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| Office building entrance near State and Randolph |
My ignorance of the Chicago Pedway was inexcusable but real. Despite being born in the city, living most of my young life nearby, and continuing to make several trips per year from nearby Iowa, I had never been in the Pedway until last week. I found out about the Pedway from my son Eli, who joins me in my love for the Windy City, and who found out about them from a video made by University of Illinois-Chicago architecture professor Stewart Hicks:
"The Bewildering Architecture of Indoor Cities" (13:11; discussion of the Pedway begins about 3:15 in)
So, on a bitterly cold December day, Eli and I sought out the Pedway. In the course of the morning, we covered maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of its five miles. The Chicago Pedway is neither as well-marked nor as well-equipped as the Minneapolis Skyway, though it has more commercial spaces than Cedar Rapids' Skywalks.
The first trick is finding your way in. Entry points aren't well-marked at all. Even when you locate an access point, that's no guarantee of access; the Pedway is not maintained by the city, but by individual property owners, which means availability is not easy to predict.
Armed with maps downloaded from the Internet, we eventually found a few entrances...
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| La Salle Street: employees only |
, only to find our way blocked.
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| Lake Street: another no go |
This skywalk across Clark Street is an unusual part of the Pedway, most of which is underground.
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| Clark Street: another no go |
Alas, it too was closed.
Eventually, we found a way in through the basement of Macys department store, formerly Marshall Field's, at 111 North State Street. In this part of the Pedway, there are wayfinding maps...
...and signs:
...and art!
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| stained glass exhibit near the Macys access |
Barbara's Bookstore is in the basement of the Macys building.
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| Barbara's is a Chicago-based bookseller with mutliple locations |
Once through a rudimentary passage across Randolph Street...
...the action really begins. There are quite a few fast-food restaurants in a fancier section across Michigan Avenue.
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| Pedway getting bougey |
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| fast food collection near train station |
(Note that the space on the left is for rent.)
There was even an Amazon Go store, which surprised me. I didn't realize they were atill around, much less underground!
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| 130 East Randolph Street |
The restrooms were a little scary, but sometimes in a storm any port will do.
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| restrooms, Chicago Pedway |
The Pedway also connects to two train lines, the Metra Electric which serves the south side of Chicago, and the South Shore Line which serves commuter stops between Chicago and South Bend, Indiana. Both the waiting areas...
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| festive waiting area |
...and the tracks themselves...
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| South Shore Line |
...were very seasonally festive. Kind of a Polar Express vibe, which I don't get at the larger stations at the west end of downtown.
If you come in on a train that stops at Millennium Station, finding the Pedway is easy. It's also easy to find from some parking garages as well as Lower Randoph Street, where there are more entrances/exits.
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| Lower Randolph Street near Michigan Avenue |
Urbanists like Jeff Speck criticize skyways, and by extension pedways, for taking foot traffic off the streets. While that's a fair criticism in Minneapolis, I didn't observe that here. At least around Randolph and Michigan, there were many more people at the surface level than in the Pedway.
Overall, the Pedway was a novelty but a bit chaotic for the first-time visitor. Along the way, I spotted a Dollop Coffee, but when I tried to return I could not find it. Here maps apps are no help, because the addresses don't distinguish between surface and underground levels. One Dollop Coffee location (150 North Michigan Avenue) led us to a very corporate building, with security guards who looked like they wanted me to buy coffee there only so they could shove it up my... I settled for a surface level Stan's Donuts at 181 North Michigan, which was very satisfactory.
We couldn't find how to get beyond where we ended. Referring to the map above, we could get to #25 but not to #37 or #50. After surfacing, we made a couple halfhearted attempts to rejoin the Pedway north of Millennium Park, but eventually saved that for another visit. I'd call it a fun prowl, worth doing if you know Chicago well, but hard to navigate and dubiously functional.
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