For nearly 20 years, the CTA has rolled out the carpet for Brown Line commuters utilizing the Francisco cease in Ravenswood.
However the magic carpet’s journey is coming to an finish.
The company is eradicating the favored Commuter Carpet, a colourful 60-foot lengthy glass-and-marble public artwork set up designed to resemble an Oriental rug.
CTA customers have been strolling throughout — and looking out down at — the art work since 2007.
However getting walked-on all these years, plus almost twenty years of Chicago winters, has prompted the mosaic tiles to return up in clumps and has required CTA staff to begin eradicating the work fully.
“The tiles loosen up and the grout work breaks up over time,” CTA spokesperson Catherine Hosinski stated. “We’ve had repairs accomplished to it, but it surely simply continued to worsen and it acquired to the purpose the place we had a number of consultants come out they usually merely indicated that it’s past restore.”
So is the CTA pulling the rug out from below certainly one of its cleverest examples of public artwork?
Not fairly. The company, consultants and Commuter Carpet’s creator, Brooklyn, New York-based artist Ellen Harvey, are working to determine a brand new life for the mosaic.
“That is actually a beloved art work, and we didn’t wish to utterly find yourself having to take away it after which not have any of it on the station,” CTA Public Artwork Undertaking Marketing consultant Elizabeth Karpowicz stated.
Public transit, public artwork
The CTA has about 150 items of artwork — some everlasting, some short-term — on show in its stations and properties.
And far of it’s actually good, corresponding to Carlos “Dzine” Rolon’s hanging Time is the Enemy, a kinetic-looking work fabricated from Venetian glass, stone and marble that has enlivened the Brown Line’s Sedgwick station in Outdated City since 2009.
There’s additionally the glass mosaic Promise (for tomorrow from the previous seeking to the long run) by Folayemi “Fo” Wilson and blkHaUS Studios adorning the Inexperienced Line’s Damen station that opened in 2024. The work honors the ethnic and racial teams who’ve known as the West Facet residence.
Good public artwork can take a little bit of the sting off the commute. When accomplished properly, it additionally contributes to the design of an L station and even an in any other case mundane-looking bus turnaround, as is the case with Shinique Smith’s Sunburst, a vigorous work of paint and aluminum that’s on the Madison Avenue bus’s finish of the road at Austin Boulevard.
Commuter Carpet was created for the Francisco station’s entrance ramp, as a part of the $530 million Brown Line enlargement challenge.
The work was a little bit of an experiment. The CTA had by no means positioned a mosaic art work within the floor earlier than, and the company put in an underground heating mechanism to maintain the work comparatively snow-free.
However why does it resemble a future of carpet?
“[Harvey’s] idea that in Ravenswood is a residential space for essentially the most half, [with] older houses — most likely hardwood flooring and flooring and rugs,” Karpowicz stated. “So the one on the station is an extension [of what is] in individuals’s houses.”
Making the most effective of a tough state of affairs
Karpowicz stated the CTA and mosaic consultants will use salvaged sections of Commuter Carpet to create new wall shows contained in the Francisco station home.
The art work needs to be up within the first half of 2026, in response to the CTA.
“I used to be fantastic with no matter they needed to do, however would clearly like to avoid wasting as a lot as attainable,” Harvey stated. “It was clear that the mosaic couldn’t safely proceed because it was.”
Harvey shall be part of creating the brand new work.
“I wish to help [the CTA] as I understand how laborious it’s to fee public artwork nowadays,” she stated. “And I do know they’re doing the most effective they’ll with a tough state of affairs.”
