The nearby block, dubbed Rockwell Crossing by locals, is full of small businesses—a pet store, a coffee shop, a yoga studio, a boutique, a dive on the corner that’s been there for years. Enter any of them and you’re likely to find people in conversation—not just about reality TV or the weather, but about mutual friends or things happening in the neighborhood. They’ll joke to you that it’s just like a small town here; everybody knows everybody’s business.

Most of them will also tell you that the neighborhood wasn’t always like this. As recently as four or five years ago, graffiti and gangs were such a problem that it was hard to feel safe walking down the street, much less attract business to the block. But in the past few years, at least six new shops have gone up. And they’ve stuck, thanks partly to the hard work of community members and organizations, and partly to the Rockwell stop around the corner that brings large numbers of commuters down the street twice a day, as regular as clockwork.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that at a recent meeting where CTA officials described their plan to close Rockwell and most of the other Brown Line stops for up to a year, Rockwell residents were the rowdiest bunch there.

“We’re fighting. Rockwell’s screaming. I love it”, says Julie Knapp. Knapp is the owner of Scents and Sensibility, a flowers and gifts boutique at 4654 North Rockwell. If you happened to be at that March 2 meeting at Lane Tech High School, she was the one with the huge sign proclaiming: “I am not a short-term inconvenience”.

There are many others who share Knapp’s frustration. For the duration of the meeting, the stage in front of Lane Tech’s nearly full auditorium was a shooting gallery. Among the targets, lined up on the wooden stage like sitting ducks, were CTA President Frank Kruesi and Chicago Transit Board Chairman Carole Brown. Audience members came to hear about the details of the recently announced temporary closures on the Brown Line and, of course, to fire away.

It’s hard not to sympathize with their anger, especially since the CTA promised this wouldn’t happen.

Before receiving bids for the half-billion-dollar expansion project, the CTA had assured communities along the Brown Line that no closures would be necessary. Then the bids came in, at a staggering $150 million more than what the CTA had predicted. That was last May. Between then and January, the CTA kept the problem to themselves while they re-bid the project and planned other cost-saving modifications, including temporary station closures that the CTA said would save $22 million. By the time they announced the closures in mid-January, the deadline to submit the project’s final report to the Federal Transit Authority was about two weeks away, leaving no time for changes. Now CTA representatives are insisting they have no choice but to go forward within the timeline and budget required by the federal government.

The CTA’s lack of candor has angered communities all along the Brown Line, but Rockwell residents in particular feel betrayed. “I don’t think there’s any other stop that’s dealing with what we’re dealing with,” says AnnaLisa Lunn. “We built a business district based on the promise of the CTA”.

Lunn has lived in the neighborhood for 12 years and was president of the Greater Rockwell Organization (GRO) from 2002 to 2004. During that period, the area finally started securing the businesses they’d been working for years to attract.

Lunn says that she sat with CTA representatives in dozens of meetings over the past few years, during which she was consistently told that the Brown Line expansion would not mean closing Rockwell, or any other stop. She passed that encouraging message on to prospective businesspeople, several of whom decided to set up shop, only to learn in January that the CTA was planning to close the stop for up to eight months.

“This is now seven businesses later and they’re suddenly telling us that they’re going to close the stations”, Lunn says. “They put us through three or four years of public work and then tossed it out the window without telling anyone”.

Not surprisingly, the question that came up again and again at Lane Tech was why the CTA hadn’t come to the affected communities earlier with the news, and tried to work on an alternative to station closures. Chairman Brown repeatedly apologized for ever promising that no station closures would be necessary but insisted that the CTA hadn’t been sure about the closures until just before submitting the grant agreement to the feds.

Regardless of the intentions behind it, many Rockwell residents see the CTA’s decision as a violation of trust. And as if to maximize the community’s alienation, when the CTA announced the closures, it also amended its by-laws to ensure that station closures or bus route changes that last less than one year and are the result of construction are not subject to the normal public hearing requirements. When Les Kniskern, GRO’s first vice-president, brought this up at the March 2 meeting, Brown fumbled a bit, and tried to assure the audience that the CTA was dedicated to working with them, regardless of whether their by-laws required it or not. To many in the room, it sounded a little hollow.

But Lunn and others aren’t ready to give up. “They keep telling us that the decision has been made”, she said. “We just don’t buy into it”. And there’s some evidence that the CTA might be listening. Since the meeting at Lane Tech, Lunn was invited to give testimony at a CTA board meeting. She argued that the $22 million that will be saved by the closures is only about 4% of the total cost of the project, and implored the board to look for the money elsewhere.

Lunn also described some of the people and businesses that would be hurt if the stop were closed. Knapp, for example, left her life as a TV producer in L.A. to come set up her shop. She got a call from a friend in the neighborhood, flew in to see the storefront, and moved in three weeks later. “I jumped into something that I didn’t know anything about, but I knew that it was my dream”, she says. Asked if she thinks her business would survive, she cringes. “That’s an awful question”, she says.

Lunn is optimistic that Knapp and the other business owners won’t be forced to find out the answer. She and other GRO members are planning to take their concerns to the mayor and then to their federal representatives if necessary. “I’m fired up…Our community usually prevails”, Lunn explains, recalling the turnout at Lane Tech. “They’re like pit bulls on a porkchop”.

If the Rockwell residents seem stubborn or naïve in their perseverance, it’s because many of them share the sense that they’re fighting for something special. “It’s completely family-owned kinds of businesses here”, Kniskern says, “and we stand to lose that. We don’t have the chains here to keep us afloat”.

But the community’s unique fragility is also a source of strength. “All we have to do is go down there and look into the faces of the people we care about”, Lunn says, “and we know there’s right on our side”.