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Introduction “One of my most astute Chicago friends…loves that grim rectangle, bounded in its iron crown of elevated-railroad tracks, and says that during the war, when he was overseas and he thought of Chicago, it was always of the Loop in the rain, with the sound of the low-pitched, bisyllabic police whistles, like sea birds’ cries.” A. J. Liebling, Chicago: The Second City From its completion in 1883, the majestic 1.1-mile-long Brooklyn Bridge, linking Manhattan with its cousin borough, has been a dominant element on the New York scene. In Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol, Alan Trachtenberg notes that the suspension bridge’s designer John Roebling predicted that it would be ranked as a national monument and as “a great work of art,” adding "Roebling's claims were far from modest, but history has borne them out. There is no more famous bridge in all the world. And in 1964, almost a hundred years later, the American government proclaimed the structure an official national monument.” By contrast, Chicago’s elevated Loop is a stumpy 2.1-mile-long rectangle of railroad tracks that run twenty feet or so above four downtown streets. It is a structure that is woven so deeply into the physical fabric of Chicago’s central business district, woven so deeply into a cityscape of towering skyscrapers, that, unlike the Brooklyn Bridge, it can’t ever be seen in its entirety. Try to take a photograph, whether from ground level or some high vantage point, and you’ll capture only a portion of the elevated Loop, at best one of its four sections. As for being honored, the only recognition that has been granted to the elevated Loop has been its inclusion, as a seeming afterthought, in the Loop Retail District when that area was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1998. Many of the structures in the 39 city blocks enclosed by its tracks have been designated National Historic Landmarks and official Chicago landmarks. Not the elevated Loop. Yet, as this book argues, the elevated Loop — disregarded, denigrated and often unloved for much of a century — has been the single most important structure in the history of Chicago. Outwardly, the elevated Loop and the Brooklyn Bridge seem very different. Nonetheless, they are both transportation structures that have played important roles in shaping their cities in physical and symbolic ways. Throughout much of its history, Chicago’s steel-and-wood elevated structure was thought of as the antithesis of anything artful. It was viewed as something ugly and grungy but, like a sewer, needed. Nothing elegant, like the Brooklyn Bridge, majestically rising 276.5 feet and spanning the East River, “vaulting the sea,” as Hart Crane writes. Trachtenberg’s book on the bridge looks at how and why it was built and also what it was seen to mean, its role as a symbol: “Coming into existence at a time of change — change from a predominately rural to an overwhelmingly urban and industrial society — Brooklyn Bridge seemed to represent that change…A symbol serves a culture by articulating in objective form the important ideas and feelings of that culture….Brooklyn Bridge symbolized and enhanced modern America.” As a monumental, free-standing structure, the bridge was initially the most visible of landmarks in the nation’s largest, most powerful and most congested city. Today, it competes with Manhattan’s gleaming forest of skyscrapers, but most views of those towers only reveal the upper floors. By contrast, the Brooklyn Bridge can be seen in its full glory from many vantage points. When the bridge was built, it linked two cities, but, in 1898, Brooklyn and three other boroughs were consolidated with Manhattan to create a much larger and even more dominant New York City. The Brooklyn Bridge became a metaphor of that greater municipality — and of the fast-growing United States. It seemed to embody in its steel, limestone, granite and cement a heady mix of strength and beauty that was catnip to local and national boosters. A visceral experience While the bridge is best viewed from afar, the elevated Loop in Chicago is a much more visceral experience, felt and heard as much as seen. The office-worker or shopper or tourist who, on a sunny day, walks from State Street across Lake Street enters, for that short time, a world of sharp-edged, patterned shadows. The lattice steel girders are a forest through which cars, trucks and pedestrians dart while, overhead, a train rumbles, overwhelming most other street sounds and halting conversations, even though the screeching of metal wheels on metal tracks during turns has been greatly dampened in recent years. Even before the elevated Loop was finished, there were calls for it to be razed. Over the next eight decades, that chorus continued. The only way to beautify the downtown, the argument went, was to get rid of the inelegant structure. The last push to tear it down came in 1978. During those years, none of Chicago’s public officials, business leaders and promoters talked about elevated Loop as the symbol of anything. It got people into and out of downtown, and that was that. Yet, without anyone paying much attention, the elevated Loop came to “symbolize and enhance” Chicago in a way that was as significant locally as the Brooklyn Bridge’s impact was nationally. Just as the bridge linked Brooklyn and Manhattan, the elevated Loop linked Chicago. It’s no accident that, during the 15 years after the completion of the elevated Loop, Chicago’s downtown came to be known as the Loop. The four lines of tracks that comprise the rectangle of the elevated structure enclosed and defined the central business district. It was clearly an important structure. Visually, aurally and physically, the elevated Loop was impossible to ignore. Names are important. Names signify. Names are not just bestowed but, in certain compelling cases, impose themselves. Once the elevated Loop structure was built, city residents used it as a key reference point in giving directions and in describing the downtown cityscape. Then, over a decade, an evolution took place. The downtown was seen to be so inter-connected with the elevated tracks that formed its borders that Chicagoans found themselves using the transportation structure’s name for the property it enclosed — eventually, calling the central business district the Loop. No one made a conscious decision to do this. Over the course of a decade and more, Chicagoans unwittingly went through this naming process because, on some subconscious level, it just made sense. The elevated Loop — with its thicket of girders rooted in the street pavements and its mass looming over pedestrians and its rumbles and screeches crowding the open air and penetrating buildings along its border — was a major presence for anyone downtown. And, for all the complaints about its ugliness, the elevated Loop made life easier and more comfortable, bringing hundreds of thousands of city residents and visitors into and out of the downtown each day. The Loop train structure was a central fact of Chicago life. The people loved it Not only that, but the elevated Loop formed the outline of what came to be a common ground that all Chicagoans shared. The significance of this cannot be overstated. Chicago has always been a city of sharp divisions. Over its nearly two centuries, it has been a city of battling neighborhoods, of competing churches and parishes, of the very rich and the very poor, of saints such as Jane Addams and sinners such as Al Capone. It has been a city divided even by baseball: You’re a Cubs fan or a White Sox fan, and never, it seems, does the twain meet. Chicago is a three-sided city — West Side, North Side and South Side. At the end of the 19th century, each of those three sections had its own house-numbering system completely unrelated to the systems in the other two sections. And, prior to 1897, each had its own elevated railroad terminal, either in service or planned, just outside the downtown area. Upon reaching one of those terminals, riders would have to get out and walk or find a street-level ride into the central business district. The elevated Loop united those lines and gave focus to the downtown as the center of the city. Without it, three central business districts or subdistricts — each concentrated on the ending place of an elevated line — might have developed. Certainly, the downtown would have been much weaker. The elevated Loop allowed Chicago to unite. This was a process that had started when cable cars gave Chicagoans a faster way to get downtown from relatively far distances. But the multiplicity of cable car loops didn’t give the downtown the cohesiveness that came with the construction of the elevated Loop. Indeed, when a uniform numbering system was finally imposed on the city in the first decade of the new century, its epicenter was at State and Madison Street, within the elevated Loop tracks. Chicago has long been a city of sharply defined neighborhoods. These communities functioned as tightly circumscribed enclaves where residents tended to share ethnicity, economic status, religion and many other attributes. As a result, a resident felt comfortable in his or her community in a way not possible in other areas of the city. The one exception was the Loop. Because of the elevated Loop, this clearly defined downtown area belonged to all Chicagoans equally. It felt comfortable to all city residents, no matter their neighborhood. Throughout much of the past 120 years, the Loop was where Chicagoans got their marriage license and where they viewed the Marshall Field store windows at Christmas and where many of them worked and where they went for plays and movies and where they shopped for virtually anything they wanted. And much more. The people loved it. And they loved riding the elevated trains from their humdrum neighborhoods to the Loop with its glitz of power, entertainment and plenty spread out before them. Although he was no fan of the Loop — or Chicago, for that matter — Manhattanite A.J. Liebling recognized the emotional power that the place and the structure had for Chicagoans. His 1952 articles in the New Yorker magazine, later collected in a book titled Chicago: The Second City, were a caustic critique of what he saw as the city’s provincialism, inferiority complex and bombast. The Loop, he asserted, couldn’t hold a candle to Manhattan. Nonetheless, Liebling mentioned, with a kind of amazement, the great affection that an otherwise canny Chicago friend had for the Loop, loving “that grim rectangle, bounded in its iron crown of elevated-railroad tracks.” Indeed, during World War II, “when he was overseas and he thought of Chicago, it was always of the Loop in the rain, with the sound of the low-pitched, bisyllabic police whistles, like sea birds’ cries.” Concentrated wealth Although both the Brooklyn Bridge and the elevated Loop were created as transportation structures, their impact on their cities has been economically huge in a way that is often overlooked. The bridge and the elevated Loop have each shaped the real estate markets of their cities by the way they benefited — and penalized — properties based on location. Chicago and New York have developed over the past century and more because of the presence of these two transportation structures. It was not for nothing that early promoters of the bridge saw the structure as a gold mine for property-owners in Brooklyn. More than half a century before the bridge was constructed, a promoter argued, “The rise of property [values] in Brooklyn alone would defray the expense of the project.” Trachtenberg argues that Manhattan benefitted even more — and the lesson can be read in its skyline. The bridge, he writes, boosted the amount of traffic coming into Manhattan, heightened the concentration of wealth here and “indirectly promoted the skyscraper.” The story was the same in Chicago. The elevated Loop, more than any other human-made feature of the landscape, defined the city and gave it focus. Its steel and wood, its grit and sound, delineated Chicago’s most important and expensive property. From the start, real estate dealers recognized that the rectangle of tracks made and broke fortunes. Location, location, location — the elevated Loop was called “the magic circle” and “the golden circle” because land inside its borders was highly precious, more valuable and more profitable than any other property in the city. Outside was second-rate. Even before the elevated Loop was finished, real estate officials were noticing that the value of land within the boundaries of the elevated tracks was rising while, for the property outside the structure, it was falling. Like the Brooklyn Bridge, the elevated Loop “concentrated [real estate] wealth” into a densely packed quarter-of-a-square-mile that, as a result, became even more densely packed. Chicago had already had skyscrapers. With the elevated Loop, many more were built—and they went higher and higher. Over the past 120 years, Chicago’s downtown, as defined by the four sides of the elevated Loop, has evolved. Much of upscale shopping moved to the Magnificent Mile on Michigan Avenue after the 1975 opening of Water Tower Place, a combination of shopping mall and high-rise residences. Even so, Macy’s, in the former Marshall Field’s building, remained as an anchor well into the 21st century. Skyscrapers have sprouted throughout the Near North Side and have clustered outside the four sections of the elevated Loop. Nevertheless, within those tracks is still one of the greatest concentrations of the tallest of the world’s buildings. Even through hard times in the 1970s, the Loop remained home of one of the world’s most important financial districts as well as a one-stop-shopping concentration of city, county, state and federal government services and courts. And so it remains today, even as it undergoes a renaissance of new residential towers and a boom in college classrooms and student housing as well as a growing wealth of entertainment and dining opportunities. After dodging the wrecking ball in 1978, the elevated Loop increasingly has come to be seen as a unique and attractive part of Chicago’s character. A tourist draw and a singular Chicago experience. “A fitting symbol of Chicago’s nitty-gritty style of life,” noted one writer. Without the elevated Loop, Chicago would have been just another Rust Belt city with a rundown and discarded downtown. With it, Chicago is Chicago. Extraordinary characters Yet, much about the elevated Loop and the downtown that took its name has been ignored, misunderstood, undervalued and distorted. That’s not the fault of Bruce Moffat’s authoritative history The “L” — The Development of Chicago’s Rapid Transit System, 1888-1932 and a handful of other books about the city’s elevated railroad lines and the elevated Loop. These well-researched books, however, have stressed the transportation aspects of the story, such as routes, fares, ridership, station design, trackage, timetables, power sources and rolling stock. Until now, no book has been written about the impact of the elevated Loop on Chicago and on the city’s development, on the city as a physical place and as an idea. That is the subject of this book. The Loop is a biography of a structure that has shaped and saved Chicago. It tells how the elevated Loop came to be, how it rooted Chicago’s downtown in a way unknown in other cities, how it played an important role in unifying the "schizophrenic" three-sided city and how it protected Chicago’s downtown—and the city itself—from the full effects of the suburbanization of America during the second half of the 20th century. This book uniquely combines urban history, biography, engineering, architecture, transportation, culture, politics and other fields and synthesizes masses of data and theories to develop new and surprising insights into what has made Chicago tick. It puts the story of the elevated Loop into the context of the evolution of public transportation in the city and in the world. It delves deeply into the history of Chicago’s cable car operations which, in many ways, set the stage for its elevated lines and the elevated Loop. Indeed, as this book explains, the word “loop” began as a technical transportation term to describe the rectangles around a few downtown blocks that were employed by cable trains as turnarounds. This book reports how the elevated Loop nearly wasn’t built and how it narrowly avoided mutilation and even demolition after eight decades of service. Chicago’s downtown and the city as a whole are major characters in this book. The opening chapter describes the vibrancy of both Chicago and its central business district on the celebratory night of New Year’s Eve, 1911. That date was important as a landmark in the re-naming of the downtown as Chicago’s Loop. Colorful and significant Chicagoans also make appearances within the pages of this book, including legendary lawyer Clarence Darrow, poet Edgar Lee Masters, Mayor Carter Harrison II, real estate entrepreneur Levi Z. Leiter, novelist Nelson Algren, Mayor Richard J. Daley and three saviors of the elevated Loop — Chicago Tribune reporter Paul Gapp, architect Harry Weese and Mayor Jane Byrne — as well as members of the notorious Gray Wolves of the Chicago City Council, including Johnny Powers, John “Bathhouse” Coughlin and Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna. The most singular presence in this story is Charles Tyson Yerkes, a man demonized in the city’s history as a corrupt financier who, as the Chicago Tribune asserted in early 1897, “treats Chicago as a milch cow” and “who debauches Councils [and] plunders the city.” Yet, Yerkes was a larger-than-life personality who put his imprint in a major way on not one, but two world cities — Chicago and London. Yes, he was corrupt and greedy, but so were his opponents. Unlike them, he didn’t shy away from the limelight. This book argues that Yerkes was as important to Chicago as Daniel H. Burnham and Richard J. Daley. That he was visionary urban planner who was the right man at the right moment to create centralized transportation systems — first, with the elevated Loop in Chicago, and, then, with the Tube in London. As a result, more time will be spent on his work in London than would be usual in a book about Chicago. What Yerkes did there provides an important context to what he did in Chicago. While Yerkes has been notorious in Chicago history, the man he hired to design the elevated Loop—John Alexander Low Waddell—is unknown. Waddell was an engineering genius and international bridge-builder whose role in bringing the elevated Loop into existence has been overlooked by Chicago historians and even by civil engineers who honor him as a seminal figure in their field. During his 63 years as an engineer, Waddell designed more than 1,000 bridges and other structures, none more significant than Chicago’s elevated Loop. Nonetheless, his role in that design was given no mention in the obituaries in the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune at the time of his death in 1938. His ostentatious personality has been absent from Chicago history, and this book rectifies that omission. Finally, an important character and a major source for this book is the Chicago Tribune, the only newspaper for which complete daily editions are available for nearly the entire history of the city. The history of the elevated Loop begins in the early 1880s, even before the elevated railroad technology itself, and runs through to the present. The digital archive of the Tribuneeditions for every day during that period, available to me through the Chicago Public Library, has been of untold value. By delving deeply into those daily stories, I was able to trace the rise and fall of the cable car, the development of the word “loop,” the rise of the elevated railroad, the questions about how the elevated trains would serve the city’s downtown, the maneuvering of Yerkes to bring the Union Loop into existence, the impact of the Union Loop on Chicago over the past century and a quarter, and the efforts in the 1970s to bring the elevated structure down. The benefit of having a single institutional voice describing these events as they happened has been incalculable for me, and the tens of thousands of daily Tribune stories that were written over those years, combined with reports from other newspapers and publications as well as books by scholars of a dozen or more fields, have enabled me to develop a textured understanding of the city as it evolved over those decades and of the role the elevated Loop played in that evolution. “The city’s rusty heart” The most significant character, of course, is the elevated Loop itself has been the most important structure in the history of Chicago. This is a book about the looming steel-and-wood downtown presence that has been loved by millions of Chicagoans for making the city’s central business district easy to get to and worth wanting to get to. A structure that was long hated as an unseemly eyesore by the city’s movers and shakers who failed to understand how it had brought them wealth and was protecting their investments. A structure that's been called "most distinctive of all man-made Chicago landmarks" and "one of [Chicago's] most distinctive trademarks. A.J. Liebling may have been bewildered at how the elevated Loop and the downtown it defined could tug at the heartstrings of Chicagoans. But novelist Nelson Algren understood. In October, 1951, eight months before Liebling’s caustic send-up of Chicago arrived in bookstores, Algren published his tempestuous paean to his native city Chicago: City on the Make. While Liebling laughed at the pretensions of the city’s boosters, Algren exploded them, embracing Chicago in all its ugliness and greed. He writes: “It’s every man for himself in this hired air. Yet once you’ve come to be part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.” As Chicago: City on the Make comes to its final page, Algren identifies the core of the city, its “broken nose,” as the elevated Loop, faulting the Pottawattomies for leaving nothing behind by the muddy river. “While we shall leave, for remembrance, one rusty iron heart. The city’s rusty heart, that hold both the hustler and the square. Takes them both and holds them there. For keeps and a single day.”The Loop: The “L” Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago is a book about Chicago’s “rusty heart” that has beat for more than 120 years and continues to keep the city and its people vital.
