Today's commute...

I took the Metra Electric commuter train down to Hyde Park this morning. Whenever I ride that train my thoughts go back to a dear friend, John Mahtesian. John was a wonderful photographer whose work was filled with keen wit, a profound sense of humanity, and not a trace of cynicism. That's why you probably never heard of him.

John lived in Hyde Park and on the morning of October 30, 1972 as was his routine, he hopped aboard a train at 57th Street for his daily commute to work. Back then that rail line was owned and operated by the Illinois Central Gulf Railroad. John entered the last car of a Loop bound train and spotted a seat in the rear half of a brand new double decked Highliner car, but another man beat him to it. The man flashed John a little victory smirk as he jumped into the coveted seat. Since there were no other seats available, John moved over to the vestibule area to stand in the center of the car.

That seemingly insignificant event saved John's life, and no doubt cost the other man his. Minutes after boarding, their train overshot the 27th Street Station. The engineer got permission from the conductor to back into the station, however the crew did not signal properly and an express (carrying a co-worker of John's), slammed into the train at a high rate of speed. The rear of the car where the man beat John to his seat was obliterated. John was severely injured, in fact he was the last survivor to be removed from the wreckage some six hours later. 44 people died in that crash, to this day the worst rail accident in this city's history.

John was fully recovered by the time I first met him eight years later, in fact the insurance settlement he received for his injuries enabled him to embark on the first of many journeys to the land of his parents, Armenia, where he made some of his most memorable photographs. Every time I ride that train I think of that terrible tragedy and of my old friend.

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Going home from Hyde Park is always a bit of an ordeal no matter how I do it. The last time I drove, it took me about two hours to get home. Today's trip involved a bus to a train to another train to a bus. Not so bad, it took only about 1.5 hours. A strange thing happened at 35th Street. The train on the opposite platform opened its doors and everybody got out and boarded our train. It turned out the other train was from a different line that accidentally got switched over to our line. In other words, the train got lost. That was a first for me, not to mention an unpleasant first for all the passengers aboard the wayward train. They had to backtrack on our train to the last common station for the two lines. The lady who sat next to me went on about how this was her first time riding the L, about how awful an experience it was, and how she just cut her pinky toe open and it was bleeding all over the place. It didn't help when we got into the next station where her train was waiting, but completely jammed.

My second train was an express. The woman who shared my seat and her teenage son debated that fact as it was moving at a snail's pace. For the entire ride, mom and son complained about the speed of the train, even getting a fellow passenger involved in the conversation, wondering aloud why this express train was traveling so slow.

I could have told them the tracks were old and the summer heat didn't help, as a result the trains had to move slowly for safety reasons.

I should have told them to be happy, things could have been so much worse.

But instead I kept my mouth shut, just doing my best to enjoy the ride.

Another landmark gone

The blog Blueprint: Chicago, notes the passing of another bit of Chicago history, the Santa Fe sign that adorned Daniel Burnham's Railway Exchange (later simply known as the Santa Fe) Building at Michigan and Jackson. The sign harkened back to the days when this city was the transportation hub of the nation, to the days when rails ruled supreme.

When I was a kid, there were six major passenger rail terminals in Downtown Chicago. One Sunday back in the sixties with nothing better to do, my father and I visited them all.

The following are links to images of all six:

• Grand Central Station
• Dearborn Station
• Illinois Central Depot
• La Salle Street Station
• Northwestern Station
• Union Station

After decades of losing money, the private railroad companies ceased operating passenger trains in the late 1960s. The responsibility for carrying on long distance passenger train service in the United States fell on the government's shoulders, marking the beginning of Amtrak. Gone were the days of the great luxury trains, Amtrak would become a bare-bones, few frills operation. Along those lines, Amtrak accomplished what the big time planners including Daniel Burnham never could, consolidate all of Chicago's long distance rail operations into one terminal, Union Station. Northwestern and the LaSalle Street Stations continued to serve commuter trains which would remain operated by private companies for several more years. Dearborn, Illinois Central and Grand Central Stations all were put out of service. Dearborn was converted into a mixed use structure as it remains today, while the other two were demolished in early seventies. Old LaSalle Street and Northwestern Stations lasted into the 80s when they both were replaced by modern skyscrapers. Of all the stations listed above, only the headhouse of Union Station with its magnificent waiting room, remains as it was orginally intended.

Here's a view of the interior of LaSalle Street Station in a scene from one of my all time favorite movies, Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest:

It's interesting given how unremarkable this space is after its 1950s era remodeling, that Hitchcock took the trouble to film on location there rather than using the much more beautiful Union Station, or simply shooting the scene in a studio back in Hollywood. I can think of lots of reasons: the cramped, confining space at LaSalle in comparison to the great open space of New York's Grand Central Terminal where the protagonists boarded their train, contributes to the tension between the two characters, Eve Kendall and Roger Thornhill. Just as likely is that Hitchcock, ever the stickler for detail including continuity, filmed there because LaSalle Street Station was the actual Chicago terminus for the storied New York Central 20th Century Limited, one of the greatest of all passenger trains. Earlier in the film you see Cary Grant walking over the red carpet that led Chicago bound passengers to that very special train on the concourse of Grand Central.

As is the case today, back in the golden era of railroads, there was no such thing as a coast to coast passenger train. If you wanted to travel from New York to California, you would have to switch trains in Chicago. You could have booked a ride on the Broadway Limited, Pennsylvania Railroad's  Pullman equipped luxury train from New York to Union Station, then hopped aboard one of any number of California bound trains out of the same station. But the choice of the fancy people, movie stars and the like, was the 20th Century Limited, where you would disembark as Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint did at La Salle Street Station around 9AM, spend some quality time in Chicago, (in the movie the time they spent here would be considered anything but quality), then in the evening hop on over to Dearborn Street Station and climb aboard the great Super Chief, the all Pullman luxury liner owned and operated by the Santa Fe, bound for Los Angeles. 

The railroads spared no expense in making the great trains great, their accommodations were comparable to those of ocean liners and luxury hotels. These trains were designed by the most famous industrial designers of the day. In the late thirties, Henry Dreyfus completely reworked the design of the train sets of the 20th Century Limited including decking out New York Central's Hudson steam locomotives in steamlined cladding. Those trains remain quintessential symbols of Art Deco elegance. Raymond Loewy did much the same for the trains of the Pennsylvania RR. Perhaps the most beautiful of all belonged to the Santa Fe. Sterling McDonald was responsible for designing the interior of the Super Chief, employing Native American motifs and colors. The real signature of Santa Fe trains however was the design of the General Motors Diesel EMD E series locomotives, which live on today in countless model railroad sets. The famous Santa Fe red and silver "Warbonnet" paint scheme was the brainchild of GM artist Leland Knickerbocker.

Here's a photograph from the 1940s by Jack Delano of a Chicago bound Super Chief making a scheduled stop in Albuquerque. At this point in the journey, passengers could disembark and purchase souvenirs made by local Native Americans.

Hauling passengers was never the primary source of revenue for the railroads, passenger service's chief benefit to the railroads was public relations and advertising. Unlike the other great routes mentioned above, Santa Fe continued to operate the Super Chief until the very end of private control of passenger rail in this country. So associated was the name Super Chief with its parent company, that Santa Fe sued Amtrak to prevent it from using the moniker for its replacement Chicago to LA route, feeling that the service aboard the government run railway did not live up to the standards it set during its forty odd years of operation.

There of course are still railroads in this country; their main purpose remains, as it always has been, to haul freight. There are far fewer of them than there once were, all of them have merged into giant corporations. Santa Fe merged with Burlington which years before merged with the Northern Pacific Railway. The name of the current company is not surprisingly an alphabet soup: BNSF. Has quite the ring to it doesn't it?

Amtrak still exists today but is constantly on the verge of decimation if not all out elimination. On the other hand, there is a move afoot to bring this country into the 21st Century by introducing high speed rail service on a large scale. Naturally it is a highly controversial plan fraught with much risk. While I was searching for photographs of the old Chicago Grand Central Station, I found this site which features a proposal to rebuild the glorious old station as a high speed rail hub. After all these years, the site is still unoccupied. I haven't had the time to study the plan carefully but it looks intriguing. I've stated in this space before my support of high speed rail and its importance to the future of this country. This proposal looks backwards and forwards at the same time, something I find quite satisfying.

As for the removal of the Santa Fe sign, well business is business and I suppose it makes little sense to advertise a company that no longer exists. Even though I never got to travel aboard the Super Chief, I did manage to see it depart from Dearborn Street Station a few times. I fondly remember those gorgeous red and silver engines that my beloved Lionels were modeled upon, pulling the train that would soon ride into oblivion. Yes is was comforting to see that sign every day and remembering something that was very special. I wonder when years from now, they remove the sign they're about to put up which will advertise Motorola, if folks will wistfully remember the glorious days of the cell phone.

Somehow I doubt it.

You don't see these everyday

Those were the words of the Metra train operator the other day as we headed into the downtown station which I still have a hard time calling Olgilvie Transportation Center. He was pointing out three passenger cars, freshly painted in old Union Pacific livery that were parked at the station. A few passengers including myself chose to disrupt the routine of our daily commute to check them out. One was a woman I'd say in her early forties, who was curious what the fuss was all about. The other, a man in his early sixties got it. Only he and I made the complete trek across the station and almost the entire length of the platform to take a look at these beauties.

"This is how I used to travel back when I was a kid" the man said.

"Me too" I replied, wistfully.

High speed to nowhere?

The following is a comment and a response to that comment that I found following this Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article about the governors-elect of three states, including Wisconsin, promising to reject hundreds of millions of federal dollars earmarked for the creation of High Speed Rail systems in their states. Here is comment one:

Florida's governor seems opposed to HSR as well. He's talking about "privatizing" a rail system there. He may be on to something. Let's privatize roads! Let the markets decide, you know, that Ron Johnson "creative destruction" thing. Let's put rail up against roads in a competitive, free-market scrum and let capitalism decide who lives and dies. But it's got to be a fair fight -- with no socialist subsidies either way.

And the response:

I love it. Since we have had roads and cars shoved down our throat for so so so long it is easy to forget that oil companies make billions because they do not pay for the roads that people use. Car companies also do not pay for the roads. It appears that when you get the federal government to subsidize something it forces the population to use something they might not otherwise use because they are already paying for it. The goal of transportation is to foster economic growth and profit indirectly not directly. Roads do not turn a profit.

These two folks bring up a fact that is so often neglected in the debate over public subsidies for transportation. Namely that few of us ever factor in what it costs to build and maintain the tremendous infrastructure necessary to enable us to drive our cars. We do calculate the steep cost of owning a car, payments, gas and insurance, because that comes directly out of our pockets. Yet it would be impossible to use those cars without the roads, highways and bridges that are built and maintained by the government at the local, state and federal levels. In the winter they are plowed, in the summer the potholes are filled. Government provides police and safety workers that help prevent us from killing each other and when accidents do happen, someone comes along to take care of the victims and someone else comes along to clean up the mess, all on the government's payroll. And after the roads and bridges have served their useful purpose, the government steps in and re-builds them. We take our roads and highways so much for granted that it is inconceivable that one day they will not be there for us.

If roads were privatized as the first commenter suggested, and it were up to us to pay directly out of our pockets every time we used them, and I'm not referring to the token amount we pay on tolls, gas taxes and license fees, I mean really pay for them without any government subsidies, we would not be having this conversation about whether or not we should encourage the development of high speed rail. It would be a done deal.

Of course passenger rail service today is subsidized as well, but not nearly to the extent that driving is. The cost of a rail ticket is comparable to an airline ticket (whose industry also benefits from government subsidies). Since the current system of public transportation in this country, both long and short distance, is for the most part, expensive, slow, and woefully inadequate for serving most people's needs, the vast majority of Americans, myself included, feel compelled to own a car. The choice between traveling long distance by rail or by car is unfortunately a rather simple one.

Governors-elect Scott Walker of Wisconsin, John Kasich of Ohio and Rick Scott of Florida, all Republicans fulfilling campaign promises, have taken action to stop the creation of High Speed Rail systems in their states by announcing that they will reject federal money that has already been set aside for their states. The argument of the politicians is that the money should go into repairing highway infrastructure rather then into some government "boondoggle" to build a train that "no one will use." It fit right into their "let's cut spending and lower taxes" song and dance, music to the ears of the constituents who voted for them, most of whom are probably married to their cars and would never conceive of taking a train in the first place.

"Let's just privatize passenger rail" is the mantra of those against government subsidies for High Speed Rail, knowing full well that it will not succeed as passenger rail has never succeeded in making money. True there once were the glory days of passenger rail, back when railroads were thriving businesses and traveling by rail was still glamorous. But even then a railroad was lucky if it could turn a marginal profit off of passengers. It was always transporting freight that made the railroads their money, passenger service existed almost entirely for advertising and public relations. The Interstate System of highways built under the Eisenhower administration marked the beginning of end for most of the railroads, as the trucking industry took over much of the long distance freight business and the automobile began to reign supreme as the cross country transport of choice for most Americans.

As the two commenters above pointed out, roads do not turn a profit either. But roads and highways are seen in this country as a necessity while passenger rail is seen as a nice thing to have but something we can live without. This is not so in other parts of the world.

Americans have witnessed in the first decade of the 21st Century that driving and air travel both have their downsides. We saw what happened after the tragedy of September 11, 2001 with the complete shut down of air travel in the U.S. for several days, and the economic blows the airlines took in the subsequent years. And while we have for many decades been the beneficiaries of cheap gas, we all know that the oil market is capricious, and that the days of inexpensive fuel, both in terms of cost at the gas pump and cost to the environment, are numbered. Alternative transportation systems benefit all of us, now and in the future. Without them, one day we may wake up to find that the once most mobile of nations has become paralyzed. Not only will HSR benefit the economy, but it will also play a critical role in national security. I believe that not supporting it is both short-sighted and foolish.

The future governors rightly claim that HSR will cost the states money in operating costs, perhaps in the low tens of millions per year, certainly not chump change. On the flip side there is this: once they reject the HUNDREDS of millions of dollars of federal money, it will be gone from them forever along with opportunities for new support industries, jobs and tax revenue. The money will be freed up and made available to other states to further along their own development of HSR. States such as Illinois are chomping at the bit to get it and the opportunities that it will provide.

Governors-elect, Walker, Kasich and Scott however are sticking to their guns, hell bent it seems to leave their states behind in the dust.

Northwestern Station

I've never been much of a fan of the architect Helmut Jahn. I find that his work typically conveys bombast over quality and sensitivity. But his buildings are always interesting and often a notch or two above much of the work of his contemporaries.

In the Eighties, Chicago's second grandest railway terminal, the Chicago and Northwestern Station, was razed to make way for this office building of Jahn's. The tower was christened Citycorp Center and the terminal portion has been recently renamed Ogilvie Transportation Center in honor of one of the very few Illinois governors who did not end up in jail after serving his term in office.

Not bound by the purist (and false) Modernist dogma of pure functionalism, Jahn designed a building of arches and monumental spaces, all the hoopla that defined Art Deco revival. It casts a striking silhouette on the skyline.

The old Northwestern Station designed by Frost and Granger and built in the Renaissance revival style in 1911 was magnificent. Like the original Union Station concourse, it made a great first impression on travelers who arrived from far and wide until the mid-sixties when its namesake railroad discontinued long distance passenger service. Unlike its larger counterpart down the street, all those entering Northwestern Station would pass through the grand waiting room under the building's most imposing feature, its beautiful Guastavino tile ceiling, common elsewhere but rare in Chicago.

In its later days, as the clerestory windows of the waiting room had been tarred over, the waiting room was not bathed in natural light. But the lack of natural light was made up by the warm tones of the tiles and the massive green marble columns holding them up. By the time of its demise in 1984, the interior was filled with so many kiosks and illuminated signs, it was difficult to see its true beauty which was revealed one last time by the wrecking crew.

The old station is truly missed by all who knew it. It was a great building that harkened back to the golden age of travel in America, and was a landmark that was well worth saving.

Given that, its replacement is frankly not all that bad, especially if you compare it to the other commuter rail terminals in town, all built in the last forty years to replace much better, older stations. Faint praise indeed. Yet at OTC there is still the sense of having arrived after getting off your train from the suburbs and entering the impressive steel and glass interior. The building is at its best at rush hour when the throngs are hurrying to or from their trains. It is then that the beehive of activity that marks the urban experience is most evident.

Unfortunately this place is all business. While there are lots of places to buy stuff or to eat and drink, save for an uninviting and embarrassingly small waiting room trackside, this is no place to sit down to watch all the activity.

Efficient use of valuable property I suppose, the entire reason for the building's very existence and the glorious old one's demise.