What It's like to ride the Yellow Line from Howard all the way to Skokie.

Dispatches from Skokie, part one of two. In which our intrepid travelers set off on an adventure and, horror of horrors, get off the platform at their destination. Photographs with part two.


Skokie is magical. There’s nothing more to it.

I’ve never had a burning desire to visit Skokie, or to go to the Northern Suburbs. Until last Saturday, the farthest north I’d been in the Chicago area was the Morse Red Line stop. But I was inspired a week ago by the brave girl from Northwestern who rode the Red Line all the way from Howard to 87th, and pretended she made it to 95th. I decided I had to learn what it would be like to take the Purple Line all the way from Howard to Linden.

Fate intervened and, though we did get to the Purple Line eventually, we ended up in Skokie first.

I enlisted my good friends and future flatmates, Adam and Paul, and we hopped on the Red Line at Garfield. The trip up to Howard was fairly uneventful, except that we made predictions about Evanston and passed a Blockbuster Video store. Paul pointed it out, and Adam said “It seems the train has taken us back to 1996.” The Red Line traverses a very nice route through the North Side, filled with wonder, miracles, and apartment buildings identical to those in Hyde Park and everywhere else in Chicago. When we got to Howard, we stayed on the platform. If we left the station, I think all three of us would have stood in fear for our lives, because there was a store selling Pagers on the street down below, next to a store selling wigs. Combined with the Blockbuster just a coupe of stops distant, this seemed to be a sign that the rapture was, indeed, there, and that it was sending us heathens back in time so that we might meet the historical Jesus and be converted by his teachings. We were waiting on the platform for the Purple Line to show up and be ready to go when a miracle occurred.

It says in the bible that no man shall know the hour or the day of the return of the Lord, and we Jews are taught that Messiah will return eventually, when the world is righteous and ready. However, Hashem is known to work miracles now and again, and the appearance of the Yellow Line train to Skokie was certainly one of them. We boarded the train, mostly because I had heard that it was a ten minute trip, and were amazed. There were only two cars, and the front one had a nice, forward-facing window. We sat in the that front car and discussed getting food in Skokie, as Adam hadn’t had breakfast that morning.

I am, I know, a lucky man. I know this because, as the train flew out of the ditch north of the Howard station and through the sylvan glen which immediately surrounded it, I was transported to a different time. I could imagine a steam train puffing through the forests of the midwest, with businessmen on their way to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange or the federal court building, or Cincinnati Jews setting out to start a new life in Skokie. As we passed the Crafty Beaver (get your dirty mind out of the gutter) Hardware Store and the “Festival of Cultures” and slowed down for the Skokie station, we decided we’d get out and look around for something to do and something to eat. The train slowed to a stop, and we all chuckled as the man said “This is Skokie, as far as this train goes.” The train actually went a little bit farther, into an amusing one-track turnaround siding. The level of quaintness, already approaching the "I Like Ike" campaign commercial level, went nowhere but up for the rest of our time in Skokie.

We got off the platform, horror of horrors, and started walking east (or perhaps north) on Dempster street. We hadn’t gone a block when we stumbled upon an Auto Parts store. This sort of thing is unremarkable, of course. But as the haunting tones of the desert drums rose in my mind, I felt myself lifted above the lone and level sands and transported to another reality, for the only auto parts in the store were giant piles of knockoff Persian rugs.

What It's like to ride the Red Line from Garfield almost all the way to Howard.

I’ve always had a strange passion to go to the North Side of Chicago. Whenever I rode the Green line, I wondered what existed at the mystical Howard Red Line stop. And so one day I decided to go there. Seriously. I wanted to see the magical ponies and fountains of gold that surely existed on the beautiful far North Side.

I hopped on the 55 bus at University avenue, and saw the combination of low-grade housing, community centers, and abandoned storefronts slipping past me on Garfield Boulevard. I imagined that this run-down commercial district would be replicated in nothing but glory and ponies when I got up north.

When I got to the Red Line stop, there were no policemen there. That surprised me, because I know that all the criminals live on the south side. I figured they must have all been off arresting someone somewhere else, and put them out of my mind. I walked down to the end of the tracks, and the train pulled up, going towards Howard.

The clearing out of the train at the Roosevelt stop is pretty impressive, it’s as if a sudden, violent regime of segregation imposed itself several decades ago and never really let go, keeping the city’s racial mix stuck in the late 1950’s. It’s almost as if the Brown/Orange/Pink stop named after Harold Washington is only a token nod to the city’s minority population.

There was nobody really interesting on the train until about the Chicago and State stop, when a drunk guy with a vacuum cleaner got into my car. But he didn’t do anything, and got off at Addison. I stared at him for a while, but it was kind of pointless.

When I could finally rip my eyes away from him, I noticed we were on the elevated tracks, running high above a landscape dotted with middle-class row houses and what looked to be prospering businesses, though from the train, I really couldn’t tell. In fact, from the train, there was little I could tell about the character of the neighborhood that wouldn’t have been a stereotype based on the people who got off at each stop.

I imagine, though, that Ponce de Leon should have looked to the North Side for the fountain of youth, that Cortes should have looked to the North Side for El Dorado, and that Henry Hudson should have looked to the North Side for the Northwest passage, because it seemed so magical in my imagination.

When we finally reached the Morse Red Line stop, I was too excited to stay on the train. I got off, stepped down, and looked around. There, in all its glory, was the #96 Lunt bus. Seriously. The Lunt bus. I got on the bus on the north side, hoping that it would be better than the busses on the south side, but it still smelled faintly of urine.

It took me a couple of blocks to a mixed use strip that looked a lot like 55th Street east of the Metra tracks, or 53rd Street east of Ellis. As I walked back, I saw a couple of police cars, and was excited. Perhaps they were going to point out where I could find some unicorns to make my trip worthwhile. I asked the officer where I could find a unicorn, but my White Sox hat gave away that I was a South Side native, and he tried to beat me with a truncheon.

I ran away, back to the train and got back on. I looked over, and there was made-up Ernie Banks and the Ghost of the First Mayor Daley, chatting with Anton Cermak. They saw me eavesdropping on their fake conversation, and First Mayor Daley said to me, “Son, you know Bridgeport’s on the South Side, right? Ain’t nothing up here but a bunch of shitbirds who don’t get out often enough.”