What’s That Building? The Gerber Building and former Uptown Station
The stately Beaux-Arts looks of the Uptown Station can’t help but grab your eye at Wilson Avenue and Broadway in the Uptown neighborhood. The structure’s doorway is flanked by medallions draped with floral garlands, a clock and lanterns set into the arched top.
Uptown Station is a stunning relic of the 1920s, when getting around the city and suburbs by train was the norm and the neighborhood was a stylish place to be.
But the building didn’t look this good for its entire 102-year history. In fact, that arched top, the pediment, is a late 2010s recreation. There was an arch like this on the station when it opened in 1923, but it was chopped off in the 1950s.
The structure has been through a lot, including standing mostly vacant since its restoration was completed in February 2018. Part of the $203 million redesign and rebuild of the Red Line’s Wilson Station entailed shifting the tracks a short distance west. The main entrance to the Red Line now sits on the other side of Wilson Avenue.
In May 2018, CTA officials signed a lease with the Chicago Market, a grocery cooperative that at the time said it would take about 18 months to build out the space — meaning it would open sometime in 2020.
Now, in 2025, Grant Kessler, the board’s president, told WBEZ’s Reset the establishment is “working hard to be open by the end of the year.”
The member-owned market has hit several speed bumps along the way, Kessler said, including COVID, raising funds and the long process of designing a grocery store in a slender triangular building.
Posters detailing renderings for the grocery cooperative.
Rising construction costs in the 2020s have pushed the amount needed to complete the space to more than $10 million. Kessler said the numbers are being finalized but are likely around $12 million.
In 2022, the Chicago City Council approved granting $5.8 million in TIF funds for the project, and Kessler said there are loans and investments from the co-op’s members, in amounts he wouldn’t specify.
“The CTA has been nice about staying with us,” Kessler said. In February, the city issued a building permit, and “we’re working on getting the rest of the money we need so we can start construction soon,” he said.
When it opens, the Chicago market will be a treat for locavores with its emphasis on food from local farms and kitchens. First envisioned at meetings in 2013, the co-op has 2,450 members, who’ve paid for lifetime shares at either $250 or $500.
“Many of them are admittedly frustrated by the timeline,” Kessler said. “It’s a bummer that it’s taking so long.”
The inside of the future Chicago Market as of March 2025.
The plans include 40-plus parking spaces and doors to the store on the west, under the new Red Line tracks. On the east, on Broadway, pedestrians will enter the store midway up the block from Wilson, through the old main doors to the platform. (The fancier entrance on the corner won’t be the main entrance.)
Inside, while most of the space will be new store fixtures and finishes, there’s one great relic of the old station preserved: the wide, red terrazzo staircase that once led passengers up to the trains. Flanked by high pillars with more floral garlands like the ones on the exterior, the stairs lead to nowhere now. Their top was chopped off when the tracks they led to were moved, but the lower portion remains as a reminder of what used to be.
Kessler said the stairs will be cushioned and used as seating, either for groups such as school kids coming to hear farmers talk about their work, or for individuals eating food they’ve picked up in the store.
These “stairs to nowhere” will be turned into cushioned seating.
Saving this old station was appropriate, not only because it’s a nicely detailed piece of the neighborhood, but because it embodies a surprising amount of history.
In a career that spanned half a century, Gerber designed rail stations from Kenosha, Wisc., to Beverly Shores, Ind. In Chicago, along with Uptown, he worked on stations in Logan Square on what’s now the Blue Line, and at both Kedzie and Kimball on what’s now the Brown Line. All three were demolished long ago.
Outside the city, Gerber’s arts and crafts-style stations on Dempster in Skokie and Linden in Wilmette are treasured landmarks. In Highland Park, a former train station called Briergate, designed by Gerber in a Spanish style with a white stucco exterior and a clay tile roof, was saved from demolition several years ago, and in Michigan City, Ind., the façade of the 11th Street station Gerber designed was incorporated into a new trackside building. And in Beverly Shores, Ind., another of his fanciful tile-roofed stations is a beloved spot on the way into that beachy town.
Bringing Gerber’s Uptown Station back to life is a fitting tribute to a man who designed so many in his day. The structure is officially known as the Gerber Building, even though “Uptown Station” is emblazoned on that corner entrance in big green letters.
In between Gerber’s two stations on Wilson, the third one on this site, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, stood from 1909 to 1922. Containing both shops and access to the train platform, it was called the Peter Stohrer Arcade Building.
The Gerber Building is right underneath the current Wilson stop on the CTA’s Red Line.
Like a lot of Wright’s work, the building was long and low, emphasizing the horizontal. One section of the building stood taller, where stairs climbed to the platform, and was topped by a characteristic Wrightian flat roof.
But here’s the detail of the short-lived Wright building that stands out most today: One of the commercial tenants was a grocer, National Tea Company.
Dennis Rodkin is the residential real estate reporter for Crain’s Chicago Business and Reset’s “What’s That Building?” contributor. Follow him @Dennis_Rodkin.
K’Von Jackson is the freelance photojournalist for Reset’s “What’s That Building?” Follow him @true_chicago.
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