Edgewater Red Line Corridors Revitalization Study 2008

Chicago’s Edgewater community historically benefited from its convenient access to the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) Red Line. The CTA’s four Edgewater stations (Granville, Thorndale, Bryn Mawr, and Berwyn) provide a high level of access shared by few other Chicago communities outside of downtown. Unfortunately, in recent years this symbiotic relationship between neighborhood and transit has begun to deteriorate. In 2007, the CTA had not comprehensively renovated any of the Edgewater stations in over 25 years, and two of the stations had not been renovated since their construction in the 1920s. The stations’ shabby conditions negatively impacted ridership, despite the density and transit dependence of surrounding neighborhoods.

In 2007, the Edgewater Development Corporation asked the UIC City Design Center and Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement to conduct a series of neighborhood workshops, focusing on each of the four CTA Red Line stations in the Edgewater neighborhood. Participants were asked to play a game in which neighborhood improvements each had a price, and where there was only so much money to go around. The sum of citizen-selected improvements were recorded and published in a report that was shared with the CTA and with the Edgewater Development Corporation for its advocacy efforts. Overall, the Reviving the Red Line project helped to set the stage for a renewal of the link between reliable transit and neighborhood vitality in Edgewater, and prepared the CTA, to commit to ambitious renovations of the Red Line system.