From the ‘L’

"She is novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time."

- Mark Twain

Project Statement

Public transportation, particularly the subway and ‘L’, has always intrigued me. Growing up in a town of about 5,000 people in rural Wisconsin, nowhere near any form of public transportation, there’s just something about the train that felt so completely urban, exotic, and foreign to me.

Most of us tend to ride the same lines, and sections of those lines, year after year, never venturing into other parts of the city by this form of transportation. Granted, there may not be much of a reason to, but curiosity got the best of me. I wondered how far into various parts of the city these lines traveled, what those neighborhoods were like and how the city looked from each line.

In this series, I share the similarities and diversity seen from each neighborhood these eight lines travel through.