At one time, most major cities in North America had grand passenger stations. Their architecture varied; some had soaring canopies of glass and iron, some the form of Greek temples or Roman baths, and some were mock Jacobean great houses or pretend Parisian palaces. Such structures, then, were about more than efficiency — they were about making a statement, a vast sign that said something like, “Behold, traveler; the Railroad resides here.”
Of course, this is a chapter from the past. Publicly subsidized highways, the introduction of the commercial jetliner, and changing patterns of travel all hit the railways hard. By the late 1960s, cities that once saw hundreds of trains per day were reduced to seeing one or two; meanwhile, some secondary routes were greatly reduced, quite often to none. Many stations closed, and Amtrak, which resumed responsibility for most long-distance services in 1971, had little need for expansive urban stations. All too often our grand downtown edifices were closed, many meeting the wrecking ball.
A select few survive to this day, still serving Amtrak’s passenger trains on a daily or better basis. My favorites are all “union stations,” buildings constructed by several railroads to consolidate urban services into a single, convenient location. My favorite is probably Portland, Ore., the station of my youth, but I also love three others — Los Angeles; St. Paul, Minn.; and Chicago. Each is a beautiful example of railroad architecture at its peak.
This stated, each also has its flaws. Portland’s is a cramped and confusing combination of an 1890s Romanesque Revival exterior and a 1920s Art Deco interior. St. Paul’s is located in, well, St. Paul, rather than in the more populous Minneapolis. Los Angeles is a beautiful 1930s combination of Mission Revival and Art Deco, but remains an inefficient stub terminal design — a problem to be fixed by Metrolink at a cost of $2 billion.
And then there’s Chicago. Planned and directed by Pennsylvania Railroad, Chicago Union Station opened in 1925. The Windy City’s Union Station remains impressive outside, with its long colonnaded façade; inside, its main hall with its 219-foot-high ceiling is as breathtaking as the day it opened. The scale of things, with its hulking interior columns, is more than a classical revival fantasy, it is a powerful expression of Chicago’s robust, monumental architectural character. Yet, over time, the station has also suffered. Metra and Amtrak must cooperate in this bustling shared space. Its passenger concourse has been rebuilt several times since 1969, and today remains a cramped, maze-like space that makes the seasoned traveler sigh, “Well, at least it’s not New York Penn Station.”
Still, it is a minor miracle that so much of what is good about the station remains intact. Relatively few of its companions in Chicago survive unscathed; Chicago & North Western’s nearby Beaux-Arts edifice, for example, was razed for an office tower in 1984, with the station operations shoved into an uninspired glass box at the tower’s base. Given the location in the heart of the city, proposals to build an office tower atop Union Station show up from time to time — Amtrak itself proposed such a thing in 2017 — but so far, each has faded after a short flurry of press. For now, it is possible, as one critic once said of New York’s long-departed Pennsylvania Station, to “enter the city like a god” — at least, if you can find your way up into the reception halls from the concourse. There, among columns larger than redwoods, and roofed in under vast skylights, there remains that sense of wonder that rail travel once instilled.
—Alexander Benjamin Craghead is a transportation historian, photographer, artist, and author.