additional Sources:

http://www.chicago-l.org/stations/damen-ravens.html

“COUNT ON AMERICA”

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This is Phase II.  

Before it was just the garbage cans back here, a couple of beat up parked cars, long-term parking, until someone gets gas money or a new tire kind of parking.  That was Phase I.  

This is Phase II:  Street talent takes the wall; maybe they got paid for this one.  They should’ve got paid for this one.  Here’s the whole thing:

Phase II is when the functions don’t change:  still garbage pick up here, still parking (better cars now).  Here’s Phase II Context:

This is a full service lost corner of the Uptown neighborhood.  Once and still somewhat a gateway neighborhood in Chicago, American Indians, Appalachian working poor.  A lot of life packed into a solid neighborhood not far from the lake.  

Come back in 6 months and this little patch might be Phase III.  They’ll want to keep it for the “urban grit” that can add an extra $100K to a condo’s asking.  But it will be clean grit.  There might be planters among the dumpsters to show someone’s in control, don’t cross them.  If there are cars parked they’ll cost as much as some of those Phase I-II apartments in the background (see above).  

But that’s Phase III and if it wants to happen to Uptown it hasn’t yet.  Let’s watch this neighborhood survive.  Phase II is plenty good.

WORLD BENEATH THE TRACKS, 2-part week-end photo essay

Zones
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Saturday and Sunday are the calendar equivalents of life beneath the tracks and so today and tomorrow Primary Source is running fresh snaps of some of what we ride over when the Brown Line el leaves Belmont Station.

 In some cities, here Chicago, we are lucky to have miles of elevated train tracks.  They are massively material. They weigh heavily on our landscapes, reminding us that humans had to somehow get all that stuff up there so we can then climb aboard and fly around above the city.  

The world under the El changes by neighborhood.  Just now in Chicago, life along a particular stretch of Brown Line track is endangered and causing us to review how important the El is to our civic imagination and the ways we connect with each other.   The City wants to make a “flyover” that would rise in the air with the train wrapped in a tube.  At least sixteen buildings would be razed to make way for a more sanitized version of per-square-foot profitability.  In this world the alley rats would no doubt be replaced by alley minks, they bite but oh they’re soft.

Primary Source loves a good alley and even more so a great timber and steel alley with elevated tracks rising above the blue recycling bins and “Target Rats!” signs.  When the El goes rattling overhead it’s the soundtrack to our endless urban movie of past and present.  

Tomorrow Part II of our Beneath the Tracks photo essay.  Please come back.  We promise no rats -not in these alleys any way-and so far no minks either.

northbound rush hour Brown Line, at that famous curve where the purported 4-minute delay (City Hall) or several second delay (numerous riders with stop watches), where Brown Line stops to let Red Line pass…our train sat 4 minutes (dang, was the mayor right?) but no Red Line ever came.  Once we’d paid our 4 minute- fine for daring to time the thing, our driver proceeded north.

 

GONE WHERE? HOW LONG?

What was that thing that…
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Trying to remember something sometimes, it’s close, if it was a kosher deli sign sideways on the ground it’d bite you.  That close, right?  

Something was here, we were just talking about it, where is it; maybe the address is wrong, trying to remember what it was exactly, what did the guy look like, the guy behind the cash register?  I was sure, this corner.  

Been a while, how long?   Wait…just before we…no wait, Springtime.  Last year? Just a year ago?  No.  Two years!  Well, no wonder.  

What did you expect?  You didn’t get back for two years.  Did you think it would still be here?