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A Brief History Of The Architecturally Imposing, Soon-To-Be-Revamped Union Station

By Rachel Cromidas in Arts & Entertainment on Jul 26, 2017 8:31PM

Chicago's Union Station is many things—a nearly one-hundred years old railroad station; one of Amtrak's largest and busiest stations; and long overdue for a major renovation.

Union Station serves as many as 130,000 people a day—nearly as many as Midway Airport—And the multi-level station can be, in short, a bit confusing to navigate. So city and state transportation officials announced a big push earlier this year to modernize and renovate the imposing West Loop station.

Besides making it easier to navigate the station, the goal of the $1 billion, six-year overhaul, led up by Chicago-based Riverside Investment & Development, would also be to add better dining options and possibly a hotel and residential towers under the Union Station umbrella.

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Historic photo of Chicago's Grand Central Station at 201 W. Harrison St., via Wikimedia Commons.

Union Station, last renovated in the early '90s, has come a long way from its 1925 opening. First proposed by iconic city planner Daniel Burnham, and later completed by local firm Graham Anderson Probst & White, Union Station was envisioned as a national railroad hub, replacing the city's very overcrowded Grand Central passenger Station. The station was designed in the popular Beaux Arts architecture style, with a Great Hall featuring a 219-foot vaulted skylight, marble floors and walls, Corinthian-style columns and a grand staircase. The station received $32 million-worth of improvements in 1991, and in 2002 it was designated a Chicago historic Landmark building.

Now, even more changes are in store: Think: 110,000 square feet of new retail space, including a food hall in the vein of the Loop's increasingly popular food hall trend. Additionally, in the first phase of the station's redevelopment, the developer is planning to transform its eight-story main building into offices and a 350-room hotel. As the Tribune notes, currently many of the floors above the station's iconic Great Hall are vacant. Lastly, the developer would build two new, 12-story residential towers above the existing main structure.

The second and third phases of redevelopment would include building a massive parking structure, two new office tours just south of the main building, and a 500,000 square-foot residential and retail tower at the southeast corners of Jackson Boulevard and Canal Street. It's all coming on the heels of a years long development boom just west of the Chicago River.

Have a look at our photo gallery, above, commemorating the station's stunning Great Hall, exterior, sweeping skylights and staircases, and more.