Lifetecture

I travelled up to the North-side of the city a while ago and came across an open wound in the street. The neighborhood around the Montrose Brown Line Station is a good blend of commercial storefronts surrounded by two and three-flats – typical Chicago residential buildings. There’s been a lot of change lately as the CTA works to upgrade all the Brown Line stops to include elevators. The newly accessible stations are an improvement for people with heavy bikes or babies in strollers, in addition to those in wheelchairs or on crutches; but the material legacy of decades of use has been erased.

When I first moved to Chicago I worked in Ravenswood and most every day I ate in Beans and Bagels, a locally owned coffee-shop with a great group of art and film students serving up good coffee and sandwiches. A few years ago I had heard that this storefront business was to be razed to make way for the CTA expansion…so I was surprised to see that it has survived the cut and is still there. The entrance to the station, along with brand new elevator, is now situated across the street, on the South side of Montrose.

I was returning home from a meeting, travelling by Brown Line when I was struck by a scene of street construction outside Montrose Station. It made me aware of how vulnerable the exposed street was; shored up like a patient undergoing heart surgery – all raw and open. The construction worker on duty supervised the surgery with great authority, ordering the large earth-mover to dig according to his instructions.

In relative terms, Chicago is only a recently developed city. Not too long ago this area was a series of pastoral fields, where local farmers defended their landed homesteads from the original inhabitants: the Ottawa, Chippewa and Pottawattamie Indians. Seeing the wound opened like that reminded me of the earth underneath the asphalt surface, covering other layers of formerly planked roads.