The ghost stations of the Chicago L
A never-opened superstation, an abandoned branch, and the Loop stops closed within the last decade.
Chicago has been building and tearing down rapid transit for over 130 years, and not every piece of it survived. A whole branch was abandoned mid-century, two Loop stations closed within the last decade to make way for a replacement, and one downtown station was built and never opened at all. Here is what is actually gone, closed, or never finished on the L, with what remains of each.
Everything still running is playable in DailyMetro's Chicago edition, and the station explorer covers every stop currently in service.
The station that was never allowed to open: Block 37
Underneath the Block 37 development on State Street sits a complete, unused station shell, built to let riders transfer directly between the Red and Blue lines without going back to street level. Construction started in 2005 with a $213 million budget aimed at an express airport service; by mid-2008 costs had already reached $320 million, and the CTA cancelled the project outright, having spent roughly $400 million on the shell itself and a further $40 million just to mothball it. It has never carried a passenger. The only thing that ever opened from the project is a free pedestrian pedway, added in November 2009, connecting the Lake and Washington stations through the Block 37 basement.
The branch that vanished in 1952: the Humboldt Park branch
A 2.09-mile elevated branch once split off the Logan Square route near Damen and ran through West Town and Humboldt Park as a shuttle to Lawndale Avenue, serving six stations along North Avenue. It opened July 29, 1895 and closed May 4, 1952. The CTA's wooden rail cars, the only ones the branch could still run by then, were barred from the new Milwaukee-Dearborn Subway on safety grounds, which cut the branch off from downtown service entirely and killed its ridership. Most of the structure came down in 1953; a short storage stub lingered into the late 1960s, and a few remnants near North Avenue survived until Blue line renovation work removed them in 1996. Almost nothing is visible today.
The branch replaced wholesale in 1958: the original Garfield Park elevated
Before there was an Orange, the original Garfield Park branch ran on its own elevated structure through the West Side, past stations that no longer exist under those names, including Sacramento, Kedzie, Crawford, Central and several more toward Oak Park and Berwyn. When Interstate 290, the Eisenhower Expressway, was built, the elevated line in its path was torn down, and 1958 saw the whole branch replaced by a new line running in the expressway's median, the direct predecessor of today's Forest Park branch of the Blue line. Some of the old branch's station names survive on the current line; the original structures and stops they named do not.
The station that moved two blocks and stayed closed for seven years: Homan
Homan, on the Green line, opened in March 1894 and closed on January 9, 1994, when the entire Green line shut down for a two-year systemwide renovation. It simply did not reopen with the rest of the line on May 12, 1996. Instead, the CTA worked with Illinois preservation officials to relocate the historic station house itself roughly two blocks west, to better space out stops near the Garfield Park Conservatory. The moved building reopened on June 30, 2001, as Conservatory-Central Park Drive, still an active Green line stop today, meaning the physical station survived even though the one it used to be does not exist anymore.
The two Loop stations replaced by one, in living memory
Madison/Wabash and Randolph/Wabash both opened on November 8, 1896, on the original Loop Elevated, and stood close enough together that the CTA had floated merging them as far back as 1981. Madison/Wabash closed for good on March 16, 2015, when construction started on a replacement; Randolph/Wabash held on until September 3, 2017. Washington/Wabash, the $75 million, fully accessible station that replaced both, opened August 31, 2017. Two stations that had run for well over a century became one in the space of about two and a half years.
What is closed, what replaced it, and when
| Station or line | Opened | Closed | Fate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Block 37 superstation | started 2005 | never opened | abandoned shell; pedway open since 2009 |
| Humboldt Park branch (6 stops) | 1895 | 1952 | demolished 1953, no downtown subway access |
| Original Garfield Park elevated | 1890s | 1958 | replaced by Blue line's Forest Park branch |
| Homan | 1894 | 1994 | building relocated, reopened 2001 as Conservatory-Central Park Drive |
| Madison/Wabash | 1896 | 2015 | replaced by Washington/Wabash (2017) |
| Randolph/Wabash | 1896 | 2017 | replaced by Washington/Wabash (2017) |
FAQ
Can you visit the Block 37 superstation?
Not the station itself. A free pedestrian pedway built from the same project connects the Lake and Washington stations at street level, but the unused platform shell below is not open to the public.
Are there abandoned CTA stations you can still see?
Little remains standing. The Humboldt Park branch was demolished by the late 1950s, and traces of the original Garfield Park elevated disappeared when the Eisenhower Expressway was built in 1958.
Why did Madison/Wabash and Randolph/Wabash close?
Both were replaced by a single new station, Washington/Wabash, which opened in 2017 with full ADA accessibility that neither of the older stations had.
Is Conservatory-Central Park Drive the same as the old Homan station?
Its station house is: the historic building from Homan, closed in 1994, was moved about two blocks and reopened in 2001 under the new name.
Why was the Block 37 superstation never finished?
Costs ran far past the original budget, from an estimated $213 million to over $320 million by 2008, and the CTA also lacked the roughly $1.5 billion it would have needed to run the express airport service the station was meant to support.