Commuter trains like this one could someday connect downtown Chicago to rural Midwest towns such as LaSalle, Ill., and Valparaiso, Ind. Photograph provided by State of Illinois.Sometimes, I wish people who live in the rural Midwest communities that surround Chicago would make up their mind as to whether they love or hate the Second City.
I understand that people who live in these small burgs think differently because, for them, a drive to the edge of town reveals the sight of endless miles of cornfield with nothing else in sight. It can be easy for them to think of their locales as the entire world, and to fear what might be on the other side of that cornfield.
That was actually the biggest adjustment I had to make when I moved for seven years to Springfield, Ill. Looking at the endless farm fields that surround the capital city can be intimidating. For Chicagoans, a trip to the edge of a city neighborhood or suburban town merely reveals yet another town. We’re all part of a big picture that I find comforting.
I’ll also admit Chicagoans can be just as isolationist at times, often preferring not to acknowledge that anything exists outside of Chicago. There are those who think of 119th Street as some magical barrier that keeps the rural, unwashed masses out of our fair city – even though parts of Chicago actually go as far south as 138th Street.
But there are times when rural Midwesterners annoy me by wanting to have it both ways.
They want easy access to Chicago and all its economic and cultural perks, realizing that a place like Bloomington, Ill., is a superior place to live than Bloomington, Ind., largely because the Illinois version can feed off the economy of Chicago, whereas the Hoosier version has to settle for a place like Indianapolis (which I think of as comparable to Peoria) as its big-city role model.
Officials in Streator and LaSalle, central Illinois towns located just north of the old maximum-security Pontiac Correctional Center, are using a $250,000 federal grant to put together a study that is trying to convince transit officials that their region is not that far away from Chicago.
Currently, the Metra commuter railroad has two train lines running from downtown to Joliet. Municipal officials in the central Illinois communities would like it if the trains kept traveling south from Joliet and made their towns the end of the line.
Not to disrespect the desires of either Streator or LaSalle (I’ve been to both places, they’re fine insofar as central Illinois towns are concerned), but that seems like a long haul from downtown Chicago.
Trains on the Rock Island commuter line already take 1.5 hours to get from Chicago to Joliet, while trains on the Metra Heritage Corridor aren’t much faster. I also know that driving a car from Joliet west on Interstate 80 to LaSalle or south on Interstate 55 to Streator takes just over an hour.
Also wanting Chicago commuter train service is the area near Lowell and Valparaiso, Ind., which is roughly the far southeastern-most corner of the Chicago area. Commuter trains that for decades have connected downtown to South Bend, Ind., run along the southern tip of Lake Michigan and pass just a few miles north of the area.
Some of those residents want a spur of tracks that would allow them to catch a train in their hometowns and walk off on Michigan Avenue one hour later, instead of having to make up to a half-hour drive to a train station near the Indiana Dunes to catch a Chicago-bound train.
The Indiana Legislature is reviewing bills to boost state sales taxes to raise about one-third of the total cost of the project, which is upsetting to the anti-tax types who don’t want to do anything. There also is vocal opposition from an element of Porter County, Ind., who want to keep a rural isolation from Chicago.
I don’t hate these people for feeling this way. There ought to be limits as to how far out one can be and still think of themselves as being in the Chicago area. I can’t imagine wanting to take a 2.5-hour train ride from LaSalle to Chicago. I’d go stir crazy.
But maybe the late Col. Robert R. McCormick had the right idea with his talk of “Chicagoland.” The Chicago Tribune’s longtime publisher whose isolationist viewpoint dominates the newspaper’s history, saw Chicago as a region where the city proper was the capital of a great Midwestern empire that extended from Detroit to Kansas City and swallowed whole such places as St. Louis, Milwaukee and the aforementioned Indianapolis.
I once heard someone (from St. Louis) try to bad-mouth Chicagoans by saying we were nothing more than “hicks with nicer suits.” I couldn’t get too offended, because there is an element of truth.
Chicagoans are more Midwestern than we’d like to admit. We have more in common with Peoria than with San Francisco, and I don’t know of anyone who’d want to have anything in common with a New Yorker – other than some jamoke from Queens who doesn’t know any better.
That’s why I get upset when I read complaints about rural lawmakers who supported the recent measure to provide an emergency financial boost to the Chicago Transit Authority – thereby keeping buses and elevated trains running.
The Southern Illinoisan, a daily newspaper based in Carbondale, hinted recently that people should vote against any legislator come the Feb. 5 elections who cast a vote for the Chicago measure.
“We had leverage as long as the bailout and capital bills were inseparable, and the Southern Illinois lawmakers who refused to consider one proposal without the other should be thanked for their determination and perhaps remember favorably on Election Day,” the newspaper wrote, in an editorial.
Does this mean Chicagoans should have bought off the support of these lawmakers from Little Egypt by extending a Metra commuter rail line from University Park down to Carbondale? That’s ridiculous.
The problem is that some rural lawmakers do not comprehend just how much larger Chicago is than their communities. Officially, Illinois consists of 13 distinct metropolitan areas. Chicago is one area, and I know of some state lawmakers who seriously want to treat Chicago as merely 1/13th of the state – not as 25 percent of Illinois’ population (45 percent if you count the Cook County suburbs, 65 percent for the entire six-county Chicago area).
The next time I hear a rural official complain about having his local tax dollars sucked up by Chicago, I’m tempted to respond by saying I’m tired of having tax dollars used to maintain the roads and studies of train service connecting rural communities to Chicago.
Either comment is equally silly. Chicago is in a marriage with the Midwest. For better or worse, we’re linked. There’s no divorce coming anytime soon.
Places such as Bloomington and Springfield (I have lived in both towns and have pleasant memories) along with Champaign and South Bend have amenities (several quality universities and Caterpillar tractors) that actually compliment the city of Chicago.
To my mind, they boost the Chicago area’s standing as a superior place to live.
-30-
EDITOR’S NOTES: Officials in LaSalle and Peru, a pair of central Illinois towns near Pontiac, would be ever so enthused if they were to get a commuter train stop on a Metra line to downtown Chicago. http://www.pantagraph.com/articles/2008/01/21/money/doc47955ccc2ea9a457786750.txt
Residents around Valparaiso, Ind., are split on whether they want direct commuter train service to Chicago, as evidenced here (http://www.nwi.com/articles/2008/01/20/opinion/editorial_advisory_board/doc97995f78c5ff53a8862573d300270256.txt) and here (http://www.nwi.com/articles/2008/01/20/opinion/letters_to_the_editor/doc175675b0cbba3a2d862573d40007cb26.txt).
Carbondale’s Southern Illinoisan newspaper is miffed, to say the least, with local legislators who supported the recent Chicago mass transit bill. http://www.southernillinoisan.com/articles/2008/01/20/opinions/voice_of_the_southern/23031828.txt
I understand that people who live in these small burgs think differently because, for them, a drive to the edge of town reveals the sight of endless miles of cornfield with nothing else in sight. It can be easy for them to think of their locales as the entire world, and to fear what might be on the other side of that cornfield.
That was actually the biggest adjustment I had to make when I moved for seven years to Springfield, Ill. Looking at the endless farm fields that surround the capital city can be intimidating. For Chicagoans, a trip to the edge of a city neighborhood or suburban town merely reveals yet another town. We’re all part of a big picture that I find comforting.
I’ll also admit Chicagoans can be just as isolationist at times, often preferring not to acknowledge that anything exists outside of Chicago. There are those who think of 119th Street as some magical barrier that keeps the rural, unwashed masses out of our fair city – even though parts of Chicago actually go as far south as 138th Street.
But there are times when rural Midwesterners annoy me by wanting to have it both ways.
They want easy access to Chicago and all its economic and cultural perks, realizing that a place like Bloomington, Ill., is a superior place to live than Bloomington, Ind., largely because the Illinois version can feed off the economy of Chicago, whereas the Hoosier version has to settle for a place like Indianapolis (which I think of as comparable to Peoria) as its big-city role model.
Officials in Streator and LaSalle, central Illinois towns located just north of the old maximum-security Pontiac Correctional Center, are using a $250,000 federal grant to put together a study that is trying to convince transit officials that their region is not that far away from Chicago.
Currently, the Metra commuter railroad has two train lines running from downtown to Joliet. Municipal officials in the central Illinois communities would like it if the trains kept traveling south from Joliet and made their towns the end of the line.
Not to disrespect the desires of either Streator or LaSalle (I’ve been to both places, they’re fine insofar as central Illinois towns are concerned), but that seems like a long haul from downtown Chicago.
Trains on the Rock Island commuter line already take 1.5 hours to get from Chicago to Joliet, while trains on the Metra Heritage Corridor aren’t much faster. I also know that driving a car from Joliet west on Interstate 80 to LaSalle or south on Interstate 55 to Streator takes just over an hour.
Also wanting Chicago commuter train service is the area near Lowell and Valparaiso, Ind., which is roughly the far southeastern-most corner of the Chicago area. Commuter trains that for decades have connected downtown to South Bend, Ind., run along the southern tip of Lake Michigan and pass just a few miles north of the area.
Some of those residents want a spur of tracks that would allow them to catch a train in their hometowns and walk off on Michigan Avenue one hour later, instead of having to make up to a half-hour drive to a train station near the Indiana Dunes to catch a Chicago-bound train.
The Indiana Legislature is reviewing bills to boost state sales taxes to raise about one-third of the total cost of the project, which is upsetting to the anti-tax types who don’t want to do anything. There also is vocal opposition from an element of Porter County, Ind., who want to keep a rural isolation from Chicago.
I don’t hate these people for feeling this way. There ought to be limits as to how far out one can be and still think of themselves as being in the Chicago area. I can’t imagine wanting to take a 2.5-hour train ride from LaSalle to Chicago. I’d go stir crazy.
But maybe the late Col. Robert R. McCormick had the right idea with his talk of “Chicagoland.” The Chicago Tribune’s longtime publisher whose isolationist viewpoint dominates the newspaper’s history, saw Chicago as a region where the city proper was the capital of a great Midwestern empire that extended from Detroit to Kansas City and swallowed whole such places as St. Louis, Milwaukee and the aforementioned Indianapolis.
I once heard someone (from St. Louis) try to bad-mouth Chicagoans by saying we were nothing more than “hicks with nicer suits.” I couldn’t get too offended, because there is an element of truth.
Chicagoans are more Midwestern than we’d like to admit. We have more in common with Peoria than with San Francisco, and I don’t know of anyone who’d want to have anything in common with a New Yorker – other than some jamoke from Queens who doesn’t know any better.
That’s why I get upset when I read complaints about rural lawmakers who supported the recent measure to provide an emergency financial boost to the Chicago Transit Authority – thereby keeping buses and elevated trains running.
The Southern Illinoisan, a daily newspaper based in Carbondale, hinted recently that people should vote against any legislator come the Feb. 5 elections who cast a vote for the Chicago measure.
“We had leverage as long as the bailout and capital bills were inseparable, and the Southern Illinois lawmakers who refused to consider one proposal without the other should be thanked for their determination and perhaps remember favorably on Election Day,” the newspaper wrote, in an editorial.
Does this mean Chicagoans should have bought off the support of these lawmakers from Little Egypt by extending a Metra commuter rail line from University Park down to Carbondale? That’s ridiculous.
The problem is that some rural lawmakers do not comprehend just how much larger Chicago is than their communities. Officially, Illinois consists of 13 distinct metropolitan areas. Chicago is one area, and I know of some state lawmakers who seriously want to treat Chicago as merely 1/13th of the state – not as 25 percent of Illinois’ population (45 percent if you count the Cook County suburbs, 65 percent for the entire six-county Chicago area).
The next time I hear a rural official complain about having his local tax dollars sucked up by Chicago, I’m tempted to respond by saying I’m tired of having tax dollars used to maintain the roads and studies of train service connecting rural communities to Chicago.
Either comment is equally silly. Chicago is in a marriage with the Midwest. For better or worse, we’re linked. There’s no divorce coming anytime soon.
Places such as Bloomington and Springfield (I have lived in both towns and have pleasant memories) along with Champaign and South Bend have amenities (several quality universities and Caterpillar tractors) that actually compliment the city of Chicago.
To my mind, they boost the Chicago area’s standing as a superior place to live.
-30-
EDITOR’S NOTES: Officials in LaSalle and Peru, a pair of central Illinois towns near Pontiac, would be ever so enthused if they were to get a commuter train stop on a Metra line to downtown Chicago. http://www.pantagraph.com/articles/2008/01/21/money/doc47955ccc2ea9a457786750.txt
Residents around Valparaiso, Ind., are split on whether they want direct commuter train service to Chicago, as evidenced here (http://www.nwi.com/articles/2008/01/20/opinion/editorial_advisory_board/doc97995f78c5ff53a8862573d300270256.txt) and here (http://www.nwi.com/articles/2008/01/20/opinion/letters_to_the_editor/doc175675b0cbba3a2d862573d40007cb26.txt).
Carbondale’s Southern Illinoisan newspaper is miffed, to say the least, with local legislators who supported the recent Chicago mass transit bill. http://www.southernillinoisan.com/articles/2008/01/20/opinions/voice_of_the_southern/23031828.txt
Chicago's commuter train setup already connects Chicagoans to places ranging from Kenosha, Wis., South Bend, Ind. and Manhattan (the one in Illinois, not New York). Illustration provided by Metra.
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