The 10 weirdest stations on the Chicago L

Most L stations are exactly what they look like: a platform, a canopy, a turnstile bank. A handful are not. One sits inside a building's second floor. One went 48 years without a single neighbour. One was supposed to connect to a library and never did. These are ten stops on the network that are genuinely odd, for reasons you can check.

All of them are playable in DailyMetro's Chicago edition, and you can look up any of them, with their lines and neighborhoods, in the station explorer.

1. Merchandise Mart: the station is inside the building

Most stations have their fare gates at street level or on an open platform. Merchandise Mart's turnstiles and customer booth sit on the second floor of the Merchandise Mart building itself, on the Brown and Purple lines, reached from inside rather than from the sidewalk. Its side platforms are also long enough for eight-car trains, the maximum on the CTA, which most other Brown line stations cannot fit. Until 1963, interurban trains of the North Shore Line ran through it on their way to Milwaukee, so this ordinary-looking L stop used to be an international-adjacent rail terminal in all but name.

2. Dempster-Skokie: the station that had no neighbours for 48 years

The Yellow line's Dempster-Skokie stop is one end of a shuttle nicknamed the Skokie Swift, relaunched in 1964 as a federally funded speed demonstration. From that year until April 2012, the entire line consisted of this station and Howard, with nothing built in between: no stops, no crossings you could get off at, just a fast nonstop run. Oakton-Skokie, which finally split the gap in 2012, was the first new CTA station built since 2001.

3. Clark/Lake: six lines, one platform level

Clark/Lake is the only station on the network served by six different colour lines: Blue, Brown, Green, Orange, Pink and Purple. It works as the Loop's main transfer point specifically because the elevated and subway routes were built decades apart by different companies and happened to cross here, not because anyone designed a six-line hub on purpose.

4. Harold Washington Library-State/Van Buren: a connection that was never built

This stop on the Brown, Orange, Pink and Purple lines reopened on June 22, 1997, rebuilt specifically to serve the newly opened Harold Washington Library across the street. The plan included a direct passage into the second floor of the library. It was never built. Riders still walk out to street level and cross like everyone else, next to a station whose whole reason for existing was supposed to make that unnecessary.

5. King Drive: the quietest stop on the map

In DailyMetro's station data, King Drive, on the Green line in Woodlawn, records the lowest annual ridership of any of the 144 stations in the game, a small fraction of what nearby Loop stations carry. It has been open since 1892, which makes it one of the system's oldest stops and one of its emptiest at the same time.

6. Illinois Medical District: named after a district, not a street

Almost every L station takes its name from the street or intersection it sits on. Illinois Medical District, on the Blue line, is named after the institutional zone around it instead, a naming pattern the network almost never uses anywhere else on its map.

7. Conservatory-Central Park Drive: a station rebuilt from a station that closed

This Green line stop, open since 2001, is not where it looks like it should be historically. Its station house is the relocated, restored building from Homan, a stop that opened in 1894 and closed in 1994, moved roughly two blocks west to give the line better spacing near the Garfield Park Conservatory. The Green line ran for seven years with a gap here before the moved building reopened.

8. Linden: the terminus that looks like a house

Every other L terminus (O'Hare, Forest Park, 95th/Dan Ryan, Howard) sits in a dense, obviously urban setting. Linden, the north end of the Purple line since 1912, sits in a quiet residential corner of Wilmette, well outside the city limits, with none of the scale of the network's other endpoints.

9. Cumberland: a park-and-ride built over an expressway interchange

Cumberland, opened in 1983 on the Blue line in Norwood Park, sits directly alongside the Kennedy Expressway's interchange with the Tri-State Tollway, built specifically to catch drivers before they hit that junction. It is one of the few L stations whose site was chosen around a highway ramp rather than a street grid.

10. O'Hare: the busiest stop is also the deepest into a different kind of building

O'Hare, the Blue line's northwest terminus since 1984, is an underground station built into an airport rather than a neighborhood. In DailyMetro's station data it is also the highest-ridership stop in the whole system, ahead of every downtown Loop station, which says something about how many people start or end an L trip at a terminal rather than at home.