With every slap of his shoeshine rag, Alex Hinds hears a steam engine chug-chugging.
”The ol`-time coal-burning locomotives made a special kind of sound,”
he said while working on a customer`s patent-leather oxfords in a bootblack shop tucked into a corner of Chicago`s Union Station. Hinds first came to his duty-post in 1939 when he was a boy of 15 and a shine cost 10 cents.
”Chuga, chuga. Chuga, chuga. Chuga-chuga. Chuga-chuga. CHUGA-CHUGA-CHUGA! they`d go when they was first starting up,” Hinds said, snapping his buffing rag in time to that long-ago rhythm. ”Then the engine would take up the couplers` slack, and you`d hear a creaking noise followed by a loud BANG! That meant the sleeping cars and diners would be slowly sliding out the train shed headed for the West Coast or the Rockies and all those far-away places. Somehow, these new diesel engines, they just don`t have the same magic.”
Soon now, Hinds` vest-pocket workspace may be as much a thing of the past as are his steam-era memories. According to the blueprints for a project that would piggy-back a 25-story, twin-tower office building over the Union Station`s waiting room, his shoeshine chairs and leather-stitching machines are scheduled to go.
The developer, U.S. Equities Group, claims the project will leave the structure`s character essentially unchanged–even while conceding that it requires considerable alteration of the station`s peripheral areas. The preservationist community, though, doesn`t buy that argument, and both sides take their debate to the Chicago City Council on Thursday.
The Union Station, its fans will inform the city fathers, is virtually our last architectural link to a self-assured age whose ebullience was measured by its enthusiasm for railroad travel. Alex Hinds is the first to second that motion.
”Taking a train trip was an event back then,” Hinds said, recalling his first days on the job. ”People would already be in a holiday mood when they came to the station. Over on the other side–in the part they already tore down–there used to be a big, long ramp, just like this staircase here. The red caps would be running up and down, fetching folks` steamer trunks to the baggage counters, and as they came down that ramp, everybody was dressed to the nines. Once, I remember seeing Duke Ellington–all the show people passed through here. But you didn`t have to be no celebrity. Just ordinary folks would be all bubbly and excited to be going off somewhere.”
Hinds was recalling a section of the station that fell victim to the wrecker`s ball in 1969, while pointing to a monumental-scale marble staircase, adjacent to his shoeshine shop, that is due for extinction under the current renovation plans. As originally built, Union Station consisted of two structures. East of Canal Street, passengers made their way to the trains through a great concourse whose weblike, structural-steel-and-glass ceiling hovered 90 feet. Or at least it did until that part of the station was replaced by the Gateway Center office building. West of Canal, and connected with the concourse by a tunnel under the street, was the waiting room, which looks the same today as it did when the station was dedicated in 1925.
”When they tore down the Illinois Central Station, we all thought,
`Well, at least the North Western is still standing.` When the North Western went, we said, `Thank God, the Union Station is still with us.` Now some people look at the plans to alter this place and argue that half a loaf will still be better than nothing,” observed architect Walker Johnson, while giving a reporter a guided tour of the premises. ”Myself, I think that we`re already down to half a loaf.”
Johnson, a member of the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois, noted that the organization is not opposed to the basic concept of an office- building addition to Union Station, only to the version of the project currently on the developer`s drawing boards. Back in the era of World War I, when plans for Union Station were first made, putting together a piece of real estate big enough to hold such a structure was no easy task, Johnson explained. So the developers of that day often provided themselves with an additional incentive for solving that title-deed gordian knot by building in the potential of a subsequent add-on to their original project.
Accordingly, the Union Station was built on caissons sufficient to support a future, 22-story addition. But because of the Depression and World War II, that projected tower was never realized. If they would only take advantage of the building`s original foundations, Johnson and his
preservationist allies argue, U.S. Equities could have its new office building without violating the station`s integrity.
His own generation of architects, Johnson noted, is not very comfortable designing on a grand scale. But the Union Station originally was conceived by Daniel Burnham, the author of the Plan for Chicago, and although the final design was drafted by other hands, it remained faithful to Burnham`s famous maxim: ”Make no small plans.”
Taking their inspiration from ancient Rome`s Baths of Caracalla, the station`s architects spanned its waiting room with a 100-foot-in-diameter barrel vault. Then they filled that great volume of space with appointments that would have been worthy of a latter-day emperor. Towering Corinthian columns guard the room`s approaches and massive, sculpted figures dwarf a traveler as he passes between them en route to the train shed. In Roman times, those architectural details would have been built upon the blood and sweat of great teams of slave laborers. In the 1920s, they were the product of the design and engineering breakthroughs that had recently made 20th-Century architecture virtually synonymous with Chicago`s architecture.
”My daddy was the chief engineer for the job of building that vault,”
said Jack McGuire, an associate of Johnson`s in the fight to preserve Union Station. ”At the time, he was working for American Three Way Prism Co., which developed an ingenious system, special for this structure, of holding all that plate glass in place.”
Looking up into the waiting room`s transparent ceiling, McGuire recalled that when he was 5, and the station was under construction, every Sunday he and his father would ride the Madison Avenue streetcar downtown, so that he could follow the progress of his father`s handiwork. Finally, one week they arrived to see that the last of the glass panels had been installed in the network of I-beams from which they are suspended. The bright light of a sunshiny day was streaming through the ceiling`s structural-steel tracery and casting its enlarged image on the room`s floor.
”Well, we finally realized the old man`s dream,” the senior McGuire said with the craftsman`s pride indigenous to that era. ”There she is, son: The great light of Burnham`s love–and with a very visible means of support.” Nor were Daniel Burnham`s dreams the only ones to which the Union Station has been witness. An airport is only a high-tech passageway, down which travelers quickly flee en route to somewhere else. But in a railroad station, observed Dorothy McManus, the human condition is on stage 24 hours a day underneath a barrel-vault proscenium arch.
”Can you see what each of those statues is carrying?” McManus asked. She was pointing through the windows of her Travelers and Immigrants Aid office to the figures that flank the passageway between the waiting room and the train shed. One of them has an owl in her hands, the other a rooster.
”When I first came to work here, we were told that that symbolized the fact that the Union Station was the first one designed for around-the-clock operations.”
The bench immediately outside of McManus` office was occupied by an Amish family whose anachronistic clothing seemed to redouble the force of her past- tense verbs. In the background, a booming-bass loudspeaker was announcing the incoming and departing trains, many of whose names haven`t changed since McManus started working here at the tail end of the golden age of railroad travel.
”Thirty five years ago, when I was a brand new volunteer, the Golden Lion Restaurant, on the Clinton Street side of the station, was world-famous for their roast beef,” McManus recalled, sandwiching her narrative in between answers to the steady stream of travelers` inquiries that came before her.
”Every table was set with a single red rose, and on Saturday night the limos would be lined up all along the street while Chicago`s high society dined there.”
McManus` own duties more often took her to the other end of the station`s social ladder. In winter, she noted, the train shed`s approaches are marked by the flickering lights of 1,500 lamps that keep the switches from freezing; and during the Korean War years, long lines of troop trains moved in and out of those switching tracks all day and all night long.
”Up on a balcony, overlooking the train shed, we had our USO headquarters,” McManus said. ”All through the 1950s, we`d stay late a couple of nights a week to work with the GIs and their families. For a lot of the boys, it would be their first time away from home. So we kept stationery so they could drop a note to their folks. Or we`d help out some soldier`s wife by watching her baby while she took a few minutes off to get herself a bite to eat.”
Since every coast-to-coast traveler had to change trains in Chicago, noted John Felty, a lot of his generation passed through Union Station on their way to World War II. On his most recent Chicago stopover, Felty came through the Travelers Aid office while traveling to his Florida retirement home. But after listening to McManus` yesteryear recollections, he contributed some of his own.
The first time he saw Union Station, Felty was a high school student making an excursion trip to the 1933 World`s Fair. ”St. Louis, where I`m from, is really just an overgrown small town,” he said. ”So you can imagine how wide-eyed my teenage buddies and I were when we stepped off that train and walked out into the crowded hub-bub of this huge station.”
Ten years later, Felty came through Union Station again, this time as a Navy lieutenant in command of a group of sailors en route to Adm. William
”Bull” Halsey`s Pacific fleet. In the mid-`40s, he remembered, the waiting room was carpeted, wall-to-wall, with khaki and blue uniforms. ”Do anything drastic to this station,” he said, upon hearing of the proposed renovation, ”and you`d be tampering with an awful lot of ex-GIs` memories. Some things, you just can`t put a price tag on.”
A few minutes later, out in the train shed, 82-year-old James Stillman and 65-year-old Robert Thomas jointly seconded that motion. Stillman, a retired physician, and Thomas, a former Rock Island Line dining-car waiter, were about to depart Union Station aboard Stillman`s privately owned railroad car, which was coupled to the end of the evening train to St. Louis.
”Why do I keep on doing this? No, I don`t need the money. I`m nicely fixed by now,” Thomas said, anticipating a reporter`s question, while stocking the car`s Pullman kitchen with supplies for the trip. ”But being a railroad man gets into your blood. For him, the Doc, this is his toy.”
”They`re really going to tamper with one of the most magnificent remaining stations in the country for the sake of saving some developer a few bucks?” asked Stillman, who was standing on the observation platform, as his car lurched into motion. Then as he and his 1922-model railroad-president`s personal sleeper began rolling down the tracks, Stillman answered his own question in a manner that would have made Daniel Burnham proud.
”Of course, I could fly anywhere I want for a fraction of the fortune it cost me to renovate this old car. But what is an airplane except a flying sardine can?” Stillman said, his words underscored by the click-ity-clack sound of the car`s wheels. ”When you get down to it, there`s really only way to go in life: First Class all the way!”
