To the editors:
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The station was decrepit but it worked. It just had too few passengers. Closing it saved a ticket agent’s salary, speeded up the schedule and helped solve the problem of delayed trains. And at the same time was only a little less convenient for bus transfer passengers. Why, once in a blue moon those pencil-pusher fossils in the Merchandise Mart do come up with a sensible idea! (If you can insult ’em there’s hope!)
Yet I do miss it, there contemplating what a horseshit town Chicago has become since Dreiser and Sandburg knew it. In 1988 that wide-wide platform at Indiana has to be a mystery to those to whom the 19th century is only a rumor. Back in the days when none but the rich drove cars, Indiana Avenue teemed with life: one of the busiest stations on the system! At Indiana Avenue was the exchange point between the North-South and the Kenwood-Stockyards lines. I remember! Had it not been for those wide platforms, people would have been crowded off and under the wheels of trains!
The CTA ought to open up the Indiana Avenue station again . . . and build a historical museum around it! Here hitting the bent spring on the deck how high we have to know we will bounce up!
