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
nan turpin photographs
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