Hey, you guys are giving me the creeps...you're in my neighborhood! ;-) Nice shots, guys.
Here in downtown Chicago the "El", as it's called, is an elevated portion of the Chicago Transit Authority's train system that does make a "loop" around the central-most section of the downtown biz district.
Asher's image is taken along Wabash Avenue roughly between Madison and Monroe. That particular area is most noted for being crammed with jewelers and doctors.
Nicolas' first image is indeed of the CTA station designed by celebrity architect Rem Koolhaas as part of the redevelopment of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) campus south of the loop area. IIT may be best known as the school where famed architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe taught and where he designed the campus' original master plan and many of its famed modernist buildings in the 1950's.
His second image is taken from an El car near the Chicago Public Library station along the south edge of the "loop" at State and Van Buren streets. That's Chicago's main library building, known as the Harold Washington Library, that you see out the window.
I've lived with that El, and the CTA, nearly all of my life. Asher's image is approximately four blocks from my home. I know I have many, many images of the el, particularly of that Wabash run. Here's one from 2006 looking east along Washington Street towards the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park.
Here's a shot of the El and Wabash on a cold, dreary winter day from approximately across the street of Asher's image. This is pretty much how the street and El feel to me year-round in all weather.
Wabash is very much a street in constant transition under that El. The 1981 film
"Thief" starring James Caan has several terrific sequences shot around the el tracks along Wabash. Few of the great shops and restaurants shown in that film still exist, as central Wabash is trying to find a new identity. But there are still some colorful, although somewhat artificial, vestiges of the street life as it exited 40-50 years ago under those tracks. This newsstand is a good example.
