Ask Geoffrey 6/25


A chunk of transportation history rests in the Chicago River. Geoffrey Baer talks trains and technology in this week's edition of Ask Geoffrey.


When did the subway and elevated lines change over to their current color monikers?  What were these routes called before this change?

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Susan Materer, Arlington Heights. 

Well the CTA started phasing in the color code system on Sept. 22, 1992 and it took a little while. They had finally finished it by 1994. It kind of blew me away that it has been 20 years already that we’ve had these color codes.  Before the color code system, the ‘L’ lines were named for this confusing hodgepodge of the last stop on the line, the highways that the trains ran along, the neighborhoods they served. 

So let’s remember what they were called. The Red Line was the Howard/Dan Ryan Line that started at Howard Street and went down through the Dan Ryan, and the Green Line was the Lake Englewood/Jackson Park Line.  Now, to make matters worse for those two lines, the CTA had just finished reconfiguring them in 1993, essentially swapping the southern half of the two routes.  You’ll remember the Howard trains used to run to Englewood and Jackson Park, and the Lake Street Line used to run down the Dan Ryan.  So, to help people remember this new configuration, the CTA created these two little cartoon characters; HoDar, for Howard/Dan Ryan and L.E. Jack, for Lake Englewood/Jackson Park.  Interestingly, these little guys were colored coded, red and green, anticipating the shift to color coding that was in progress at that same time.

The Blue Line was called the O’Hare/Congress/Douglas Line as it went from O’Hare down the Congress Expressway.  The Brown Line was called the Ravenswood Line.  As you can see from this sign, the CTA understood that this was going to take a while for people to remember the new names, so they gave you both on the sign there.  The Yellow Line was the Skokie Swift, and the Orange and Pink lines actually didn’t exist before color coding.

Now interestingly, the color designations for some of these lines may have had their origins much further back. When the State Street Subway opened in 1943, it was denoted with a red line on some maps to distinguish it from the elevated sections, and that’s of course the Red Line today.  Later, the CTA introduced maps showing each line in a different color, just to make it easier to see. When they went to these official color designations, most of these lines were just given the colors already on the map but with one exception.  The Skokie Swift was actually orange. When the new Midway line opened in 1993, it was originally planned to be yellow, but yellow didn’t stand out very well on printed maps, so they made the Yellow Line the little Skokie Swift Line and they gave the Midway Line orange.

The colors don’t have any symbolism, except for the one that goes to Evanston, which is purple because of Northwestern University.  Actually Chicago’s school children picked the color for the Pink Line in a vote, over silver and gold in 2006. By the way, I want to thank two people, Graham Garfield and Bruce Moffat transit historians, for their help on this. 

I have a 100-year-old penny postcard that features the Metropolitan Bridge in Chicago.  Is there any interesting history about this bridge?

Carl Bogaard, Rogers Park

Oh there’s a lot of history.  So first of all, here’s the postcard our viewer Carl sent this to us. It’s from 1907 and it shows a train on the metropolitan bridge crossing the Chicago River. It crossed the south branch of the river between Jackson and Van Buren. In fact if you go there today you can still see some fragments of this bridge down in the water. That’s the west bank of the south branch of the Chicago River, north of the Van Buren Bridge. It was called the Metropolitan Bridge because it was built and owned by the Metropolitan Bus Side Railway.

This was one of those privately owned ‘L’ lines that we had in Chicago, called the MET or the Polly L, and it went to Logan Square, Garfield Park, Humboldt Park and Douglas Park. What’s left of the MET today is part of the Pink Line and the Blue Line. Now to get these trains into the loop, the MET built a moveable bridge across the Chicago River in 1895, and it carried trains to a dead-end terminal at Franklin Street that was later extended to Wells Street.  So these trains didn’t actually connect with the Loop ‘L’ structure, it sort of dead ended just short of there. 

The bridge really does look strange to us today.  It was actually a revolutionary new kind of drawbridge called a Scherzer rolling lift bridge, invented in Chicago. Each loop rolls back on the giant runners kind of like a giant rocking chair. This was a big improvement over the swing bridges that were used at the time, which pivoted horizontally around a post in the middle of the river. This is the State Street Bridge in 1889. But Rolling Lift bridges were eventually replaced by the more modern bascule type bridge, also invented in Chicago. Instead of rocking back on runners, bascule bridges just pivoted around on an axle like a giant seesaw. The Metropolitan Bridge operated for more than 60 years, the last train ran across it in 1958, and it was demolished in 1961 after the ‘L’ was re-routed down the middle of the Eisenhower Expressway. 

I pass the old R.R. Donnelley printing plant while riding the Metra to work. What do the emblems and shields on the building’s façade represent?

Cheryl Dorsey, Park Forest. 

Well this is the one we ran out of time for last week, so we got it in this week. The Metra Electric Line runs right between McCormick Place and the old R.R. Donnelley & Sons printing plant on Cermak Road.  It gives riders a great sort of track level view of the Lakeside Press Building, as it was called. 

R.R. Donnelly was historically a major commercial printer, although today that’s just one of those businesses.  Lakeside Press printed, among other things, the Sears Catalogue, Time Magazine,  and Life Magazine and did a lot of phonebooks. 

The building was designed by the famous architect Howard Van Doren Shaw.  Shaw had been asked to design a building that would “represent the close affiliation between printing and the fine arts,” because Lakeside specialized in really high quality work. When construction was completed in 1929, the Tribune called the building Chicago’s most beautiful factory. The terra-cotta emblems and shields represent the history of the printing industry. The shields feature fanciful designs, evoking English heraldry. Some carry the marks of historic great printers and medieval guild symbols, referring to print making and book binding. The shields also fit in well with the overall sense of English gothic design on the building. Other ornaments on the outside celebrate the famous printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg, and great figures in printing history like Bruce Rogers, the great American photographer and book designer shown here as a satyr. Over the main entrance, two story vaulted arches featuring carved shield, grapevines, ships, books and castles.

In addition to being beautiful, the building was designed to be fireproof with 10 to 12 inch thick floors to support the heavy printing machinery and tons of paper. But as the printing process became more high-tech and required less equipment, the need for space decreased and parts of the building were just vacated. Then when Sears discontinued printing the catalogue or distributing the catalogue in 1993, Donnelley closed the plant and then sold the building. It’s interesting because the same sort of features that made it obsolete for printing really made it great for a modern, high tech use.  It is now a server farm, so high tech computer servers are housed in that building.           

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