11th Street is a rail stop in the central city neighborhood of Michigan City, Indiana. It serves the South Shore Line commuter rail system and is one of two active stations in Michigan City, the other being Carroll Avenue station. It is located adjacent to the historic 11th Street Station of the former Chicago, South Shore and South Bend Railroad station, which operated the station from 1927 until 1987. The station is composed of a passenger shelter and a sign on the northwest corner of East 11th Street and Pine Street; boarding and alighting is done from the street itself.HistoryThe Chicago, South Shore and South Bend was one of the last interurban railroads to operate profitably in the United States. Aggressive management, led by financier Samuel Insull, reconceptualized the South Shore as the linchpin of a public transportation network operating throughout the industrialized Indiana Dunes region of Indiana. Insull interests built the 11th Street Station in central Michigan City in May 1927 as a pioneering piece of multimodal public transportation infrastructure. The South Shore had affiliated with several regional bus lines, and the 11th Street Station was conceived as a waiting area point where system users would transfer between a bus and an electric train.After operating relatively successfully for some decades, the South Shore entered bankruptcy in the 1980s. Electric train service was reorganized under the umbrella of the publicly funded Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District (NICTD), but affiliated bus service had long since ceased. The South Shore Line closed the 11th Street station in November 1987, but its NICTD successor-in-interest maintains train service to the street adjacent to the station. The station building itself, designed by Insull's staff-architect Arthur U. Gerber, is closed and out of service.
