There is a colleague who admits to never having ridden the “L.” Though it’s easy to forgive this failing — she has not lived her whole life here — you wish she knew what she has been missing.
For most, the “L,” and all manner of other public transportation, is a necessary hassle of urban life and work. Few ever have the time or energy to notice the details, the faces or the conversations of a commute.
But sometimes you just can’t help it.
One recent late afternoon, six people were standing on the “L” platform at Wilson Avenue, waiting for a train, when one of them said, “Do you realize how easy it would be to just push someone down onto the tracks in front of a train?”
This naturally caused the five other people to move back from the tracks and stare at the man doing the talking.
He didn’t mean any harm. He was a student at Loyola University, he later said, when he and those who had been with him on the platform were safely inside a train traveling north.
“I didn’t mean to scare anybody,” he said. “Anyway, that’s not the weirdest thing anybody’s ever said on an `L.’ “
He’s not kidding.
Who among us has not encountered the strange, funny, disturbing, silly, jarring, sad or joyful while riding an “L”?
In a city increasingly divided by social, racial and economic forces, the “L” is among the last places where we can be reminded on a visceral and visual level of the diversity of this area and its residents.
The lawyer sits next to the short-order cook. The teenage girl sits with a whiskered old man. A homeless fellow wondering about his next meal shares a car with an Evanston woman heading downtown for a day of shopping.
The “L” was unveiled in June 1892, as a 3 1/2-mile stretch of track that ran between Congress Boulevard and 39th Street in the alley between State Street and Wabash Avenue.
More tracks and lines were added, and by 1897 these many tracks joined in a circle around the downtown business district, creating the Loop.
It was this section specifically that inspired Nelson Algren to refer to “the dark girders of the El” as “the city’s rusty heart.”
There is rust and there is complaint, even some fear. But there is also, if you look closely enough, life and color.
Some of that color comes in artwork, in the murals that dot the system. Some of it comes in characters.
On the “L” we can be swept up in that pleasant illusion that we are all neighbors. The “L” is real. Gritty, yes, but glorious.
