Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/18th Street "L" station, Chicago, 1904

18th Street "L" station, Chicago, 1904

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Original – The station house for the 18th Street station on the Chicago "L" in 1904; it was demolished three years later and few pictures are known to survive of these structures.

Reason

Chicago first received rapid transit when the South Side Elevated Railroad opened on June 6, 1892. Ten stations opened that day, eight of which looked like this 1904 image of the station on 18th Street. The railroad subsequently expanded southward, but the station houses on the extension looked quite different from those on the original portion as depicted here.

Unfortunately, the city didn't like these street-level station houses that blocked under-track alley access. When the railroad wished to construct a third center track for express operations in 1907, they were only allowed to do so in exchange for demolishing these station houses and replacing them with mezzanines. Therefore, despite the historic significance of these station houses, pictures of them are rare; none were known to exist in 1995, and even today I know of only two other pictures of these houses, neither of which are of as good quality composition-wise as this.

While the rarity of these images should dovetail nicely with this particular image's EV, I am aware that it is rather small. It was originally even smaller, although it was the largest size available on the internet. I actually enlarged it and quadrupled its size (doubling each dimension) in the course of my restoration, but I fear that anything further will start stretching out any artifacts or other blurriness. I've e-mailed the Library of Congress for help in obtaining access any other possible copy of this negative that would yield a larger size if need be.

Articles in which this image appears

18th station (CTA South Side Elevated), List of former Chicago "L" stations

FP category for this image

USA History

Creator

A Chicago Daily News photographer, uploaded by Lost on Belmont, and restored and enlarged by myself.

• Support as nominator – John M Wolfson (talk • contribs) 22:45, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
  • Comment as of the time of this comment, the unrestored, uncropped version pops up whenever you click the image, but the thumbnail is the correct cropped version and appears on Commons. – John M Wolfson (talk • contribs) 23:41, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose Way too small per FPC criteria, visibly upsampled, too... PS: To see the "correct" file, purge your browser's cache. Janke | Talk 19:38, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
  • Little lesson in the LoC: Anything taken from the "American Memory" section of the site exists elsewhere, usually at much higher resolution. As such, the source for this indicates we likely can do better. Adam Cuerden ^(talk)_{Has about 8.2% of all FPs. Currently celebrating his 600^th FP!} 03:10, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

Not Promoted --Armbrust ^{The Homunculus} 23:31, 8 March 2023 (UTC)