- The street cars may be long gone in Chicago, but city transit by rail is still alive and well: the L system.

You can take it to the South Side, the Southwest Side, it'll take you to the North Side.

It takes you down the Eisenhower Expressway to the West Side and up the middle of the Kennedy Expressway to the Northwest Side.

You can even ride it at street level through this quaint neighborhood.

(train rumbling) Of course, the most famous part of the L system is our Downtown Loop.

This is where nearly all the train lines come together.

It circles an area just five blocks wide by seven blocks long.

And it's the creation of our old friend Charles Tyson Yerkes.

So, as you can imagine, building it was hotly contested and involved more than a little grift.

- So what Yerkes was very good at was not only underhanded business practices, but figuring out which type of underhanded business practice was needed for each situation.

- [Geoffrey] CTA General manager, Graham Garfield, is the agency's unofficial historian.

- When the L lines first opened, the big disadvantage they had compared to the street cars was that they ended on the edge of downtown.

- [Geoffrey] In other words, there was no loop.

Yerkes was determined to unite the lines and reap the rewards.

- Long before CTA, all of the L routes were all built by private companies.

They had to get what was called a franchise in order to build the line.

And in Chicago, it would usually involve a lot of behind-the-scenes negotiation, some of it for favors, maybe some of it financial.

- Bribes.

- Yeah, but better known as bribes.

- [Geoffrey] In this case, Yerkes had to convince business owners along the planned route of the loop structure to allow him to build it.

But no amount of palm greasing was enough to convince business owners on Van Buren Street to let him build the final leg.

- So Yerkes really pulled a fast one there, right?

- Yes, you need the consent of half of the property owners along a public way for a private enterprise like the L. So he sought permission to build a line far longer than the loop segment that he needed, all the way from Wabash to Halsted Street.

- Way west.

- Way west.

But really, all he needed was from Wabash to Wells Street.

- So weren't the people further west, you know, enraged when he never built the L line?

- They might've been a little annoyed, but they probably were in it more for the money they were paid for their consent signatures than for the actual transportation.

- Yerkes' business strategies made him a pariah, and he soon left the city for points east, and ultimately England, where he helped finance the London Underground.

But he left Chicago with the Loop.

Over the decades, there were calls to tear it down, but defenders of the Loop made their voices heard.

Turns out Chicago loves the Loop.

The American Institute of Architects called it our Eiffel Tower.

(whimsical music)