More than a decade after planning began, a new CTA train station at Damen Avenue and Lake Street on the Green Line began serving passengers Monday.
With trains rumbling to a stop behind them, Chicago and CTA leaders heralded the station’s proximity to the United Center, Malcolm X College, the Kinzie Industrial Corridor and the mixed-income Westhaven Park housing development. They also nodded to its delayed completion weeks before the Democratic National Convention comes to the nearby Bulls and Blackhawks arena.
The Damen stop fills a 1.5-mile gap between existing stations on the west branch of the Green Line, replacing a station that was torn down 76 years earlier.
“People in these communities have been neglected of access to public transportation for many years,” Ald. Walter Burnett, whose 27th Ward includes the new station, said at a ceremonial opening Monday. “Some of it is due to economics. Some of it is due to ethnicity. For me this ‘L’ stop is a social justice issue. It’s something that needed to be done a long time ago.”
Hours after the $80 million station entered service early Monday morning, a handful of tourists and residents stood atop the brand-new platforms waiting for trains. M’Kiyah Baxter, 19, who lives nearby, didn’t know the new station was an option until her maps app told her it offered the best route to reach her South Side destination that morning.
Normally, she relies on the Madison bus or could walk to the Blue Line that runs down the center of the Eisenhower Expressway. But the bus is slow, and if she’s heading to the South Side, taking a bus to the Red Line can be a long journey, she said.
“(The Damen stop) is way closer, and it makes moving around much easier,” she said. “Just because it’s in the area, we don’t have to walk too far.”
The new station, designed by Perkins&Will, includes a large, rectangular concrete-and-glass building that rises next to the Lake Street “L” tracks. A glass pedestrian bridge over the tracks is encased in lime green bars, which are repeated in a tall elevator shaft that rises above the station with a bright green CTA logo easily visible to the surrounding area.
Visible through the glass facade is a large mural by artist Folayemi Wilson depicting a prairie with imagines of young people looking toward the horizon. The images were taken from local photo archives, according to the city.
Though construction of the station was led by the Chicago Department of Transportation, the opening was likely a welcome celebration for the CTA and President Dorval Carter, who has faced criticism in recent years as ridership, service and the perception of personal safety on the CTA lagged.
First announced in February 2017, the station was initially expected to be finished in 2020, and the price tag in early official statements shifted between $50 million and $60 million. But the opening date was pushed back multiple times, with officials citing first the need to wait for the station design to be finished before awarding a construction contract, then the necessity of relocating utilities and reinforcing column foundations, supply chain challenges and delays in getting materials.
Advance work, which included relocating structural columns, began in 2019.
The intersection of Damen and Lake was served by an “L” station for decades, until it was closed in 1948. The station was one of 10 on the Lake Street line that were closed at that time in an effort to speed up service, according to Tribune archives.
In the years after that, the Henry Horner public housing development was built around the site, bringing hundreds of families to the neighborhood. The housing complex began to be torn down in the 1990s, and the nearby Westhaven development constructed.
Efforts to restore the Damen station to serve the area began years ago. Roberto Requejo, now a CTA board member, was involved in some early efforts in the mid-2000s when he worked at the Metropolitan Planning Council, he said.
“This is a very important station,” he said. “We need to speed it up … the construction delays are problematic, the seven years. But the biggest delay was the years since 1948 when they closed it down to today, and knowing that there were 10,000 people here who never got a station.”
Mayor Brandon Johnson, who lives on the West Side served by the Green Line, highlighted the “historic relevance” of the line because it serves both the West and South sides of the city.
“I’m thrilled about the promise and potential of this station to revitalize our neighborhoods and uplift all of our residents,” he said. “But I know that there are many more communities in our city that deserve the type of improved transit access that we are seeing today.”
In the past decade, the CTA has built other new stations intended to close gaps between existing ones. Morgan, which serves the Green and Pink lines east of the new Damen station in the booming West Loop, opened in 2012. Cermak-McCormick Place on the Near South Side, also on the Green Line, opened in 2015.
Carter, wearing a green tie, outlined a vision for the newest station at Damen to improve access to transit for nearby residents, including via a new Divvy station at the “L” stop. It could bring customers to businesses in the Kinzie corridor, and provide a way for fans to reach Bulls and Blackhawks games or concerts at the United Center, he said.
“For decades to come, this station will provide (residents) with an easier and faster way to connect to valuable resources and opportunities across our entire Chicago region,” Carter said.
As the ceremony concluded, Carter entered the station with his staff and boarded a train heading toward downtown.
