The Loop: The "l" Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago - Softcover

Reardon, Patrick T.

 
9780809338108: The Loop: The "l" Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0809338106 ISBN 13: 9780809338108
Verlag: SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIV PR, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

The structure that anchors Chicago

Every day Chicagoans rely on the loop of elevated train tracks to get to their jobs, classrooms, or homes in the city&;s downtown. But how much do they know about the single most important structure in the history of the Windy City? In engagingly brisk prose, Patrick T. Reardon unfolds the fascinating story about how Chicago&;s elevated Loop was built, gave its name to the downtown, helped unify the city, saved the city&;s economy, and was itself saved from destruction in the 1970s.
 
This unique volume combines urban history, biography, engineering, architecture, transportation, culture, and politics to explore the elevated Loop&;s impact on the city&;s development and economy and on the way Chicagoans see themselves. The Loop rooted Chicago&;s downtown in a way unknown in other cities, and it protected that area&;and the city itself&;from the full effects of suburbanization during the second half of the twentieth century. Masses of data underlie new insights into what has made Chicago&;s downtown, and the city as a whole, tick.
 
The Loop features a cast of colorful Chicagoans, such as legendary lawyer Clarence Darrow, poet Edgar Lee Masters, mayor Richard J. Daley, and the notorious Gray Wolves of the Chicago City Council. Charles T. Yerkes, an often-demonized figure, is shown as a visionary urban planner, and engineer John Alexander Low Waddell, a world-renowned bridge creator, is introduced to Chicagoans as the designer of their urban railway.
 
This fascinating exploration of how one human-built structure reshaped the social and economic landscape of Chicago is the definitive book on Chicago&;s elevated Loop.
 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

For more than three decades Patrick T. Reardon was an urban affairs writer, a feature writer, a columnist, and an editor for the Chicago Tribune. In 2000 he was one of a team of 50 staff members who won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. Now a freelance writer and poet, he has contributed chapters to several books and is the author of Faith Stripped to Its Essence. His website is https://patricktreardon.com/.
 

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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...

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Verlag
SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIV PR
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0809338106
ISBN 13 
9780809338108
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
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