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CTA Celebrates 75 Years of Subway Service
The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) invites riders to help them celebrate the 75th anniversary of the opening of its first underground line, the State Street Subway, by visiting displays of archival images in the nine stations on the 4.9-mile line.
The subway line, now part of CTA’s Red Line, opened to the public on Oct. 17, 1943. The stations were designed in the Art Moderne (or “Streamline Moderne”) architectural style, which evolved in the 1930s from the Art Deco style with simplified shapes, long horizontal attributes and curving forms. It is believed to have been the first subway stations in the world to use fluorescent lighting; other up-to-date features included ventilation, signals, drainage, illumination and escalators.
Federal funding through President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs made the project possible, along with some local funding. The city broke ground for the subway project in 1938. The line entered service using 4000-series cars (two of which remain in CTA’s Heritage Fleet), which had steel bodies instead of older cars with wood bodies, for added safety.
Decades later, in 1993, CTA opened a new subway connection to the Dan Ryan Line in anticipation of the opening of the Orange Line to Midway.
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| An archival photo from opening day of CTA’s State Street Subway, Oct. 17, 1943. |
A 1939 photo of subway construction workers. |
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