The Chicago L's Original Loop: How a Train Route Defined Downtown

The elevated track that encircles Chicago's downtown — part of the system universally known as "the L" — cemented the name "the Loop" for the entire central business district after 1897, when the Union Loop opened. The name may be older, possibly borrowed from cable-car turnaround loops of the 1880s, but the elevated tracks made it stick. The Union Loop was assembled by Charles Tyson Yerkes, a Philadelphia financier who had served prison time for embezzlement in Philadelphia and reinvented himself as Chicago's transit czar. Yerkes built a new loop of elevated track downtown that the separate elevated lines — each approaching from a different direction — fed into, allowing trains from any line to circulate through downtown without reversing. The loop-shaped track itself became the definition of "downtown": everything inside the L was the Loop; everything outside was a neighborhood. The original steel structure — which rattles over Wabash Avenue so loudly that diners at first-floor restaurants feel it in their silverware — was built in the 1890s and has never been entirely replaced. Trains still circle downtown on roughly the same route Yerkes built.