No, not a squash of passengers from Amtrak or Metra commuter trains. Squash as in the sport played on a court with rackets and a ball.
A four-walled glass court surrounded by bleachers has been constructed at the north end of the Great Hall to accommodate the Professional Squash Association’s world championships tournament, being held this week through March 2.
The $1 million tournament has attracted more than 100 top players from more than 25 countries. Reigning champions Mohamed ElShorbagy and Raneem El Welily, both Egyptians, are the top seeds. The top American in the tournament is Amanda Sobhy.
A bit unusual for a train station to hold a sporting event? Not necessarily, says Marc Magliari, a spokesman for Amtrak, which owns Union Station. The Professional Squash Association has an affinity for iconic venues and has been holding tournaments in Vanderbilt Hall at New York City’s Grand Central Station since 2017.
Amtrak is happy to earn revenue by renting out parts of the facility to help pay the $22-million cost of renovating the famous Great Hall and its 219-foot-long skylight, Magliari said.
“We believe there’s a market for the Burlington Room, the Legacy Club and parts of the Great Hall,” Magliari said.
Holding a squash tournament in a busy train station has the potential for luring many new fans, but the Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic, Blair Kamin, wondered if Amtrak was sending the right message by hosting such an event in the Great Hall while crowds of commuters wend their way through the awkward ramps, stairways, and platforms across the street in the station’s concourses.
“To beleaguered commuters, the event must seem like Amtrak, the station’s owner, is fiddling with Roman-inspired architecture while they do a slow burn,” Kamin said. “Is this any way to run a railroad station — Roman imperial grandeur for the few, a rat maze for the many?”
Magliari disagrees. Amtrak’s improvements to the station are a work in progress, he insists, pointing to the renovation to the Clinton Street side of the station and installation of a new elevator making it more Americans with Disabilities Act-accessible.
‘Way off topic, but here’s a historical Chicago-squash connection: an experimental nuclear reactor built in an unused squash court at the U of Chicago hosted the first controlled nuclear reaction in history in December 1942.
With the original concourse replaced by the “awkward” little warren, one should not be surprised that the so-called “Great Hall” would be rented out….in Amtrak times a not great space devoid of purpose or patrons. Half century ago this writer would have loved squash there.