Skokie officials are exploring the possibility of extending the Chicago Transit Authority Yellow Line north to the area of Westfield Old Orchard Shopping Center, which could markedly expand transit access and spur economic growth.
Mayor Ann Tennes floated the potential extension during her State of the Village address Friday at the Skokie Chamber of Commerce’s 101-year anniversary celebration.
“I’m happy to tell you we’ve begun very preliminary conversations with the governor’s office and community partners about the possibility of extending the CTA Yellow Line, the ‘Skokie Swift,’ to the Old Orchard corridor,” Tennes said to the nearly 150 event attendees.
The Yellow Line currently has three stations: the Howard Street (7600 north) Station, which is on the Chicago-Evanston border, the Oakton-Skokie station at Oakton Street (8000 north) in Skokie and the Dempster-Skokie Station, located at 5001 Dempster Street (8800 north) in Skokie.
The Skokie Swift, as the line is also known, offers connecting service to downtown Chicago via the Purple Line Express and Red Line.
“Just think of how a Yellow Line terminal in a place that makes sense, not in the Niles North parking lot…but at a place that makes sense, think of how that would support all of the new housing in this corridor,” Tennes told the Chamber of Commerce audience.
“To be clear, these conversations are preliminary, and truth be told, one of them was held in the storage room at Soul Good Coffee when the governor (J.B. Pritzker) was about to give them a $100,000 check.”
Asked for the CTA’s perspective, CTA spokesperson Maddie Kilgannon declined to comment to the Chicago Tribune on a potential extension.
The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center and Westfield Old Orchard have both expressed interest at the possibility of expanding the line to Old Orchard Road, Tennes added.
“Westfield is supportive of a Yellow Line extension and the broader effort to expand sustainable transit options,” said Westfield Old Orchard General Manager Maegen Akers in a statement to the Pioneer Press.
“A station near Westfield Old Orchard would improve access for thousands of visitors and employees each day while supporting environmental goals and regional economic growth.”
Tennes said in a follow-up conversation with the Pioneer Press that “these projects take years, if not decades, to bring to fruition, and they cost millions and millions of dollars.”
The total cost of such an extension is “unknown at this point, but it would be significant,” Tennes said.
“So there would have to be funding provided by other outside partners.”
Tennes clarified that the transportation project would be done in concert with the community and its respective development partners to make sure they had a voice on the “very long-term” project.
“I’m just pleased to be beginning the conversation, knowing that there’s a long way to go, many other conversations to be had, and certainly, if the project would look like it’s gaining traction, we would develop a very specific and intentional plan for engaging the community,” Tennes said.
Past Yellow Line plans
The Village of Skokie conducted a feasibility study on a potential extension to the “vicinity of Old Orchard Road” back in 2003, according to a 2010 report prepared by the Federal Transit Administration for the CTA.
“The Old Orchard Road area, one and one-half miles north of the current CTA Yellow Line terminus, now serves as the hub of travel demand in the area, and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future,” the report detailed.
The original proposed extensions of the line were part of the Chicago region’s “long-range transportation plan developed by the Chicago Area Transportation Study,” now named the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP).
According to the report, The Village of Skokie and corresponding organizations have studied extensions “in varying lengths and alignments” over the past few decades, but nothing has been built.
The CTA’s website lists the extension as no longer being studied and that it is not included in the list of “fiscally constrained projects” in the CMAP’s Go To 2040 Comprehensive Regional Plan.
Tennes said that this project would not be a “dusting off” of the prior plan to extend the Yellow Line to the Old Orchard corridor, which the community largely rejected because of the proposed location in the parking lot of Niles North High School, adjacent to Old Orchard.
“Village leadership is committed to making sure that it’s done, if and when it happens, and again this is preliminary…that it is done in a way that is acceptable to the community,” Tennes said.
Other CTA construction projects
The last time the Yellow Line underwent changes was in April 2012 when Skokie opened the intermediate Oakton Street station, located at 4800 Oakton Street, between the Howard and Dempster stations.
The medial stop cost approximately $20 million to construct, according to previous reports. Fourteen million of the station’s funding was allocated from Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality federal grants, along with $6 million from the Village of Skokie’s tax increment financing district.
Former Skokie Mayor George Van Dusen first wafted the idea of adding the Oakton stop to the Yellow Line to a young Barack Obama, whom he met at a CTA meeting years prior when the former president was a state senator.
When Van Dusen told Obama that he planned to endorse him in a future bid for the U.S. Senate during a follow-up conversation at Skokie’s Festival of Cultures, Obama asked what he could do for Van Dusen in return if he won.
“I took him (Obama) down to Oakton Street, and I looked over and said, ‘You see that spot?… I need a CTA station there. I want a downtown (Skokie) CTA station,’” Van Dusen previously told the Pioneer Press in an interview.
Adding an Oakton stop was vital to the village, Van Dusen argued, because it gave commuters more convenient access to downtown Skokie and the Illinois Science & Technology Park.
Van Dusen later said he didn’t expect the former president to follow up, but he did.
Along with support from U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, U.S. Rep. Jan. Schakowsky and U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk, Van Dusen found enough funding from D.C. to eventually build the station stop.
More recently, the Chicago Transit Authority officially began construction in late April on a $5.75 billion rail extension that will extend the CTA Red Line from its current terminus at 95th Street south to 130th Street and add four new train stations along the way.
The project has been criticized for its massive price tag, with cost estimates that have ballooned from $3.6 billion just two years ago.
Discussed for more than 50 years, the project is set to bring transit and development to the city’s Far South Side neighborhoods and “undo nearly 60 years of racial inequity in transit,” in the words of former CTA President Dorval Carter.
Talia Soglin contributed.
