CTA Tattler

It's either out the door or out the window

This great Tattler Tale comes from our Rexblade.

Last night during my commut home on the southbound red line, the car I was riding in was visited by one of the 'regular' hobos. He stumbled in through the emergency doors and uses his terrible smell as an ice breaker to start telling dirty jokes to a bunch of teenagers who were trying to ignore him. Two of the teens stand up and move toward the doors in a futile attempt to distance themselves from him. The hobo gets up and stands with them at the doors and continues his one-sided conversation.

Figuring it was none of my business, I turned up my headphones, raised my hood, and buried my face into my shirt which thankfully was lightly scented with cologne. Then, as the train pulls out of one of the tunnel stations, I hear screams so loud they overpowered my headphones! I looked up to see that the doors were wide open, with the hobo nearly falling out, as the train sped out of the station and down the tunnel!!

Thankfully the hobo regained his balance and got the doors to close before we reached the next station.

From what I could gather in all the commotion, it would seem that someone had realized too late that the train had reached their stop, and pulled the emergency lever to make the doors open and pushed past the hobo just as the train was beginning to move. No one alerted the train operator of what had happened, so he obliviously accelerated and sped on to the next stop. Needless to say, there was relieved and shocked conversation throughout the car for the rest of the trip.

Goin' to more dogs

So the feds have come up with more bucks for bomb-sniffing dogs on the CTA.

Whoo hoo! Who knew that Bush realized here WAS a CTA! Seems like it's all about the SUV's for him.

Anyway, I talked to some dog handlers recently on the Grand platform, and they set me straight on a few concepts:

1. Those dogs REALLY do know how to sniff for bombs and other contraband. Note to that dude who kept his pot stash in his toilet paper tucked in his pants (see comments): Watch out for dem dere dogs!

2. The dogs with muzzles sometimes are trained only as attack dogs. If they have no muzzle, generally they are purely drug-sniffing dogs, and don't have the "attack dog" training. Now folks, I really am generalizing here. But that's what one cop and sergeant told me about the dogs.

Max tells us what riders are reading

Earlier this year I was doing some weekly roundups of what people were reading on the CTA. People do lotsa El reading, so frankly, I was spending my entire commute writing down book names and rubber-necking to see what the whole title was, the author, and writing down descriptions of readers. It kept me from my newspaper reading and my other Tattler reporting. So I stopped. Call me lazy.

But yesterday I got an e-mail from Max, a Medill journalism student, who mentioned his own blog about books, The Millions.

He's done a few posts himself about what books he sees people reading on the CTA. "I find myself endlessly fascinated by what people are reading on the El," Max says.  "I think it's because I worked in a book store for a few years and since then, I'm always interested in seeing what books are out there "in the wild."  And oddly enough, I always get a little thrill when I spot someone reading a book that I like.... In that sense, maybe it is a bit like birdwatching."

So, since I'm too lazy to do the work anymore on this kind of thing, I urge you to read what Max has seen others reading: Here, here, here and here.

A friendly hand to remove stuck toilet paper

A young female college student boards at Fullerton with four plastic bags of groceries, heading south. (She likes DiGiorno pizza and Homestyle Eggos.)

She gets up after Jackson to exit at Harrison. She bends over to arrange her plastic bags in her hands. In doing so, a teenager noticed something sticking out of the back of her jeans and told her about it -- it was about 3-4 squares of toilet paper hanging out of the back of her jeans waistband!

She obviously is embarrassed, and still having trouble reaching it for extrication. That's when an 18-year-old guy steps in and yanks it out of her jeans for her.

Red Line Far North building boom

The Near North South, Lakeview and Wrigleyville neighborhoods have all seen a huge burst of renovation and new home construction over the last 15 years or so. But neighborhoods further north lagged behind a bit, particularly hard by the Red Line tracks.

Those days are over.

Riding from Rogers Park south to Grand every day, I’ve noticed a big building boom north of Belmont in the last six months or so, particularly within a block on either side of the tracks.

At the Jarvis stop, the small commercial area around the station is being renovated. The old Charmers gay bar has doubled in size and morphed into an Irish Pub called Poitin Stil.

Just south of Morse, a brand-new eight-unit building is now fully occupied a block east of the tracks at Pratt and Wayne.

At Granville and Broadway, ground has broken for a huge 10-story, mixed use development with 150-some condo units.

The Substation North Lofts are slowly rising adjacent to the west side of the tracks between Thorndale and Bryn Mawr. At Bryn Mawr, which saw great renovation a few years back, the old Walgreen’s east of the tracks has finally been redeveloped with a bank.

Rolling south, Catalpa Gardens is taking root just north of Berwyn on the west. The 126-unit development features three 11-story buildings painted blue and beige in a pattern that rises and falls like a wave from one building to the next.

Dazed, drunk and depants-ed

Great story here from SpartyCuse, in case you missed it earlier this week:

Funny story that I never had time to post back when it happened. Its August 19, 2005, I'm riding the Blue Line toward the Loop, and we stop at California. The train sits there for about 5 minutes, doors open, no announcement. I finally get off the train, step onto the platform, to try and find out whats happening.

In the car ahead, there's a bit of a disturbance. There's an African-American woman, clearly homeless, drunk, and possibly high or mentally ill. Shes causing a scene on the car ahead - smoking, drinking booze, and harassing passengers, and the CTA staff somehow get her off the car. Now, instead of closing the doors and having the train take off, the train sits there. She goes out of sight, then comes back, and gets on the train again.

Then she lights up a smoke. People wonder where the police are, and the CTA staff say "on the way" This is now 10 minutes after we stopped. CTA staff are telling people they cant pull her off the train, and people are yelling everything possible at her to get her off. Some guy offered her more booze if she got off, and one guy yelled "free weed out here" as a way to get her out. No luck.

Finally, about 15 minutes after we stop, one angry passenger asks the CTA staff if HE can pull her out. Staff basically says do whatever you wanna do. Many people, including myself, tell him to wait for the cops, but he was in a hurry to get someplace.

So the guy, as you can guess, plays the role of CTA bouncer and clears the car of the problem.

The worst part? As she was being removed from the train, she forgot to hold her pants (which were about 10 sizes too big) up, and the entire CTA community got a not-so-lovely look at what she had south of the border.

The train then closed the doors, and took off. No word what happened to her.

Horrifying eyewitness account of bus hitting woman

UPDATE: Driver placed on unpaid leave.

This account comes from a reader: I know this blog is all about the unusual, strange and sometimes funny happenings that occur daily on the CTA. However, this isn't one of those stories. It is, in fact, the most frightening thing I've ever witness in my 6 years of living in Chicago (and riding public transit). It takes on new significance we you consider yesterday's (Thursday, September 22) Sun-Times lead story concerning the city's pending crackdown on pedestrians who jaywalk/cross against the light.

I attend Truman College (Wilson & Broadway) on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Afterwards I head to my boyfriend's apartment (Sheridan & Foster) for a late dinner. Since it's such a short distance, I usually walk. But last night I was running a little late and decided to head over to Sheridan & Wilson and take the #151 up to Foster.

The bus was fairly empty (it's about 9:50 pm and there were only about 4 others riding) so I was able to sit in one of the single seats on the right side of the bus. The bus wasn't doing the complete route, but rather stopping its run at Foster (which was perfect for me).

As the driver made the westbound turn from Sheridan onto Foster (to head to the North Garage) I heard a loud "thud" and felt the bus come to an abrupt stop. The driver stood up in her seat and, with a look of utter disbelief, asked no one in particular "I didn't just hit her, did I" (I think she was trying to convince herself more than any of us on the bus). There was a young woman sitting the first inward facing seat (opposite the driver's seat) who started screaming "Yes you did!" The driver then becomes hysterical and in her haste to go outside and see what happened, forgets to put the bus in park. The next voices I hear are people on the sidewalk and in their cars outside yelling at the driver to stop because she's dragging the woman under the bus.

The driver eventually recovers, puts the bus in park and goes out the front door. She takes a look towards the back of the bus, screams and tears off running down the sidewalk (let me state here that the driver WAS NOT trying to flee the scene...she was just so distraught that she simply, 'lost it'). I was the closest passenger to the back door and when I opened it to step off, there she was. A short, Caucasian, female in her late 60's or early 70's laying face down on the street (literally, a 'little old lady'). She had been doubled-over (presumably during the dragging) and was in a sort of fetal position with her rear in the air. She was lying just to the left of door and slightly under the bus. To the right was a pool of blood and a smear trailing to where the woman now rested.

Our Men in Blue nab purse snatcher

An editor at Chicago Architecture witnessed a purse snatching Tuesday at the Madison/WabashWells elevated station, and contributes these photos he took of Chicago's finest apprehending the suspect.

Click below for another shot.

Overshooting the platform

The motorwoman came zooming into Grand, mashed the brakes and stopped at least 20 feet past the usual spot.

That became the trend for the entire ride home.

As she slammed into my station stop, it was obvious that she overshot the platform by at least one door in the first car.

She sheepishly apologized and told those at the first door in the first car to move to the second door so they didn't drop 5 feet onto the railbed while disembarking.

Dueling textbooks

I was heading home on the northbound Red Line out of Grand Avenue. I had missed a train by about a minute, but another truly was following about two minutes behind. Since it was about 4:45, I actually found a seat right away.

I got settled in for some accounting homework for my Roosevelt University MBA class: Textbook and notebook resting atop my black messenger bag; pen poised; puzzled look on my face trying to detemine why my balance sheet wasn't balancing.

I kept sensing the guy next to me looking closely at my book and homework. I made eye contact with him a few minutes later and he said:

"Wanna trade textbooks?"

No way was I gonna take that bait. "No thanks! I'm sure yours is much thicker than mine." After all mine is a puny softcover of just 444 pages.

But he did drag his behemoth out of his bag. 800-plus pages in hardback for his undergrad class accounting and finance class.

He wins the Dueling Textbooks contest. Thank the good lord I don't have to drag that one around.