100 years ago, the first trains pulled into Union Station

Chicago Tribune

11-05-2025

Chicago's Union Station has borne witness to the gamut of emotions, its cavernous waiting room echoing with everything from raucous laughter to profound despair ever since the first train arrived there 100 years ago this month.
The imposing station that sprawls along Canal Street west of the Loop was artistically inspired by the massive ruins of Rome's Baths of Caracalla. On a more practical level, its blueprints addressed a problem identified earlier by architect Daniel Burnham in his 1909 'Plan of Chicago.'
With 22 railroad lines converging on Chicago, the city's center was covered by a spider's web of tracks. If one switch failed, a massive traffic jam ensued. In 1881, three lines made a dent in the problem. The Chicago & Alton, the Pittsburgh & Fort Wayne, and the Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad jointly established a Union Depot between Madison and Clinton streets and just west of the Chicago River.
When trains pulled into a terminal, the final station on their route, it meant another train couldn't use that track until its predecessor backed out. When Burnham got the contract to design the new Union Station, he placed it between two sets of multiple tracks. That 'permitted trains from the east and west to enter and leave simultaneously,' the Tribune reported on the station's July 23, 1925, opening day.
Burnham died in 1912 and while the station was built with his vision, it was completed by the firm later known as Graham, Anderson, Probst and White.
The station's cost was estimated at $75 million and picked up by a consortium of railroads. Burnham justified going big on a train station by forecasting in his 1909 plan that 'within a few years the waking hours of a million Americans will be spent in the business center of Chicago, where unpleasant sights and sounds should be abolished.'
Burnham took a similarly hyper-rational allotment of space to his design of the eight-story Union Station building.
Its predecessor had 'an energetic man in blue uniform and cap' who steered immigrants to quarters across Adams Street from the station.
The separation of newcomers continued in the Union Station, which had an immigrants' waiting room. Conductors telegraphed the names of immigrants aboard incoming trains.
The Woman's Waiting Room had stairs leading down to a nursery. A doctor, a nurse, and a matron were present at all times.
There were formal and casual dining facilities, staffed by the famed Harvey Girls, who waited on tables in what's considered the nation's first restaurant chain at train stations across the country.
There were two jail cells for offenders being taken to prison, a morgue for travelers who died on a train, and a chapel for those feeling spiritually needy. One hospital handled customers' medical emergencies. Another cared for railroad employees.
The entrances from Clinton Street were quite modest. The Pennsylvania Railroad's manager insisted on that. He wanted to send a message that folks using those entrances weren't welcome.
On that side, the station was bordered by an intimidating motley of saloons, furniture-making workshops, and Chicago's garment district.
The station's cavernous space was emphasized by architects' age-old gambit of bringing people through a cramped space into a towering one, thus psychologically underlying the latter, noted Fred Ash in his book 'Chicago Union Station.'
'Patrons entering from the east had their visual field first constricted then expanded, causing them to instinctively lift their eyes,' Ash wrote. 'Columns of Italian travertine soared over a belt course of warm gray marble ten feet high.'
At one end, a pair of niches were occupied by hulking, plaster figures. Day was accompanied by a rooster, Night by an owl.
The scene was diffusely lit by skylights and shadows cast by the coffered barrel-vaults through which they ran, 125 feet above the floor.
At its formal opening, Mayor William Dever pronounced the Union Station the finest thing Chicago had accomplished in a long time. But his eloquence was outdone by a chemical analysis made by the R.W. Hunt & Co.
It revealed that the station's heritage was far older than the 1888 establishment of a predecessor station, the Union Depot. The lengthier chronology was formulated after an examination of what appeared to be a 'bleeding pillar.'
'Sure enough, there were long streaks like old blood or iron rust, running from a point about ten feet up,' assistant station manager F.J. Burton told the Tribune in February 1925, before the station opened. 'Travertine marble is extremely porous, with crumbly holes in it that make it look like gorgonzola cheese.'
Coroner Oscar Wolff 'was called from a game of chess at the Hamilton Club' to examine the pillar, the Tribune story said.
He gave orders that no one touch the column, one of four at the south end of the Waiting Room, while he investigated.
Samples of whatever was causing the 'bleeding' were sent to the R.W. Hunt laboratory, which determined the substance to be 'rotted vegetable matter and iron oxide.'
'It was probably caught in a cavity about 7,000,000 years ago when the marble was forming,' the lab concluded.