Dependable public transportation, especially rapid transit, can be both a lifeline and a building block for an inner-city neighborhood.
That’s why there was grass-roots support for reconstruction of the Chicago Transit Authority’s Green Line, which runs across the West Side to Oak Park, and across the South Side, where it forks west to Englewood and east to Woodlawn. Some neighborhoods are wisely hitching commercial developments to their rebuilt stations.
One neighborhood is an exception to the rule. The elevated structure above East 63rd Street has been more a noose than a lifeline for struggling Woodlawn.
Built to deliver crowds to the 1893 World’s Fair in Jackson Park, the elevated helped make 63rd Street one of the city’s premier commercial strips. But times change. Woodlawn is only now recovering from 40 years of racial change and economic disinvestment. And shopping now tends to get done at supermarkets and malls, not in storefronts “under the tracks.”
Yet the 63rd Street elevated remains, casting a gritty shadow over what now are mostly vacant lots, discouraging would-be investors from redeveloping the street as an airy residential boulevard.
The obvious solution would be to tear down the elevated east of Cottage Grove Avenue. So urges an unlikely neighborhood coalition that includes several local churches, The Woodlawn Organization and the University of Chicago.
But the obvious gets less obvious when the solution involves several government agencies and tens of millions of federal dollars. The CTA already has been awarded–and indeed, has partially spent–nearly $20 million in federal funds for the design and reconstruction of that part of the Green Line. If the project is halted and the terminus moved west to Cottage Grove, nearly $10 million will have been spent for naught, and a like amount will need to be redirected to other purposes–such as tearing down the old elevated.
In retrospect, there has been a woeful breakdown in communication between CTA planners and Woodlawn leaders. In prospect, it will require a rare, formal waiver from federal officials to allow the CTA to tear down, rather than finish rebuilding, that stretch of the 63rd Street elevated.
That’s asking a lot, given the weight of bureaucratic inertia. Yet with Woodlawn’s future at stake, it’s not asking too much.
