I wasn't able to picture railroad yards on 51st Street, but then when Beagles mentioned Central Steel and Wire I realized oh yeah, that's where the Orange Line is. Beagles wouldn't remember the Orange Line since it didn't start running until 1993. It runs from the loop along the Stevenson expressway to Western where it runs south until it picks up those railroad tracks where Beagles bow-and-arrowed his bunny, and follows it until it gets to just north of Midway and jogs over to the airport.
See that's another thing the north side had, along with named east-west and diagonal streets, el trains. Well there was the Red Line (all the trains were color-coded in the mid-nineties) which ran south along the Dan Ryan, but you had to cross into the ghetto to get there and we were too weenie to do that. The only time I rode an el train was on those rare occasions when I got to go to Wrigley. We would take the bus to downtown and then walk down into the loud and dirty and exciting station and roar through the tunnel until we burst into the sunlight and rode high above the streets of the city, of the mysterious north side where everything looked a little different though it was impossible to put your finger on in exactly what how.
It was thought by some that the Orange Line would open up the southwest side for yuppies. Well maybe not yuppies but millennials who aren't into automobiles and who love public trans. But there were no Starbucks's or health clubs or vegetarian restaurants or book stores on the southwest side and that just never happened.
I used to love automobiles, and spent my teenage evenings on 55th and Kedzie (where by the way a Starbucks has just gone up where Talmans used to be) smoking cigs and trying to look tough, and I could name the kind, the year, and the model of almost every car that went by, but then I think most of the teenagers of that time could. But outside of a couple years when I lived in southern Illinois I never owned one. Eventually I learned the bus lines of Champaign and then of Austin and became a public trans man, I could read the paper on my way to work and I never had to worry about finding a parking place.
But trains are so much faster and more exciting than busses and when I came back to Chicago in the fall of 1987 I was mad to ride them. I didn't have to be going anywhere I just rode them to the end of their line and back for the fun of it.
I ride the red and brown lines all the time now and tend to read a magazine rather than stare bug-eyed out the window at the cars that look like toys and people who look like ants, but still I enjoy the whole process. Climbing the stairs up or down from the street you enter into the foyer of another world, and when you flash your card at the reader (not as satisfying as plunking in that token, but probably more convenient), you are among the elite. You can travel either way and as far as you want, and at certain points you can transfer to other lines and theoretically, you could ride the rails for eternity. When you leave the train and pass through the same turnstyle others are using to enter then unless you pay another fare anywhere you go you will have to hoof it, you are just an ordinary pedestrian like everybody else.
So the next time I am on the Orange Line passing Whipple I will think of Beagles down in that ditch sixty years ago barking like a beagle, much I suspect, to the amusement of the dog, and that busybody Edna, and his dad, and probably to Beagles himself.
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