[Mr Downtown]

Some of you guys should read for comprehension. I believe the closest I've come to praising this design is calling it "inoffensive."

As for the history, first, Daniel Burnham had virtually nothing to do with Chicago Union Station, except recommending that one be built. When he died in 1912, all that had been done was a parti sketched out by Thomas Rodd of the Pennsylvania R.R. The design that got built was by a successor firm to the successor firm to D.H. Burnham & Co.

During construction, the railroads decided to add the office building over the headhouse, and they actually had to go back and redo the building foundations (at no little expense) to allow that. A few years later, they concluded there was no market for so much office space west of the river and dropped that part of the plan.

Fifty years later, no one wanted 50-foot-deep square-doughnut office floorplates, but Penn Central controlled an entire block next to the river where a modern office tower could go, and saw no future for that big empty concourse. Only two years later, of course, Amtrak decided Union Station would be the station to use in Chicago, and five years later RTA was created to preserve and expand suburban train operations.