Railroad terminals are often recognized for their architectural significance, but rapid-transit stations usually get dismissed as street furniture, occupying something of a design netherworld along with bridge-tender houses, park shelters, and newsstands. Yet there’s a quasi-glorious tradition in subway station design, at least in other places. Turn-of-the-century architect Hector Guimard’s sinuous wrought-iron canopies and ornamentation at Paris metro entrances epitomize the art nouveau style; historian Nikolaus Pevsner calls them the “most insistent survivors” of la belle epoque. Moscow’s subway stations–with their lavish materials, extravagant finishes, and monumental proportions–suggest the grandeur of museums or government buildings. The Washington metro is a model of hushed modern efficiency. And even in New York, intricate mosaic tile work is commonplace in many stations built before World War I.
Whatever thinking is done about the design of the city’s rapid-transit stations doesn’t necessarily come out of CTA headquarters, and maybe that’s part of the problem. The CTA doesn’t really own all of what we think of as the CTA. That’s because the el was composed by consolidating the holdings of privately owned train and streetcar companies bought out of receivership by the city during the Great Depression. The Chicago Transit Authority was invented in 1943 to own and run the subway, which, like Lake Shore Drive, was built in the late 30s as a project of the New Deal. So the CTA may own the subway, but the city owns the el structure and surrounding real estate. The city is charged with the care and maintenance of the aboveground tracks and stations, while the CTA runs the service and sees to the rolling stock and subways. Every public transit system in America depends on state and federal governments for their survival. In the case of the CTA, much of the funding for ongoing repair and rehabilitation comes from federal grants administered by the city primarily through the Department of Transportation’s bureau of bridges and transit. Its dependence on outsiders is further aggravated by a precipitously declining ridership.
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When the Loop elevated was built in the 19th century, ticket booths and waiting areas were built above the street, at either the mezzanine or track level, and featured the prevailing contemporary styles of commercial architecture: neoclassical detail, masonry exteriors, wood-trimmed interiors. In residential neighborhoods they were built at grade and had a more modest character.
The firm of Dubin, Dubin & Moutoussamy (now called DubinReid) served as the general architectural consultant on the Midway line and as a subconsultant on the Merchandise Mart project. It designed the Davis Street stop in Evanston and the new station for the Skokie Swift. It was also responsible for the rehabilitation of the Addison stop on the Howard line. It’s somehow fitting that its work represents the best and worst of recent rapid-transit station projects.
The Addison station illustrates where the values of the CTA part ways with the aims of good design. Lip service may be paid to integrating stations into the urban fabric, but for nearly three decades that fabric has been running up the middle of expressways, so the institutional feel of the concrete islands along the O’Hare line was in a sense appropriate to their environment. Now that new stations are being built downtown or in the neighborhoods, the CTA has yet to shed its prison mentality. The problems of vandalism and crime require open, vandal-proof spaces: metal benches, no glass, no colors (lest bright hues attract graffiti).
