When it comes to getting from here to there,the word “subway” all too often is tanta-mount to “substandard.” It’s not just that the trains feel like cattle cars, but also that the stations themselves resemble holding pens for people–dirty, smelly, ugly, disorienting, even scary.
There are exceptions, of course. The structural vaults of Washington, D.C.’s Metro system echo the classical dignity of the nation’s capital, providing passengers an environment that is at once spacious and serene.
Boston’s subway, known as the “T,” features brightly colored steel columns that identify transit lines, handsome graphics of local landmarks that orient riders, even doughnut shops and other vendors who bring some of the life of the streets into a bustling un-derground.
Compared with these civilized examples, Chicago’s subway stations are bare-boned and brutal–nowhere more so than on the State Street line, which never has been lauded in song as “that great subway.”
Built during World War II, in part to serve as bomb shelters, its stations once had a kind of spartan sheen, complete with polished wall tiles. Yet that was before a vicious cycle of declining ridership and deferred maintenance rendered them a pathetic mess, leaving the tiles with layer upon layer of grime.
Now, after carrying more than 2 billion riders over more than half a century, the State Street stations are due to get their first major rehab–and judging by the initial stop to be redone, there is reason to celebrate.
A little more than a week after its Nov. 24 reopening, the Roosevelt Road stop is everything that too many other Chicago Transit Authority stations are not: brightly lit, clean, colorful, reasonably spacious, seemingly safe, and most of all, full of zest about big-city life.
This is not great architecture, yet it is so much better than what we are used to that it merits an enthusiastic “hooray.” As to whether it will look good 50 years from now, only time and CTA maintenance budgets will tell.
Remade for $9.7 million and largely federally funded, the Roosevelt Road station is a prototype for revamping more downtown stops by the turn of the century–or perhaps beyond, if that’s how long it takes to pry the dollars out of Washington.
The timing of the job could not be better, given that it immediately follows the successful “de-malling” of State Street and the return of a traditional street design there. No matter how pedestrian-friendly the street and its stores become, people will be far less likely to go there if the subway forces them to run a gantlet of unremitting ugliness.
This station, in contrast, is about beauty.
Would you believe Art Deco column capitals or tiles showing a silhouette of the Chicago skyline? These cosmetic touches and more substantive changes are all about enriching the public realm, even the one presided over by the cash-poor CTA.
Architects get credit
That the Roosevelt Road station turned out so well is largely due to Chicago’s Department of Transportation, which is responsible for the design and construction of downtown CTA stops.
In recent years, the department has let architects play an integral role in shaping public works rather than simply be a supporting cast for engineers.
This innovative approach has produced exemplary results, such as the above-ground redo of State Street. Now, the same is true below ground, though the Roosevelt Road station easily could have been a watered-down design by committee.
It was, in fact, shaped by two firms. The first, Muller and Muller Architects, had finished drawings for the stop when city transportation officials abruptly decided last year that several State Street stations, which were in various stages of being redone, need a common visual theme. Good thing they did.
Two firms working on other stops, DLK Architecture and Daniel P. Coffey & Associates, were asked to produce designs that could be applied to Roosevelt, five other stations and a continuous subway platform along the State Street line. Coffey’s won. So while the broad outlines of the Roosevelt station were formed by Jay Muller of Muller and Muller, the decoration is Dan Coffey’s. And it is a delight to behold.
Throughout, an aqua blue skyline silhouette graces walls of glazed tile; you can even make out Sears Tower and its rabbit-eared television antennas. Red tile bands and steel columns remind riders that the State Street line also is known as the Red Line. Blue and red Deco capitals form stylized sunbursts that radiate Jazz Age energy.
While this sunny palette lacks the understated, black-tie formality of the CTA’s recently completed Blue Line station at Lake and Wells Streets and may even remind some of the garish curtain-walls of Helmut Jahn’s James R. Thompson Center (the former State of Illinois Center), it nonetheless communicates vividly that this is not the same old, could-be-anywhere, depressing CTA.
Ingeniously fashioned from eight different tile patterns, the skyline silhouette creates an easily recognizable image that says “downtown.” City officials say it will be easy to wipe graffiti off the tiles. We’ll see, but what seems equally important is that when you treat people with dignity, they tend to respond in kind. Maybe, by improving the CTA’s environs, the decoration will turn out to be a form of preventive maintenance.
If nothing else, the silhouette’s airy blue color subtly conveys spaciousness, as if CTA riders were floating in the sky rather than burrowing through the underground. In another playful touch, Coffey and his senior designer, Peter Brinckerhoff, interrupted the red tile bands to let the Sears Tower portion of the silhouette poke through, celebrating its height. These features make the station seem hand-crafted and human-scaled, bringing a welcome bit of eccentricity to the institutional environment of public transit.
In general, the design is a fresh interpretation of Art Deco, nowhere more so than on the subway platform. There, red, white and blue diagonals stained onto the concrete floor evoke the distinct chevron patterns of 1920s design and form a huge, abstracted arrow that points CTA riders to the escalators and an elevator (for those in wheelchairs) leading to the street.
A sense of roominess
Yet all the decoration would be meaningless if the station did not ease the flow of CTA riders, a key issue because the Roosevelt station serves the Chicago police headquarters at 11th and State Streets, the Dearborn Park and Central Station neighborhoods, as well as Soldier Field and the museum campus that includes the Field Museum of Natural History.
What mattered was not only providing an unobstructed path for riders, but also endowing the station with a generosity of space, a feature that was as commonplace to the buildings of the 1920s as torch lamps and ornamental wall sconces.
As much as can reasonably be expected in the renovation of a subway stop, where carving out more space can be very expensive, the architects–in concert with Meridian Engineers (now Edwards and Kelcey Design Services)have achieved a sense of roominess.
You notice it in the two stairway canopies on the east side of State Street, their height and big expanses of glass making the space within them seem practically luxurious, at least by CTA standards. The stairways were widened to 8 feet from 6 feet, making them appear more spacious still.
Even if the canopies strain to strike an aesthetic balance between the frank modernism of a CTA elevated station a block to the east and the Art Deco of the Roosevelt station, they are welcoming gateways–a vast improvement on the traditional canopy-less station entrances along the State Street subway.
Unfortunately, because of budget constraints, an existing stairway on the west side of State Street didn’t get a canopy, but it has the same decorative treatment as the other one.
On the mezzanine and platform, there is both more space and a feeling of greater spaciousness. Both levels required major excavation work to make room for an elevator that would enable the station to comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act.
Columns that normally would have been placed close to the edge of the platform have been pulled in toward its center with no loss of structural stability. This small but significant feature carves out a column-free space so people in wheelchairs don’t have to maneuver along the platform’s edge.
Conduits have been removed from the platform’s vaulted ceiling, freeing it from visual clutter.
Another major reason the stop seems commodious is that its interior has been treated as a series of rooms that celebrate the act of going from point A to point B.
This approach shaped a bowing arch that forms a handsome gateway between the mezzanine and the platform. And it can be seen at each end of the platform, where concave walls create spaces reminiscent of an apse (a semicircular recess at the end of a church) featuring the skyline silhouette. Welcome, they almost seem to say, to the shrine of public transportation.
In general, this station’s graphics are crisp and clear. Some feature letters spelling out “Roosevelt” in a typeface following the Deco theme and stylishly departing from the modern, CTA standard. Glassed-in cabinets on the mezzanine will allow notices to be posted in a single spot, preventing visual clutter there.
The lighting also is well-handled, particularly on the platform. There, a band of bright fluorescent lights replaces the CTA’s old, dim bulbs, providing a continuous visual exclamation point for the red columns.
Not perfect
Still, there is room for improvement.
Future platforms could have brightly lit zones where passengers gather in off-peak hours–in effect, creating intimate rooms within the big room where people wait for trains. And the CTA could loosen its rigid standards for attendant stations and other features–all are now harsh, steel-clad forms at odds with the decorative quality of the new prototype.
But what is remarkable about this design is the way it manages to bring a tinge of glamorous romanticism to the low-rent modernism of the CTA. The design is a distant cousin of, but still part of the same aesthetic family as, the historic lightposts and subway canopies of the new State Street. And while it may take some doing to bring those two into harmony, something more important has transpired.
The underground has been elevated; a CTA station no longer seems like a holding pen.
Now, if they could just redo those cattle cars.
ALONG THE SAME LINE
The renovated Roosevelt Road subway station is a design proto-type for five other Chicago Transit Authority stops along the State Street (Red) Line as well as the continuous platform serving the Washington, Monroe and Jackson Street subway stations.
To be paid for by a combination of federal, state and city funds, all the work would cost a total of almost $97 million. Two of the stops are under construction, while the rest are being designed or are partly funded.
The NAMES OF THE PROJECTS, their estimated costs and opening dates are:
– ROOSEVELT/STATE; $9.7 million; open.
– RANDOLPH/WASHINGTON (under construction); $13.5 million; May 1997.
– JACKSON/VAN BUREN (under construction); $12 million; November 1997.
– GRAND/STATE; $15 million; November 1998.
– CHICAGO/STATE; $16.6 million; April 1999.
– CLARK/DIVISION; $15 million; April 1999.
– CONTINUOUS PLATFORM; $15 million; April 1999.
Source: Chicago Department of Transportation.
