Throwing Away the Headhouse: North & Clybourn Red Line Before and After Apple

We've written before about the reconstruction of the North & Clybourn stop on the CTA's Red Line, financed to a tune of nearly $4 million by Apple Computer to provide a more fitting backdrop to its shiny new store right next door.  It reminds me about the line in Lawrence of Arabia where Peter O'Toole is asked exactly what he found so attractive about the desert.  "It's clean," was his reply.

As described on the excellent Chicago-L.org website, the North & Clybourn station was designed in 1939 by Shaw, Naess and Murphy.  It is the only subway station in the system to have a headhouse. All the others have ticketing in below-ground mezzanines.

The redesign kept the building but largely threw away the design.  It's been Californiaized: dark textured brick getting flat, lighter replacements, windows, doors and lighting all redesigned.  The original building had character -it just needed to be cleaned up and restored.   The redesign is generic and banal.

Thanks to Landmarks Illinois, we've gotten some photo's of the original design in its later days, and we put them side to side with the new station, allowing you to make your own judgements.  Just remember to add a little imagination to see it in your mind as it was originally, not as the CTA had allowed it to decay.  And speculate what we might have had if Apple, instead of spending all that money replacing and throwing away the old brick, doors, and windows - repeat after me, the greenest building is the one that already exists - had used it instead to clean, repair and restore the original.  (All older photo's courtesy Landmarks Illinois.)

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According to Landmarks Illinois President James Peters . . .

There was no need to replace the brick or--even worse--the beautiful polished black granite panels that wrapped the base of the building and the eastern curved wall.

These materials were in fine shape, although dirty and in need of tuckpointing. This was purely a "make it look like any other 2010 commercial buff-colored brick box" cosmetic job.

Well before the work began, we tried desperately to redirect the project (and save money), but the die had been cast by the California designers for the project--and CTA was unwilling to cross them. Thus, a very unique Art Moderne (1943) station building gets banalized. And, in this era of "sustainability," a lot of great and beautiful building materials were tossed away, unnecessarily, in the process.

The CTA - and every other city agency - have recently announced that everything's now for sale to fill the gaping holes in all the budgets.  They will be aggressively pursuing naming rights for every city asset they can persuade some advertiser to put up the cash to brand.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing - I've already read someone suggest a UPS-sponsored Brown Line - but it's unlikely we'll find too many mores corporations as generous as Apple was at North & Clybourn.  For renovations to come, we need to balance the need for cash against preserving Chicago's unique character and keeping it from coming just another generic could-be-anywhere shopping mall.

Red Line Station Applized as Apple Mania Descends on North Avenue for opening of Lincoln Park store

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A drear, rainy day didn't stop Macaddicts from turning out in force for the Saturday opening of Apple's new store at North and Halsted.

According to the website infoAppleStore.com, nearly 300 people were standing in line by the time the store opened at 10:00 a.m., with mayoral hopeful Rahm Emanuel earlier working the line, shaking hands and asking, "What are you going to buy today?"

As the rains came, store employees handed out Apple branded umbrellas, which were collected as customers entered the store, in small controlled batches, to the thanks of employees, applause . . .

and even high fives . . .

In essence, the steel-clad store is a 6,500 square-foot rectangular tube for selling. open at both ends with all-glass facades, centered by the iconic Apple logo floating above in benediction.  According to Crain's Chicago Business, the property on which the store stands, formerly home to a gas station, was acquired for $10.5 million by an unnamed Mexican investor, with Apple paying a cool $750,00 for leasing rights, which extend through the next 30 years.

The total size is 18,000 square-feet, including the back-office basement and adjacent, marble paved plaza.  Included is a flush-surfaced shallow fountain that's the very model of Apple minimalism.

infoAppleStore.com has an informative and entertaining account of the preparation and opening here, including links to other accounts and some great photos far more professional than what you see in this post.  (They had better weather: that's my story and I'm sticking to it.) See our previous report on the Lincoln Park Apple store, including a more detailed account of the elements of the design here.

After the break: read about the Apple-funded North & Clybourn station rehab (with pictures) and John Sculley's take on his days at Apple.

Apple North Avenue Store emerges - it's very shiny. (And don't worry; it's taken charge of that ugly duckling next door)

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The dark tent  that had enveloped the new Apple store at North Avenue and Halsted is finally coming off.  The design, by regular Apple architects Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, appears to be a larger retread of an existing store in Scottsdale, Arizona, a rectangular box enclosed in glass at either end.

According to Gary Allen's incredibly exhaustive infoAppleStore.com, initially created in 2003 to support the "Overnighters" camping out before a new store's opening and now grown to nearly 2,000 pages, the 15,000 square foot store has essentially been finished since June, down to interior furniture, but is awaiting the completion of the broad plaza to the building's west and the rehab of the adjoining North and Clybourn Red Line subway station.

The store is clad in stainless steel panels imported from Japan's Kikukawa Kogyo Company.  They are primarily large and vertically placed.  At the building's crest, the last several inches of the gaps between them are left open.

 Much taller panels clad a bustle along the structures west side, and much smaller, square panels serve as coping above the canopied entrances.  Strips of small display windows are placed within the stainless steel sides. The plaza, which runs all along the building from North to Clybourn, is paved in stone slabs with a marbleized look, and are also used to clad the large planters on the plaza.

Two temporary sculptures now punctuate the perfection:

. . . Green squares in polished metal

 . . . and, at each end facade,  logo shroud

The control-freak nature of Steve Jobs and the company he both founded and resurrected can be seen just to the west of the store.  The area around North and Clybourn has undergone its own resurrection in recent years.  Originally an industrial, working class area, it had grown increasingly derelict.  Frederick Ahlschlager's 1887 Yondorf Hall housed a liquor store that was a magnet for local wino's.

Now, the area has gentrified, and grown into one of the city's most successful shopping districts.  In 1998, the Yondorf was acquired as office space by the Stepenwolf Theatre Company.  The exterior has been beautifully restored, and the liquor store is now a jeweler's shop.  All up and down the streets, there's a vibrant mixture of big box retailers like Best Buy and Borders, and popular chains like Crate and Barrel, Banana Republic and Restoration Hardware.  The massive old Seeburg jukebox factory is now, thanks in large part to a $8.5 million TIF payout, a spiffy Grossinger auto mall.  A shiny new Vitamin Shoppe has just opened on one of the corners, the final certificate of authenticity for the district's yuppyfication.

The one major holdout in the revival has been the North and Clybourn Red Line station, originally opened in 1943. As reported in a history on another invaluable website, Graham Garfield's Chicago_L.org, the station was unique in a number of ways.  It was the only one with an above-ground headhouse replacing the standard below-ground mezzanine.  Designed by Shaw, Naess and Murphy, it had a distinctive Art Moderne feel, with curved elevations to the east and west, and the interior was generously lit through tall windows, subdivided into panes in a geometric grid.

As the area declined and the passenger load dropped, the building became increasingly decrepit.  The corner entrance was sealed up and made a commercial space.  While both the Green and Blue lines have recently undergone major rehabs, the Red Line has not. Amidst the pristine festival of consuming all around it, North and Clybourn had become a jarring, discordant reminder of the inevitability of decay.  Hardly a suitable neighbor for Apple's vision of an ever-brighter future.

So last October, Apple entered into an agreement with the CTA.  In exchange for being able to repave the area east of the bus turnaround that is now the new store's plaza, Apple is kicking in nearly $4 million towards the rehab of the station, now serving 4,500 passengers a day.  $2,100,000 is going directly to the CTA to update the interiors. 

Apparently being informed of how things can actually work in Chicago, Apple claimed the rights to rehab the exterior of the station - the part in immediately vicinity to their gleeming new outpost - for themselves, allocating another $1.8 million to the task.  Much of the original character of the station has been stripped away along with the grime.  The original  mottled brick that gave the building a subtle polychromatic accent has been completely replaced with bricks of monochrome buff.  The geometric grid-paned windows have been supplanted with something much more contemporary - and generic, the major feature being top transoms that should aid natural ventilation.   The former curving entrance along the west is now choppily angled.  It's a much brighter, much blander building.

Not surprisingly, the best work appears to be on the east side that actually faces the Apple store.  The same bland windows prevail, in the center bays with entrance doors below, but the generous glass still  provides a feeling of openness, lighting up the interior.  The great, curving canopy has been retained, it's red edge repainted.  Handsome, free-standing stainless steel lettering are a welcome addition,  spelling out the station's name in a curve that follows the canopy's perimeter.

Maybe we would have been better off if Apple had kept control of the interior rehab, as well.  It seems to be going as a snail's pace.  In truth, the project has its challenges.  The head house never married very gracefully to the station below.  Long corridors branching out in confusing ways must be traversed to get to the cramped stairway to the platform, bisected to insert an almost impossibly narrow escalator.  When I was at the site on Saturday, the headhouse was a hollowed out disaster zone, and one stair had been closed off to allow for the original red tile treads to receive replacements of light gray.

The Apple store is expected to open this fall.  How far along,  do you think,  will the CTA have the interior rehab by then?