On some days, especially in winter, Chicago seems most enjoyable to us in the shadows and rumbles that exist beneath the “L.”
This is not what boosters and civic leaders tout-How much prettier you’ll find the Bean! Get over to Navy Pier!-but whenever we walk those streets that sit under the “L” tracks, the city feels alive and mysterious and gritty and real.
This experience is, of course, most accessible downtown, beneath the tracks that form what is commonly referred to as the Loop: Wabash Avenue on the east, Wells Street on the west, Lake Street on the north and Van Buren Street on the south. Bathed in a hard shade even on the sunniest days, this is a walk guaranteed to remind you that you live in a place of sometimes hidden and often harsh beauty.
Another stretch extends for about a mile above 63rd Street, between Cottage Grove Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.
Part of the CTA’s Green Line, this section of track is among the city’s oldest. It once extended east to Jackson Park, where it unloaded passengers giddily rushing to enjoy the diversions and marvels of the Columbian Exposition of 1893. After the fair closed, the line was amputated to Stony Island Avenue, and in more recent years it lost additional track and stops at Dorchester and University Avenues.
We can remember how rough and tumble and terrifying that bygone eastern stretch was, filled with some 30 bars and liquor stores. Known as “Baby Skid Row,” it was freed from the overhead tracks in 1997 and in short order the street-level seediness and crime vanished. You will now find that strip dotted with new homes carrying high price tags.
But where the “L” still stands, the walk under it takes you past a couple of liquor stores and bars, some stores, the handsome Bessie Coleman branch of the Chicago Public Library (which opened in 1992), some other new buildings and a large number of empty lots.
It will introduce you to Daley’s Restaurant, which boasts of surprising longevity–“since 1918”–even though it is actually older, opened in 1892 by a man who was no relation to the local political clan. Until the 1960s it was a fine-dining, steak-and-wine kind of place. Then, reflecting the changing demographics of the Woodlawn neighborhood, it became and remains a tasty and friendly soul-food stop.
The “L” rumbles above. People eat and talk. Osgood shoots.
There is a certain airy poetry (and a lot of sky) in Osgood’s photo. And there is the urge, always, when writing of the “L,” to evoke that poet Nelson Algren, and so I will: He called it “the city’s rusty heart.”
We told this to a man we met standing at the corner of 63rd and Cottage, in the shadow of tracks and station. He looked up and said, after a long moment, “Hmmm. I like to think of it more like a river.”
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rkogan@tribune.comn
