Quote:
Originally Posted by Randomguy34
Just sayin, the Lake St branch is not the best representation of elevated trains over the street. Having been all over the east coast for school, the Lake St branch is a real outlier when it comes to elevated trains. The only reason why Lake st looks like crap is because the street was never zoned for businesses, and instead has always been zoned for manufacturing. If that wasn't the case dense housing would have been built along much of he street, just like in Boston, Philadelphia, as well as Brooklyn and The Bronx, all areas that have active businesses underneath their elevated lines
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Actually this isn't true. The industrial corridor along Lake took the place of a residential neighborhood. Lake Street was actually the city's original Main Street, and had lots of small scale development even when the surrounding areas were still undeveloped.
It was only after the L was built (around 1890) that property values started to drop, residents moved elsewhere and the old residential buildings were gradually bought up and replaced with low-slung warehouses. When the zoning ordinance was first created in the 50s, this process was already well underway and the ordinance only put this into law. Planners at that time assumed either the elevated line would get torn down, or that riders would transfer from buses, so they saw no need to concentrate housing around the stations.