Next stop, Bessie Coleman?
One woman’s efforts to rename ‘L’ stops after Chicago women
It was cold and it was windy standing on the Addison Street “L” platform with Tribune photographer Jason Wambsgans and a delightful woman named Janet Volk, who was explaining why she thinks it might be a good idea to rename every one of the 141 stops spread along the Red, Blue, Green, Brown, Orange, Yellow, Purple and Pink lines.
“This one would be in honor of a woman named Ann Hartnett,” Volk said.
Never heard of her? It’s likely you’ve never heard of Thomas Addison either. He was an English physician and scientist who was born around 1793 and died in 1860, never having left his native country save for Scotland, but giving his name to a street here and to Addison’s disease, the malady that occurs when the body doesn’t produce enough of certain hormones.
Most of the current “L” stops carry equally obscure or prosaic names and have ever since the transit system was born in June 1892, as a 3 ½-mile stretch of track that ran between Congress Boulevard and 39th Street in the alley between State Street and Wabash Avenue. More tracks and lines were added, and by 1897 these many tracks joined in a circle around the downtown business district, in the Loop. It was this section specifically that inspired Nelson Algren to refer to “the dark girders of the El” as “the city’s rusty heart.”
So, might the Addison “L” stop one day also carry the name of Ann Hartnett?
Here, let Volk explain: “Philip Wrigley, who inherited the Wrigley
chewing gum empire and the Chicago Cubs from his father, faced a potential disaster in 1942. As young men were being drafted into the armed forces, Major League Baseball was shutting down. Wrigley asked his advisers to come up with an idea to keep fans in the stands. The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) was born. The first player signed to the new league was Chicago born-and-bred Ann Harnett (1920-2006) who played third base and the outfield along with being a catcher. After playing 5 seasons, Harnett retired from professional sports and became a nun.”
Volk has created a Women’s L Project website filled with such fascinating short biographies.
Here’s another, about Jackie Taylor, who would be honored at the Montrose stop on the Brown Line because it is four blocks from Taylor’s Black Ensemble Theater Cultural Center.
As Volk writes, “Jackie Taylor (born 1951) grew up in the Cabrini-Green housing project on Chicago’s Near North Side. She got involved in drama via a Chicago Park District drama teacher. Those drama classes turned out to be life changing for Taylor. After graduating from Loyola University, she acted with The Free Street Theater before going to Hollywood. She landed a big role in the movie Cooley High but grew disenchanted with Hollywood’s exploitation of Black people. Taylor returned to Chicago and started the Black Ensemble Theater, a theater company whose mission is to eradicate racism. In addition to being the BET Founder, Taylor is a playwright, director, producer, educator and singer. She continues to act as well.”
I won’t give you others because it’s an enlightening and pleasant joy to discover on your own what Volk calls “Chicago women who accomplished transformational work in the fields of justice, social work, business, education, medicine, the arts, literature, politics and science.”
You, as do I, might quibble with
some of the selections, some dead and some alive, but it’s impossible not to admire the detailed research that Volk has done and the thoughtful way she is using it.
“It has been an amazing learning experience for me,” she said.
Volk was not raised in the city but rather in the pleasant southwest suburb of Palos Heights. She talks fondly of traveling as a youngster with her mother by train and “L” and bus to visit her grandmother in the Uptown neighborhood. She would as an adult move to and live in other cities and suburbs and various city neighborhoods, as she raised two now adult children.
Much of her career was spent in the health care industry and later as a Lutheran pastor and minister. She retired in 2018 and began devoting her time to the satisfying volunteer duties as a docent for the Chicago Architectural Foundation and learning the peculiarities and pleasures of pickleball.
“Then the pandemic happened,” she says.
That was when she noticed a newspaper article about the updating of New York City’s “City of Women” map, originally created by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro in 2016,
on which every station in that city’s vast subway system was named after a notable woman with a New York connection. It’s available from Chicago’s Haymarket Books. As Solnit has written, “How does it impact our imaginations that so many places in so many cities are named after men and so few after women?”
“I could do this for Chicago,” Volk thought to herself.
And she began digging. In time she collaborated with graphic designer Jessika Savage to create a colorful and conversation-starting map that is available for sale with, Volk says, a percentage of the proceeds going to “Chicago nonprofit organizations assisting women and girls as they move forward on their life journeys.”
Volk is not a naive person and understands how this city works. She knows the cost of changing all the “L” stop names would be cost-prohibitive and would surely cause loud controversy. Indeed, writers through the decades have had a hard time even naming the system, as writer Edward McClelland detailed in a 2019 story for a Chicago magazine story headlined “Once and for All: Is It the El, el, L, or ‘;L’?”
But perhaps a few of the stops could honor women in some
fashion. In the meantime, we have Volk and her website and her map. Her creation reminds me that the “L” is a Chicago wonder and if riding it during these pandemic days and nights make for an uneasy trip, it still is a treasure.
“Don’t make eye contact,” an “L” riding friend has advised me, reaffirming that we all tend to view public transportation as a necessary hassle of urban life and work. But think of all that you’ve encounter on a ride, all that can be strange, funny, disturbing, silly, jarring, sad or joyful?
As I once wrote, “In a city increasingly divided by social, racial and economic forces, the ‘L’ is among the last places where we can be reminded on a visceral and visual level of the diversity of this area and its residents.” There is rust and there is complaint, even some fear. “But there is also, if you look closely enough, life,” I long ago noted, “On the ‘L’ we can be swept up in that pleasant illusion that we are all neighbors. The ‘L’ is real. Gritty, yes, but glorious.”
I took the “L” back south and Volk, who lives nearby, walked home in the bright chilly sunshine.