Day 191: From a Transfer to a Terminal: the tale of the Forest Park stop.

     In 1905, the Metropolitan West Side Elevated constructed a new station at Des Plaines Avenue. The station served as a link to the service provided by the Aurora, Elgin, & Chicago railroad.  The service had become quite cumbersome to operate, so the railroad was glad to be rid of the burden. Some time around the early twenties(at around the same time when service was extended all the way out to Westchester), there was a small station house built at Des Plaines. Soon afterwards, the CTA started to make preparations for its biggest ever change to west side service, the installation of the Congress Line(which was to also include a stop at Halsted). While the Eisenhower Expressway was being put in, the elevated lines to the west of the city had to be torn down to make space. To get around this issue, the CTA came up with the idea of laying track in the median of the Expressway. This project took several years, and the new station officially opened on June 22, 1958.

     At this point, there were still hopes that the interurban railroad would resume its connection into Des Plaines, and so the CTA laid a single track that the railroad could have used to connect into the Terminal. Ultimately, that never happened, and the connection was severed a few years later. In 1977, it was finally decided to build a more permanent station for the terminal, and so the current station was closed, a temporary one was erected, and work commenced on the new permanent facility. This station was designed by Louis Rocah, who was in charge of the Bureau of Architecture, an organization which is now defunct. Contemporary reports called the station's 'floating' roof an homage to the design of McCormick Place(home of the Chicago Auto Show), done by Helmut Jahn(who would design the Thompson Center more than 10 years later). The new station was finished in June of 1980, at which point a team of 300 CTA workers managed to make the conversion between stations over the course of one hectic weekend.

     For the next two years, finishing touches were made on the station, and it was finally 100% operational upon the installation of its elevator in December of 1982. Upon completion, the station housed a platform, concessions, full transfer capabilities between rail and CTA/Pace buses, as well as a parking lot with 1,000 spaces. In 1994 the CTA renamed all of it's line with colors. The West-Northwest route became known as the Blue Line, and the Des Plaines station became known as Forest Park, after the town it is located in.