“Make sure you mention the sheet-metal workers–the backbone of the CTA!” hollers a man in the stairwell. The man, by no coincidence, is in fact a sheet-metal worker, and the stairwell he occupies provides access to the southbound platform of the Belmont station of the Howard el. In the small area beneath the platform, between the ticket booth and the stairs, a group of four CTA workers stir paint and unload supplies from several oversized storage boxes. The men are bundled up for a cold day, and as they work they laugh and twit Bill Foster, who’s in charge of the repainting and rehabbing of the station. What do the sheet-metal workers do? Foster is asked. “Ahh,” he grins, “they go in and try to fix things and then we paint it over to make it look good.”
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Foster is youngish and bespectacled; he’s been with the CTA seven years. He heads a team of about a dozen men who are part of the authority’s extensive sprucing-up program. “They wanted something that would really make the stations look nice,” Foster says, “so that people will say, ‘Hey, we really like our station.’” The official name for Foster’s part of the project is Operation CLASS, which stands for “Clean, Lighted and Safe Stations.” For a dozen stations on the north-south line, Operation CLASS includes painting, replacing some platforms and canopies, installing new lighting and windbreaks, and generally increasing maintenance all the way around. (The only thing missing from the plans are more benches.) The 12 stations, however, are just a part of a “21-point improvement program” called “Going Your Way,” meant to provide high-profile and noticeable improvements in the day-to-day use of Chicago’s 650-million-dollar-a-year transit system. Other parts of the program range from repainting the entire bus fleet to building 37 new bus shelters to cleaning and disinfecting the State and Dearborn subway tunnels. (A lot of this has been under way for the past six months.)
At the end of the platform sits a short safety fence: it has been splashed with bright yellow. The stairwells get the pink treatment, the steps the burgundy; the station’s “lookout hut” is a vision in peach, with pink windows. The whole affair looks as if it was designed by Willy Wonka the day he tried peyote for the first time.
Ironically enough, the glowing peach wasn’t even in the original conception. “The inside of these canopies were supposed to be white,” Foster says, “but the original supplier didn’t deliver. We were running around like crazy trying to find some white paint. And of course, the way CTA is, you gotta send out for bids on something like that. We’ve been without white paint for two and a half months.”
