Monday, March 31, 2008

Now And Then



The above photo shows the Wilson L auxiliary entrance on August 1, 1946. The lower photo shows how this entrance looks today. Notice the building on the right still remains, thankfully.
The facade was built to match the neighboring McJunkin building but was demolished in the mid 1950s to allow for the driveway to the back portion of the McJunkin building seen on the left in the current-day photo.
(photo above: Charles E. Keevil photo, Walter R. Keevil Collection, and Krambles-Peterson Archive)
Update: We added another photo, (top) that shows the Wilson L auxiliary entrance in 1918, before the facade was added to mimic the McJunkin building. They are now in chronological order. As you can see, even this old entrance is an improvement over what we have today.

15 comments:

  1. Shields, then no Shields.

    I'm on a shields frenzy these days.

    Look up above the sidewalk at the "ceiling". There is supposed to be hangers with sheets of metal that protect the people and cars under the track from the grease and debris that falls from the trains. Notice anything missing these days?

    How cheap can the CTA be to not even protect our community from it's dropping sh#*?

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  2. ugh . . . it looks like the corrugated metal is still there, just painted white.

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  3. I sincerely hope Ron Huberman reads this blog, especially since that's the entrance he uses every work day.

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  4. Seriously, Huberman gets on the L at Wilson?

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  5. Yes he does. He's been an Uptown resident for some years. Back in the days when he was Daley's 911 Call Center guru.

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  6. Whether he rides the El or not (which I know he does), this entrance will never look like that again, but wow, what an awesome pic!

    I'd just love to see the CTA, at minimum, scrub down and clean the terra cotta on the exterior of the station.

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  7. I visited the south port L station over the weekend and it looks great!! As a matter of fact every time I visit that area there are new stores and never a vacant spot. Here we are in UpTown only a mile away and have tons of vacant store fronts. It seems most business owners don't want to take a chance on UpTown.

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  8. Ron Huberman is cute.

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  9. Nobody wanted to take a chance on Southport, either, until the area was taken away from Helen via redistricting.

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  10. The corrugted metal shields only protect the Truman college South side of Wilson. The North side is wide open to falling debris as the area over passing cars.

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  11. I used to live off Southport when it was pretty darn grubby, retail buildings had vacancies, and gangs were still a problem. This was in the early to mid-nineties. A lot can happen to a neighborhood over time, and I see the same kind of positive changes happening in Uptown now.

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  12. True, but it's probably not a coincidence that the Southport Corridor went through its most noticeable changes right after it was no longer part of Helen's 46th Ward. Uptown is changing but in spite of Helen.

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  13. I find it funny that the old photos don't have much litter & piss stains in them, compared to what one would see now.

    Huberman isn't cute- he's hot!

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  14. ugh huberman can resign for all i care. I agree, the old ones are cleaner and better. i guess all those people forgot to teach their children how to throw away trash and use a bathroom.

    Why does this Wilson and the Lawrence stops look like such shanty hubs. They are creepy, dirty, damp, and the turnstiles hardly accept my CTA card so i always missed trains and now just walk over to the Main Wilson station, at least i can get in there.

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  15. Ever since the late sixties, I always remember Wilson L being a total slum.

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