Transport: Chicago Underground

Ever since Manhattan became Bagdad-on-the-Subway 34 years ago, lusty Chicago has toyed with the idea of an underground of its own. But despite years of fantastic traffic messes, civic pounding, editorial urging and earnest planning, Chicago is still the biggest city in the world without a passenger subway.

More than 75% of Chicago’s passenger traffic is handled by a vast system of street cars and busses. Chief rapid transit the city proper has is furnished by its far-flung 41-year-old elevated railway system, 14 lines that creep and clang counterclockwise around the “Loop” encircling the 7 by 6-block financial and mercantile district before heading back toward the city’s outskirts. Inside the “Loop,” the property values are as high as the 45-story Field Building; outside they fall off just as steeply.

Most of Chicago’s subway schemes have proposed leveling the elevated loop and the uneven scale of property values it sustains. Successfully opposing such plans have been the real-estate and business interests entrenched inside the “Loop.” But last week a plan that contained no threat to the “Loop” was on its way to fulfillment. Signed by President Roosevelt was a PWA allotment of 18 million lend-spend dollars, representing 45% of the cost of a $40,000,000 7.6-mile subway system which Chicago must start building before January 1, and must have substantially completed by June 30, 1940. To be tunneled at a depth of 35 feet through the stratum of blue clay underlying Chicago’s 25 feet of largely-filled in elevation above Lake Michigan, its two lines will lead from existing “L” trackage on the North Side, shortcutting some trains into the “Loop” from outlying areas with time savings of as much as 16 to 20 minutes, and bringing rapid transit for the first time to the busy Milwaukee Avenue industrial district. In the “Loop” itself the lines will run under Dearborn and State Streets, a block apart, with communicating passenger tunnels connecting their continuous platforms at seven consecutive “Loop” streets. Effect of the system when promised unification of Chicago’s transit lines is achieved will be to speed up “L” time by making possible a reduction in number of overhead trains, and to relieve congested street cars and bus lines in the newly tapped districts.