Landmarks: Kensington, Ivanhoe train stops offer a glimpse back in time

Growing up in Homewood, the train was a constant presence. We could hear the mild horn of the Electric Line Highliners in the distance as we played outside, and one of my first jobs once I learned to drive was to pick up my dad after work every day at the station in downtown Flossmoor.

He’d been riding the train every weekday since the early 1970s back and forth from his job in the Amoco Building, now called the Aon Center.

One of our family stories details the white knuckle time in October 1972, after news spread about an Electric Line train crash that had claimed lives and injured hundreds. Dad might have been one of those trains.

It was decades before cellphones or marking oneself safe on social media, so tense hours followed until we learned he luckily had caught a later train than usual that day. Beyond a significant delay, he was unscathed and resumed his daily train commute as soon as the rails were restored.

He eventually grew tired of commuting, but still loved the train, taking us kids on adventures downtown on weekends, riding upstairs where the view of the passing scenery was better and where we could peer down at other passengers reading their newspapers or dozing fitfully.

Mostly we’d look outward. There was so much to see. Tiny lakes at the bottom of the raised rail bed marked ancient excavations, we imagined, though they more likely dated to the early 1920s when the rail line was raised above grade and viaducts were installed so the increasing motor traffic could safely pass below the tracks.

There were mysteries along the way, too, such as the, giant abandoned turret in Harvey topped by castle-like battlements, with tall, vacant, black windows. Rather than a defensive structure, I later learned, it’s a lasting relic of the area’s agricultural past, a grain storage silo constructed to withstand potential explosions. It was built so solidly that attempts to raze it left barely a mark.

A bit farther up the line, a hillside advertised “Ivanhoe” in giant embedded concrete letters near a train station by the same name. But there is no town of Ivanhoe. The Ivanhoe train station is in Riverdale, which also has a train station named Riverdale. It’s across the Little Calumet River from the neighborhood in Chicago called Riverdale, which does not have a train station. Its northern reaches are served by the Kensington train station, which also hits Chicago’s West Pullman and Roseland neighborhoods.

For infrequent train riders, such as those who hit the Metra Electric Line to go to this weekend’s Lollapalooza festival in Grant Park, it can get pretty confusing.

But there’s a simple explanation, at least for the train station names. The south suburbs were booming in the 1920s when the Illinois Central Railroad pumped resources into modernizing its signature commuter service. Train cars powered by electricity from lines run overhead offered a tantalizing glimpse of a future where coal burning locomotives and their sooty, air-fouling residue were phased out.

The raised rails paired with sunken viaducts promised safer travel for IC passengers and motorists alike, with speedier train travel enabled by the elimination of troublesome crossings.

It was a progressive era, and transportation technology was following suit.

Some of the stations along the line dated to the early days of the Illinois Central, when rail travel was the only way to get out of town. Some of those towns, such as Kensington, would eventually be swallowed up by Chicago.

Kensington was originally called Calumet Junction and grew up around the intersection of the Illinois Central and Michigan, according to the Chicago Historical Society’s Encyclopedia of Chicago. By the 1860s, Kensington had its own post office, though its many pubs may have put it on the map, especially for residents of nearby Roseland, which was dry.

That legacy lives on in Electric line landmarks such as the old tied house tavern at 114th and Front streets that’s topped with a terra cotta globe draped with Schlitz beer bunting, and the former Schlitz stables building with terra cotta horse heads that for a while housed the now defunct Argus Brewery.

When George Pullman established his rail car factory just north of Kensington, the area swelled with activity. Pullman eventually got its own rail stop, but Kensington continued to be an important station — it still is where Electric Line riders can transfer from the main route to the Blue Island line.

But Kensington itself got drawn out of existence. It was swallowed by the rapidly expanding borders of Chicago in the 1890s, though it retained its own identity for a little while. In those progressive 1920s as its rail line was modernizing, another high-minded effort erased the former town from the map when University of Chicago sociologists drew the city’s community areas that still define Chicago’s neighborhoods.

Kensington ended up parceled out into Riverdale, West Pullman and Roseland but it retained its station name.

At the same time, other stations along the electric line were established in between the older ones named for their towns. That included Ivanhoe, where a new subdivision was taking off far enough south of the main Riverdale station to merit its own train stop.

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According to a contemporary account, developers lured Chicagoans to stop at the new station with ice cream socials and tours of the lots they were selling in 1921 for $250. In one promotional stunt, they reportedly hired someone to dress in knight armor and ride a white horse around the area while shouting “Ivanhoe the Beautiful!”

The large Ivanhoe marker embedded in the landscape by the train station likely dates to those early promotional efforts, as it’s visible in aerial photographs of the area taken in 1939. It advertised the subdivision until 2017, when it was demolished as part of a project to improve drainage in the area.

It’s not advertised in the landscape anymore, but Riverdale’s Ivanhoe neighborhood is separate from Ivanhoe Manor, a subdivision in Dolton farther east. It’s one of the many connections between the two villages that start back at the very beginning, when early entrepreneur George Dolton established a ferry service in what would become Riverdale. The village of Dolton isn’t named after him, but rather his sons, who were early civic leaders in the town that would be called Dolton Station until the 1920s. But Dolton no longer has a train station.

When I take the train these days, I use the Calumet station. Sometimes people assume I’m going to or from Calumet City. But that town doesn’t have a train station anymore either, despite a proliferation of train tracks.

I catch the train from Calumet station in East Hazel Crest, which, like Ivanhoe, is named for the land moneyed interests wanted people to disembark to patronize. In this case, it was Calumet Country Club, which not long ago was abandoned by Homewood leaders and subsequently annexed by Hazel Crest, which is working with industrial developers to obliterate the historic golf course.

If that happens, the Calumet station will join Kensington and Ivanhoe as reflections of the past along the old Illinois Central Electric Line.

Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at peisenberg@tribpub.com.