CHICAGO — You only celebrate a 100th birthday once, and Amtrak made sure that the milestone for Chicago Union Station did not go unnoticed.
Officials including Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker were on hand today for ceremonies today (July 22, 2025) marking the centennial of the station’s dedication, held July 23, 1925, although — as Amtrak’s Jennifer Mitchell noted — the facility had opened on May 16, 2025. “What we would call a ‘soft opening’ today,” said Mitchell, Amtrak’s executive vice president, strategy and planning.
Pritzker — whose appearance assured the event received more local media attention than otherwise would have been the case — noted that visitors “from across the globe” have passed through the station first designed by celebrated Chicago architect Daniel Burnham and completed by the firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White.
“Whether coming from near or far, each of them have been welcomed to our city by this incredible building,” Pritzker said. “Today’s centennial celebration is certainly about this place and its architecture. It’s about its beauty, it’s about its majesty, but most of all, today is really a celebration of what this place has meant to our nation and to the people of Illinois.”
Mitchell provided a brief history of the building, and noted that since Amtrak took full ownership in 1984, it has spent more than $70 million on its restoration and improvement. The most visible result of that work is the massive skylight that illuminates the Great Hall, which had been blacked out as a security precaution during World War II. “In fact, it is better than the time that it was dedicated one hundred years ago tomorrow,” Mitchell said, “since the skylight no longer leaks.”
Other speakers at the event, held on a balcony overlooking the station’s Great Hall, were Joan Johns of the Chicago Architecture Center; Scott Lothes of the Center for Railroad Photography & Art; and Kirk Dillard, board chairman for the Regional Transportation Authority.
Johns noted the $75 million spent to build the structure over a 10-year period would be the equivalent of about $1 billion today, detailed some of the many architectural honors it has received, and said the Center was looking to conduct “more and more tours of this space.” (Details on the organization’s many Chicago tours are available at architecture.org; specifics of the Union Station tour, the next of which is set for Aug. 14, are available here.)
Lothes’ organization provided photos for banners celebrating the anniversary that now hang in the Great Hall and the hallway leading into it. He noted how the station had long served as a magnet for photographers, including the organization’s founder, the late John Gruber, who documented the facility in 1965 for a noted Trains Magazine article for which he took more than 2,000 photos.
“And of course, John wanted to focus on the grand architecture like we see in our picture of the concourse and this building together,” Lothes said. “But John really loved the the fact that this was a place that brought people together people from all over the city, from all over the country, from all over the world. In that space, you have this incredible human drama that plays out.
“John looked for that in his photography. He looked for moments that show the everyday greatness of this space. And when we were asked to put together images for this space, for this celebration, we look for images in our collections that could really convey the everyday greatness of Chicago Union Station and the people that come here all the time.”
Dillard, who said the station is used by more people on a daily basis than Chicago’s Midway Airport, said Union Station “combines two of Illinois’ most iconic regional symbols: our unmatched architecture and our world class transportation system.” He also noted that the station could play an even bigger role in regional transportation if Metra can fulfill the vision of CEO Jim Derwinski to develop regular rail service between the station and O’Hare Airport.
That, he said, would “require significant capital investment to complete flyover and grade separations to assure we don’t have to compete with the freight trains that are there today. But it is possible, it is transformative … and this is Daniel Burnham’s building. We should have no small plans, and we should plan large.” (Dillard and Pritzker both invoked Burnham’s famed maxim, “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.”)
Pritzker also addressed the station’s future.
“Our collective action has been to focus on unlocking a vast system of new and expanded passenger rail services throughout the Midwest, with Chicago’s Union Station serving as its center point,” he said. He noted the state and federal partnership involved in that effort to date — as well as plans for further improvements to both Union Station and the rail infrastructure leading to it, known as the Chicago Hub Improvement Program. [See “Amtrak, agencies apply for more than $450 million …,” Trains News Wire, Dec. 18, 2024].\
“We are still fighting for federal funding to truly unlock our potential and further connect Illinois and the rest of the nation,” Pritzker said. “… I really am very, very proud to see the vision that’s being realized here at Union Station. It’s the shining emblem of the world class rail infrastructure that we have built in the state of Illinois.”
A video of the ceremony — along with articles on the station from the CRPA magazine, Railroad Heritage; Trains; and Railroad & Railfan — are slated to be available on the Chicago Union Station website by the end of this week. A new article on the station is also scheduled for the October issue of Trains.
With all of Metra’s problems, service to O’Hare is fanciful. If memory serves the North Central line has been running 22 years and remains weekday rush hour.
It’s too bad that Amtrak can’t fix up its trains as well as it does its stations. I remember reading a book about the demise of the famed Connecticut River steamboats in the 1930s. There was a sentence in that book that said “A few yards of new plush in the saloon didn’t help much while the river side dock was falling in.” A similar expression applicable to Amtrak might be “Polishing up the granite in the city stations didn’t help much while the trains were barely able to run down the tracks.”
Thank you to the beloved and treasured Chicago Union Station for existing! Happy 100th anniversary to the landmark of America’s railroad capital!
Dr. Güntürk Üstün