Chicago Skyline Above the Metra Electric Line

There is a bridge over rail lines on Congress (well, now it is East Ida B. Wells Drive). The rails run straight toward the skyline. Silver lines narrowing, converging, disappearing into the base of the city. A Metra train sits on the tracks below you, heavy and silver-gray, waiting. Above it, the buildings of glass and steel climb the grey sky.

Most people think the skyline built Chicago. They have it backward. The rails built the skyline.

In 1850, Chicago was a city of 30,000 people in a swamp at the edge of a lake. It had ambition and almost nothing else. To build a city, you need workers. To keep workers, you need somewhere for them to sleep that is not a boarding house next to a slaughterhouse. The city had to expand outward before it could grow upward. It needed a system that could reliably move human beings in and out of its center every day, in all weather, before the automobile promised something easier.

The Illinois Central Railroad understood this before the architects did.

In 1852, the Illinois Central laid tracks south from the city along the lakefront. By 1856, it was running suburban service: workers carried in from the South Side neighborhoods on a schedule, delivered to the business district, and taken home in the evening. This was not a luxury. This was the city's circulatory system. The neighborhoods filled in around the stations. The demand for office space downtown grew because the workers could reach downtown. The towers followed the tracks. They always do.

In 1926, the Illinois Central electrified the line. One of the first electrified commuter railroads in North America. The catenary wires went up. The steam engines came down. Hyde Park got direct service to the Loop in twenty minutes. The city's South Side knit itself to the center in a way that changed what it meant to live there. You could work in the Loop and go home to a neighborhood with trees and a yard. The railroad made that possible. The city grew because the railroad ran through it.

Today, it is the Metra Electric Line. It runs 33 miles from Millennium Station in the heart of the Loop south to University Park, with branches serving 33 stations. On a weekday morning, tens of thousands of commuters ride it into the city. They sit where their grandparents sat, watching the same skyline assemble itself through the windows as the tracks curve north toward downtown. The line still runs on infrastructure rooted in that 1926 electrification. The catenary system, the stations, the alignments: most of it was built when Prohibition was still the law of the land.

The funding is perpetually contested. Metra negotiates every year with the Regional Transportation Authority and the state of Illinois for capital money to maintain what 170 years of rail service built. The cars age. The platforms need work. The political will to invest in commuter rail comes and goes. What does not come and go are the 40,000 people who need the train to get to work.

The trains still run. Every day. On time, most of the time. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, everything.

From the Ida B. Wells bridge, you can see what the railroad built. The tracks leave the station and run north in a straight line, steel rails narrowing toward the base of the towers. The skyline is not floating above the city. It is standing on ground that the railroad made accessible. Every skyscraper up there is a consequence of a decision made in 1852: run steel into a swamp, run trains on the steel, and watch what people build around them.

The city did not happen. It was constructed, line by line, from the ground up.

Look north. The tracks are still there. The train is waiting.

Now you know why.