CHICAGO — Two architectural design companies and Amtrak are soliciting input from people who frequent Chicago Union Station before embarking on a renovation project at the busy facility.
The outreach is part of a process to determine the latest round of improvements being funded in part by a recent Federal-State Partnership grant [see “Chicago Union Station to receive more than $93 million …,” Trains News Wire, Dec. 6, 2023].
The Chicago-based Epstein firm, in partnership with New York’s FX Collaborative, is attempting survey outreach with posters placed around the station that contain a QR code which travelers can access via smartphones. The rather extensive survey is also available here and requires about 10 minutes to complete.
It categorizes participants by home zip code, age, and sex, whether they are an Amtrak intercity rider or Metra commuter; frequency of visits,; and how they get to the station. Trains News Wire found it to be comprehensive in touching on aspects of current station operations that need examination.
The station is approaching its 100th anniversary in 2025. Originally owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad, Milwaukee Road, and Chicago, Burlington & Quincy (Gulf, Mobile and Ohio was a tenant), Union Station’s airy concourse was reduced to a basement beneath an office high-rise before Amtrak took over in 1971. Since then, the company has attempted to rework available space within the pillar-laden confines. The most recent renovation in 1990 created an exit corridor for intercity passengers between boarding lounges and gates.
Since then, Amtrak has made incremental improvements. Among them: relocating the first-class Metropolitan Lounge to a previously unoccupied area. It recently transformed the old Metropolitan space to an ancillary boarding lounge while removing seating from the always-congested main south boarding area. Amtrak passengers departing on most south concourse service (all trains except the Hiawatha Corridor and Empire Builder) are escorted from the Great Hall, which had been left untouched by the 1970 wrecking ball.
Paths for Metra commuters, however, typically congeal during every morning and evening rush hour, especially for those taking BNSF Railway trains to Aurora, Ill., out of the south boarding area. If there is a service disruption, stranded passengers caught in the cramped corridors have nowhere to go. The survey acknowledged most of these current shortcomings and asked for opinions on possible solutions. About 91% of the nearly 36 million passengers who transited the station in 2019 were Metra riders.
I took the survey. How dumb. A consultant was paid to come up with this? Any teams of architects could learn far more walking the station end-to-end in a couple of hours, than reading the survey results.
We have become a Nation of Bureaucrats.
Seldom (or never) mentioned is an insoluble problem, which is no viable connection between CUS and Chicago’s elevated or subway trains.
Oh, while I’m at it, if METRA wants to do something socially useful, CUS isn’t its biggest problem in “The Loop”. LaSalle Street “Station” is way beyond an utter disgrace. This mislocated hole in the wall serves the METRA Rock Island. If memory serves, METRA Southwest will be swicthed there upon completion of Chicago CREATE’s 75th Street Corridor. I’m not one, normally, to play the race card or socio-economic card, I seldom do. But I have to wonder if LaSalle Street would be tolerated if it served passengers for the North Shore’s wealthy suburbs. The LaSalle Street atrocity seems to be good enough for black Americans and middle-class whites who live in the southwestern tier of suburbs.
As an occasional patron of both METRA and Amtrak Ill take the survey. Seems to me that the probems are already known and the surgery will be an exercise in Community PR. Byt we’ll see.
The two trains I normally take, Amtrak Hiawatha and METRA BNSF, do not run into the problems enunmerated in the article.
It’s not like nothing has been done. The place is a whole lot better than it was ten, twenty, thirty years ago.
Surely beats the ’80s and early ’90’s now, though it did have some “character” back then too.
There exist no easy fixes for CUS. The office buildings squatting upon the lower concourse remnants are analogous to MSG on Penn Station. While the new train hall helps open boarding areas at Penn, nothing comparable is available at CUS. Hard to rectify past mistakes. All one has to do is stroll through GCT to recognize past excellence and mourn its loss.