F.K. Plous: Build the CTA Super Loop to get Lincoln Yards and The 78 developed

Chicago Tribune

11-07-2025

In April, the Tribune Editorial Board asked: 'Is Lincoln Yards becoming Chicago's new Block 37?'
Block 37, for those too young to remember, was the space surrounded by State, Dearborn, Randolph and Washington streets that stood empty for 20 years until an exasperated Mayor Richard M. Daley found a developer willing to build what amounted to a disappointing assembly of retail stores.
Today, a similar drama is unfolding on a much bigger scale 2 miles north of downtown on a vacant 54-acre tract of former industrial land dubbed Lincoln Yards. Developer Sterling Bay announced its intention to build a mix of office, residential and commercial buildings on the tract back in 2019.
But in five years, Sterling Bay has finished only one Lincoln Yards project, a life sciences building that today stands empty. Famishing for capital to keep the project alive, Sterling Bay surrendered ownership of more than half the tract to Arkansas-based lender Bank OZK. Now Los Angeles-based Kayne Anderson and Chicago-based JDL are planning to acquire the entire tract for a bargain. But the partners' plans — at least at this point — suggest a much more modest scale of development than Sterling Bay's: shorter high-rises, a lower residential population, and less commercial and office space.
What went wrong with Lincoln Yards? Most of the postmortems name the usual suspects: the pandemic, the massive conversion of office work to remote work, rising interest rates and political foot-dragging by Lori Lightfoot when she was mayor and Ald. Scott Waguespack.
Those factors may have played a role, but so does another element that everyone seems to overlook: geography. The map of Lincoln Yards looks forbidding. In a flat city where all private and public property is organized into rectangles and triangles aligned with the principal points of the compass, Lincoln Yards is defined by a series of wedges, lumps and lobes that don't adjoin with the rest of the Chicago street map. Like its deviant neighbor to the south, Goose Island, Lincoln Yards is full of confusing little streets that don't line up with the Chicago grid and bear names not found in any other neighborhood.
The problem is the river. Early Chicago may have craved a clear and simple street grid, but it craved growth even more, and that meant quick access to the docks where schooners delivered the coal, salt, lumber, shingles, iron, flour and whiskey the new city needed for growth. Because the river winds, the streets accessing the docks in Lincoln Yards had to deviate in their headings. Even veteran Chicago motorists find the place confusing, and transit hardly goes there. Elston Avenue, which forms the tract's western edge, lost its CTA bus service in 1997. Elston should be the gateway to Lincoln Yards, but when a popular band is performing at the Salt Shed between Division Street and North Avenue, Elston seizes up. Should Elston attract more new businesses and residents, Lincoln Yards could become inaccessible.
By surface vehicles, at least. But more than 20 years ago, the CTA was pondering a new subway that could have provided Lincoln Yards, Bucktown, Noble Square and adjacent neighborhoods with a fast, frequent mass transit service to the Loop, Near North Side, Near West Side and the Illinois Medical District plus connections to the Blue Line to O'Hare International Airport and the Orange Line to Midway Airport.
The proposed Super Loop, sometimes known as the Circle Line, seemed achievable and practical because more than half the route would use existing CTA infrastructure. Northbound trains would follow the Red Line subway from the Loop to the North and Clybourn station. Then, just north of the station, a new underground junction would enable Super Loop trains to switch onto a new pair of tracks running west under North Avenue. That westbound segment was to include a station at North and Elston at the southwest corner of the area that would become Lincoln Yards.
From North and Elston, the underground tubes would head west half a mile, then turn south under Ashland Avenue. At the busy corner of Division Street and Ashland and Milwaukee avenues, the line would pass under the existing Blue Line subway station, where Super Loop passengers could ride an escalator up one level to transfer to trains to O'Hare or downtown. Proceeding south under Ashland, trains would stop at a new station under Chicago Avenue. Just south of the Chicago and Ashland stop, the line would swing slightly west, climb out of the tunnel and ramp up onto an unused segment of the old West Side Elevated Railway.
At Lake Street, it would cross the elevated Green Line just west of the Ashland stop, where a platform would enable passengers to transfer to Green and Pink Line trains. Continuing south on what's today known as the Pink Line, trains would stop at a new station serving the United Center, the existing station serving the West Side medical district and the 18th Street stop serving the Pilsen neighborhood.
But just south of 18th Street, where the Pink Line turns west, Super Loop trains would continue south on a new elevated right of way paralleling Ashland Avenue, crossing the sanitary canal and curving northeast to join the Orange Line elevated just west of its Ashland stop, where passengers could catch an Orange Line train to Midway. At Chinatown, trains would switch onto the Red Line and repeat their itinerary.
All seemed to be going well for the new Super Loop plan until around 2012, when the CTA quietly dropped the project. The Red Line subway lacked the capacity to handle the increased train frequencies generated by the Super Loop. Under then President Dorval Carter Jr., the CTA switched its growth focus from circulation within the urban core to outreach toward the margins with a $6 billion, 6-mile extension of the Red Line to the Far South Side at 130th Street.
But today, with the Red Line extension barely started and two giant tracts of real estate waiting for development deep inside the city, it's time to rethink the Super Loop not just as a people mover but also as a tool for jump-starting development and generating vital real estate tax revenues.
It would work like this: With the Red Line off-limits to more trains, switch those Super Loop trains at Chinatown into a new subway running parallel to the Red Line three blocks west under The 78. Build two underground stations: one at the south end of The 78 just north of 16th Street, the other a half-mile north at, or under, the Chicago Fire's proposed new soccer stadium.
Rapid transit stations serving a major stadium are essential in preventing traffic congestion on game days. One reason Chicago and New York are the only remaining cities with two Major League Baseball teams is that both ballparks in both cities are on the rapid transit system (and in Chicago, Rate Field is served by Metra as well).
Heading north from the Fire's new stadium in The 78, the Super Loop tube would cross under the South Branch of the Chicago River and head north under Canal Street to a long-overdue two-block-long underground station serving Union Station and the Ogilvie Transportation Center, neither of which was ever directly connected to the city's rapid transit infrastructure (or to each other). The new connectivity would take thousands of daily vehicles, buses and taxis out of the congested West Loop — especially on Canal, Adams, Clinton and Jackson streets — and create a long-delayed all-weather pedestrian connection between the two busy rail terminals.
Continuing north under Canal, the new subway would bring precious new mobility to the congested and fast-growing River West and Fulton River districts, two formerly obscure tracts of warehouses and railroad spurs now throbbing with residential development — and auto traffic. The next stop north would be Goose Island, another once-obscure tract of factories and rail yards now generating explosive commercial development (and congestion).
As originally proposed, the CTA Super Loop running west from North and Clybourn would have merely grazed Lincoln Yards with an underground station at the far southwestern corner of the tract, North and Elston. On its new north-south orientation, the subway could head directly northwest from Goose Island into the heart of Lincoln Yards, with two underground stations — one in the south tract at a location next to Cortland Street and the Armitage Avenue bus line, and another in the longer north tract, around Dickens Avenue. The line would access the popular 606 trail, then loop west to Ashland and turn south on the original Super Loop heading (but with a 'Gateway to Bucktown' station under the busy intersection of Ashland and North).
There's no reason to scratch heads and ponder why two large and promising tracts of urban real estate continue to stand empty in a city full of eager, experienced and well-financed developers and young families seeking an urban home. Those promising properties are inaccessible. The missing element is the mass mobility provided by a new rail transit infrastructure.
Expensive? Compared to what? Has anybody calculated the real estate taxes never paid by two empty prairies?