More than five years after it was announced, a new CTA Green Line station near the United Center is under construction.
The station at Damen Avenue is set to be complete in the first quarter of 2024, according to the Chicago Department of Transportation. It will fill a 1.5-mile gap between existing stations on the west branch of the Green Line and is intended to improve public transit for nearby residents, companies in the Kinzie Industrial Corridor, and visitors trying to reach the United Center to attend Blackhawks games, Bulls games and concerts.
The station and related work on Lake Street under the tracks are expected to cost about $80 million, and will be funded by the Kinzie Industrial Corridor Tax Increment Financing District, according to the city.
An “L” station existed at Damen and Lake for decades, until it was closed in 1948. Damen was one of 10 stations on the Lake Street line closed at that time in an effort to speed up service, according to Tribune archives.
Advocates have long pushed to reopen a station at Damen, including the business incubator Industrial Council of Nearwest Chicago. Executive Director Steve DeBretto said the return of the Damen station is a matter of equity.
“It’s great to have many transit options for people who live here, work here or who just want to come here to shop,” he said.
The Kinzie Industrial Corridor, a planned manufacturing district where the organization is located, includes firms with workforces that come from surrounding neighborhoods and companies, like breweries, that draw visitors to the area. Key for those businesses are transit options to get to the site and to better connect the district with the center of the city, he said.
The new station, designed by Perkins&Will, was initially expected to open in 2020. The completion date was then pushed back a year because city officials said they had to wait for the station design to be finished before awarding a construction contract. It was pushed back again because of the advance work needed to relocate utilities and reinforce column foundations, along with supply chain challenges and delays in getting materials, CDOT spokeswoman Erica Schroeder said.
Advance work has been underway since 2019, when the city began a project to reconstruct a stretch of Lake Street from Ashland to Damen and relocate structural columns to allow the new station to be built.
The initial price tag shifted between $50 million and $60 million in earlier official statements. Schroeder said the $80 million figure includes the nearby site work, and a construction contract for the station project came in at $67.3 million.
In the past decade, CTA has built other new stations intended to close gaps between existing ones. Morgan, which serves the Green and Pink lines east of the new Damen station, opened in 2012, and Cermak-McCormick Place on the south branch of the Green Line opened in 2015.
sfreishtat@chicagotribune.com
