Lost on the concourse
On Friday, a disgruntled would-be inventor stormed into a patent attorney’s office on Chicago’s near west side and killed three people before a police SWAT team marksman took him down.
Kudos to the CPD for not hesitating to take the shot when a clear opportunity presented itself. But that’s not my topic here.
The incident caused the total closure of the office tower at 500 W. Madison—including the Ogilvie Transportation Center at its base. News reports estimated some 50,000 commuters were affected during the Friday afternoon rush. Metra employees followed their security protocol and went into lock-down, and no trains moved for nearly two hours. Once the trains were rolling again, around quarter after five, it was a free-for-all to find a seat and—with equipment moves interrupted along with the train runs—the regular departure schedule had no chance of being restored until some time on Saturday.
Architectural aesthetics aside for the moment, it must be noted that all three of Chicago’s surviving stations—Union, La Salle Street, and the North Western (aka Ogilvie)—have been rebuilt in the past few decades with high-rise office buildings atop them. Now, as we have seen, the wisdom of cramming so many multiple uses into a single place may be lacking. Once upon a time, a train station was just that. Now, with fifty floors of offices stacked up, or more, there are at least that many avenues for something to happen that will shut down, not just an office building, but a major commuter hub as well.
Of course, part of my opinion is shaped by my love of architectural history. No offence to Helmut Jahn—his Citigroup Center is pretty cool with its cascading waterfall of glass and steel—but I’d like that building so much more if it stood on almost any other block of the city and hadn’t replaced the Chicago and North Western Station, with its sixty-foot-tall columns and classic, rusticated Renaissance Revival majesty.
Worse is the travesty inflicted on the concourse of Union Station in the late 1960s. This was once a massive Beaux-arts confection from the drafting table of Daniel Burnham, and served as a grandiose welcome to the city. Now it’s a rat’s warren of cramped corridors, with any hope for a clear passageway obstructed by the myriad structural columns of the heinous Brutalist office tower that stands on its head. A visitor arriving at Union Station can wander aimlessly until they find their way out, and often will never come across the grand remnant of the station’s past, the Great Hall.
The third station, the La Salle Street terminal of the old Rock Island line, is under yet another mediocre high-rise and abuts the Chicago Stock Exchange. I don’t even want to get into the potential ramifications, from a disaster/terror-attack/crazy-person-with-a-gun standpoint, of that combined use.
