The 93 Bus
Chicago’s urban transit system, also known as the CTA, may not look like a vastly efficient system when compared with the likes of Tokyo and Paris. Even so, it’s fantastic when compared with the low bar that US cities’ services tend to set. While the city’s train lines leave many sizable gaps in service, you can get just about anywhere if you have the patience to traverse long bus routes. Thanks to the city’s highly standardized grid system with large streets every half mile, it is easy to run buses on said routes to create a dense network that only faces the (rather major) limitation of getting caught in traffic. This pattern of coverage continues not only throughout most of Chicago itself, but into many “inner ring” suburbs that brush up on the big city’s boundaries. I grew up in Evanston, the first suburb north of Chicago along Lake Michigan and somewhat well-known in its own right for a few things such as Northwestern University and bizarre Prohibition history. It also gets its own train line in the L system, the aptly named Purple Line much like Northwestern’s official color. While this is certainly Evanston’s best-known connection into the city, there’s also the lesser-known 93 bus line which veers away from the lakefront side of town. It’s surprisingly reliable, usually quaint enough to get work done, and best of all it passes through some of Chicagoland’s most culturally fascinating neighborhoods.
The route of this CTA bus line, with some demographic information, food recs and more at your disposal. We’ll be moving from northeast to southwest in this narrative-ish adventure.
While it makes sense that a bus along Dodge and California Avenues would have to change course from a simple straight line in order to provide onward train connections, it’s amusing that the eventual shape of the route pretty much perfectly aligns with my life history. As we start in the northeast at the Davis purple line train stop, we end up right between my childhood home and Northwestern University’s lakefront campus. I attended Northwestern myself for my undergraduate degree, and let’s just say that visiting home from the dorms was hardly much of an ordeal. The Davis stop is arguably a good marker for the center of action in Evanston, and there’s no shortage of nearby commerce and commotion to demonstrate the perks of this lively and relatively densely populated suburb.
These downtown adjacent areas may be the only face of Evanston that outsiders and many Northwestern students know about, but the 93 bus continues westwards and towards less typical college town vibes. It passes by a number of Black-owned businesses along Emerson Avenue and later on Dodge Avenue when the bus turns south. Here it passes right by Evanston Township High School (ETHS), the absolute beast of an institution from which I graduated in 2017. ETHS students have a favorite fun fact about their school that appears to not just be the stuff of urban legends: it is the largest in the country contained in a singular building, with over 1.2 million square feet of interconnected indoor space. 5 minute passing periods were absolutely brutal when we would end up with classes on the opposite side of the universe from one another, and getting to know even a significant fraction of the nearly 4000 students attending in any given year is quite the undertaking.
A bird’s eye view of the absolute crater that ETHS imposes on the surrounding Evanston area. All of the buildings you see in the bottom half are actually a singular behemoth that includes hundreds of classrooms, dozens of indoor gyms, an indoor fieldhouse, a massive arts wing, a few auditoriums and cafeterias each, and too many niche facilities to remember. As you may be able to tell looking up from the indoor “campus”, the schools lays claim to even more outdoor space for both practicing and competing in all kinds of sports. West is up in this photo, so the 93 bus travels along the street visible at the bottom of the image (Dodge Avenue).
ETHS’ student body has no absolute racial majority, and the neighborhood in which it is located consists primarily of Black and Hispanic residents. It is one of the only open enrollment high schools in all of Chicagoland to have significant populations of all three racial groups. Most high schools to the north of Evanston do not have many non-White students at all, most to the west have diverse populations but without many Black students, and there are similarly few White students in most of Chicago’s non-selective schools. It’s also a rare institution of the sort to transcend a massive socioeconomic spectrum, with 40 percent of students being eligible for free or reduced lunch while others had families with sailboats and huge summer homes in Michigan. Their houses within Evanston tend to be swanky enough to bring in significant property tax revenue for the town, hence ETHS’ rather comfortable position in terms of paying for its countless resources.
While the existence of such inequality is not a great thing broadly speaking, the exposure that my peers organically received to those far removed from their bubbles definitely appears to have served as a valuable tool. While I don’t wish to downplay Evanston’s persistent racial inequities, the fact is that my childhood friends of color who grew up poor generally ended up with far better opportunities to find success than many people of color who are raised in parts of Chicagoland almost entirely deprived of resources and high-income peers. It's also certainly not the case that every white kid at ETHS is rich. I knew plenty whose families were far from financially comfortable, and some who had legitimately troubled home lives. All across the racial spectrum, some kids with few privileges ended up in unfortunate patterns of selling and/or using drugs to make it from day to day. On the bright side, this line of work is far less deadly than it would be deep in the West Side or other troubled spots of Chicago itself.
On the reverse side, ETHS kids from financially comfortable backgrounds seem to have a relatively clear understanding that there are great things to be gained from going outside of their bubbles. Part of the evidence for this is that I don’t know many graduates who choose to surround themselves only with people just like them. Countless teenagers from both rich and poor backgrounds have made enormous strides in the arts scene, and the crossover between them increases the odds that any particular kid with great talent but a tough upbringing is able to gain visibility. This isn’t to say that classism did not exist, and it’s certainly true that some students had to act like they came from more wealth than they did to fit in with their chosen social circles. But I am generally of the opinion that Evanston’s conditions provide paths towards progress that broader forms of educational divisions could not.
As the 93 bus continues south from ETHS, it passes through two more miles of Evanston streets, with some great Jamaican and Mexican restaurants representing some of the area's residential demographics. Towards the south end of Evanston and west of Dodge Avenue lies James Park, in which you can find quite the anomaly - a reasonably prominent hill among entirely flat land. I hate to break the news that this isn’t some sort of cool natural phenomenon…it’s made from a landfill, hence why it is unironically referred to as Mount Trashmore. The bus crosses into Chicago at Howard Street, a transition that's far more noticeable at night than day given Evanston's comparatively abysmal street lighting. The street's name switches from Dodge to California and continues for a few more miles of what can perhaps be described as Midwestern EPCOT.
Mount Trashmore may not look like much, but with our frigid winters, folks are going to find a way to sled one way or another. In the warmer months, my Cross Country teammates and I would have to run to this park from ETHS and do laps up and down the slope.
I took this photo while taking off from O’Hare at night - Evanston’s boundary with Chicago at the south end of the picture is incredibly stark. It may be nice to contribute relatively little to light pollution, but I’ve almost had the 93 bus pass me by at night on the Evanston side as a result.
We start in an area that is primarily Hasidic, a subsect of Judaism that involves far stricter adherence than the mostly Reform Jews of Evanston or even the primarily Modern Orthodox Jews of neighboring Skokie. If none of them are riding the bus with you, perhaps it's a Saturday and they're walking around outside instead as per their religious mandate. Even though the street is lined with Jewish institutions, they are not the only group living around these parts. There are many Hispanic folks particularly just south of Howard and east of California, with most of them descending from Mexico. This part of town is a bit unusual in that it’s heavily straddling the line between high and low density. There are many single family homes among the housing stock, and getting downtown isn’t too convenient from around here, but you don’t see the huge parking lots or lack of pedestrian activity like you might in some outlying neighborhoods further west.
Let's continue south a couple more miles. In what much of the world would see as an unlikely combination, the area's Jewish population ends up heavily intermixed with a significant Muslim community around Devon Avenue. At California and Devon, you can see a Jewish boys' school, Tel Aviv Kosher Pizzeria, a liquor store, halal restaurants and a Muslim-run food pantry all adjacent to one another. I regularly volunteer at the latter institution - I am not Muslim myself, rather following the Sikh faith which naturally has its own temple a half mile east on Devon. However, Muslims and Sikhs share a steadfast principle of feeding the needy, and everyone I work with at the place is incredibly friendly and well-exposed to an endless number of distinct cultures. As a result most are highly multilingual, which is good as communication with clients necessitates knowledge of Spanish, Arabic, Urdu, Russian, Dari and French at the least. Thanks to the Spanish immersion program I attended in elementary school in Evanston, my father’s Indian heritage and my weird obsession with learning even more languages, I’m no slouch in this regard myself.
A typical Devon street scene, taken a bit east of California closer to Western and Devon. Tons of South Asian enterprises line this street.
Continuing from the Devon area, the 93 bus passes through Arcadia Terrace and Budlong Woods, two rather quiet residential areas with some beautiful homes and solid park access. Lots of Filipino and Vietnamese Americans live around here, but there isn’t much in the way of corresponding commerce. At Foster Avenue, a mile and a half south of Devon, the bus turns west and crosses over the North Shore Channel to provide access to two nearly adjacent college campuses: North Park University and Northeastern Illinois University. The respective student bodies of these schools contribute to the neighborhood’s uniquely trendy commercial scene for being nearly at the edge of the city and not directly surrounding an L stop. Both are known to be primarily commuter schools, with the 93 bus greatly expanding the number of people who can arrive for classes here in one trip.
The bus takes yet another turn southwards at Kimball Avenue, crossing a branch of the Chicago River to feed into the Brown Line terminal at Kimball and Lawrence. Here you’re in the heart of Albany Park, a neighborhood with an ethnic profile that gives the Devon Avenue area some stiff competition for complexity. It first received populations hailing from countries such as Germany and Sweden when developments were completed in the early 1900s. It was a heavily Jewish neighborhood in the middle of the century, and has since seen waves of Mexicans, Koreans, Guatemalans, Ecuadorians, Filipinos, Assyrians and countless others. Just within 1000 feet of Kimball and Lawrence, your options include Kyrgyz food, Filipino food, a couple of Chinese restaurants, a Mexican bakery, a Mexican cafe, a Guatemalan bakery, some taquerias and a classic hot dog joint. While this is only the tip of the iceberg of ethnic representation in Albany Park’s commerce, I am saddened to admit that there is no veritable Indian restaurant to satisfy the tastes I grew up with. Persian and Afghan cuisines are available with some culinary overlap, and there are even Indian/Pakistani grocery shops, but the heavy presence of Indian restaurants on Devon Avenue probably reduces the value proposition of setting up in other nearby neighborhoods.
A typical scene by the Kimball brown line stop in Albany Park - this fruit stand appears to always be around when the weather isn’t ridiculous. A lot of informal commerce thrives in the area without many actively enforced restrictions.
I live in Albany Park myself, and it’s quite the cultural adventure to say the least. Whether I’m Shazam-ing my neighbors’ party music to learn some new Ecuadorian tracks, hearing an Assyrian barber’s teenage dating misadventures with a Sikh girl while he threads my sister’s eyebrows, or making the futile attempt to identify the difference between Salvadoran and Honduran sour cream in my local grocery store, I find that my understanding of the world is ever expanding all without a real need to depart from a small walking radius. The area is jam packed with enterprises going far beyond food to cover just about everything imaginable whether it’s essential or utterly frivolous. It’s a rather mixed income neighborhood by Chicago’s increasingly stratified standards, which explains why it’s far more commercially active than some of the most deprived parts of the city yet not in the more “manicured” fashion of heavily gentrified areas. The location doesn’t hurt either, with both proximity to many northern suburbs and direct connections on the Brown Line to a multitude of affluent neighborhoods.
So What?
Did I just write all that purely for the sake of ethnographic narration? Well, it certainly was one of my motives, but there are some more pointed takeaways that we can glean from the specific nature of the 93 bus:
It’s a monumentally important transit service as it connects global communities with one another, workers with various large employers, and students with a number of educational institutions…which is why it is absolute insanity that the bus does not run at all on Sundays. Many bus lines running through Evanston have this kind of schedule, but the 93 is pretty much the only bus line that moves through significant parts of both Evanston and Chicago, so whatever weird logic Evanston must be enforcing really seems irrelevant. This particular absurdity is annoyingly inconvenient at best, or a straight up hindrance to work opportunities at worst. If we can successfully advocate for this bus to run 7 days a week, we will have produced a marked and sustainable improvement to the lives of thousands in our community.
Not many of the neighborhoods along this route are particularly flashy or well-known among non-locals, but that’s truly a missed opportunity. There’s so much to learn about the world from folks of all walks of life, or you can simply sit back and enjoy the people watching as the bus moves along. I’ve had to explain in signs to an old European man who spoke no English that the “stop request” wire on the bus is not a good spot to hang his dry cleaning. I’ve listened to a young Hasidic boy emphasizing the importance of belief in God on the phone. Sometimes I’ve completely failed to determine what language people are speaking, which otherwise doesn’t happen often for my linguistically-obsessed self. Check out the end of this post for some great recommendations in these areas.
There’s been a frightening rise in hard-right beliefs that multiculturalism is some sort of evil death curse to society. By their logic, pretty much everywhere along this bus line should be a warzone. I’m not claiming that nothing bad ever happens in these areas crime-wise, but even the roughest pockets don’t hold a candle to Chicago’s averages. It’s pretty backwards to claim that diversity to the point where people end up interacting significantly across ethnic boundaries is the root problem. In reality, the parts of Chicago facing the most violence are areas where ethnic homogeneity within a marginalized background and the ubiquitous nature of poverty contribute to a feeling that no other life is possible. It’s easy to forget there’s a whole complex world to explore when you’re living in a community where people have a relatively narrow set of life experiences - and while the effects can be more personally damaging for those in poverty, the same phenomenon applies to many ubiquitously wealthy circles.
So if you’re ever looking for a global adventure at a heavily discounted rate, a way to get involved with local volunteer work, or live evidence to prove bigots wrong, you know where to go. It’ll be a cold day in hell before anything on the bus line between downtown Evanston and Albany Park gets a direct train connection, making it all the more essential that it run a full seven days per week. In the meantime, don’t screw up by waiting for it on a Sunday.