One Tower for the Meatpackers; One for the Fashionistas - Ross Barney's new Morgan Street Station bridges old and new Fulton Market

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While major Chicago institutions like the South Water market have relocated several times over Chicago's history, and others, like the Union Stockyards, have completely vanished, the Fulton Market district, the clearinghouse for meat, fish and dairy characterized nearly a century ago as "a sight to gladden to anyone interested in the trade . . . thoroughly modern in every sense of the word", has endured in its original location, even as it becomes marbled with gentrification.

Loft rehabs are common.  Smart boutiques . . .

 mingle with meatpackers . . .

Art Galleries . . .

amidst butter-and-egg firms . . .

There's the new home of the Showmen's League of America . . .

and this Archer-Daniels-Midland complex, reported to be Chicago's last active grain elevator . . .

The area is still defined by the soaring, massive hulk of the Fulton Cold Storage building  . . .

. . . designed by Gardner & Lindberg and built in the 1920's at a cost of $4,000,000 - 5,000,000 cubic feet "for the proper keeping of butter, eggs and other perishable produce."  It survives today as "The only 100% owner operated warehouse in Chicago," and, as pictured on website photographs, a magnet for beautiful women hanging off its highest ramparts.

Now, however, the Fulton Market is getting a new visual marker, one that will end the district's long isolation from public transit.  Morgan Street was one of the original stations on the 1893 Lake Street Elevated line, but it survived only until 1948, when it was among 10 stations closed in an efficiency drive by the recently formed CTA.  Since the rebuilding of what is now called the Green Line in the early 1990's, there has been no L stop between Clinton and Ashland, part of a short-sighted rapid transit redlining of the inner city that also saw the demolition of all Green Line stations from Roosevelt to 35th, a nearly three mile stretch.  (Efforts are now underway to also reconstruct the station at Cermak, serving McCormick Place.)

The design of the new Morgan Street station comes from Ross Barney Architects, which recently completed an award-winning, $100 million rehab of the CTA's Red, Brown and Purple transfer stops at Belmont and Fullerton.  $30 million in TIF funding is going towards Morgan Street's estimated price tag of $38,000,000, about what it cost to complete the entire Dan Ryan extension back in the 1960's.

The design offers a station house on either side of Lake, leading up to staggered platforms that reduce the strain on the trestle structure . . .

 . . . and translucent polycarbonate canopies that provide both shelter and daylight.*

Trees, landscaping and bicycle racks are planned for street level.

Dominating the composition, however, are the pair of tall, wide and thin stair towers, like a pair of giant bookends, that rise first from the street to the platforms, and then above the platforms to a bridge crossing the tracks.

While the entire design stresses a sense of openness, eventually the stair towers will have a perforated metal screen.

Today, without that screen, the wide-open, white-painted metal frame gives an almost vertiginous sense of the high-height wafers poking into the sky.

We'll be waiting to see how it all turns out, but there's no doubt but that Ross Barney's design for the Morgan Street station creates a strikingly distinctive emblem for a classic neighborhood that - so far, at least - hasn't sacrificed its historic character as it gains a new kind of vitality.

*Direct daylight not available during night-time hours.