It’s not just you — that entrance at Union Station may be unfamiliar. That’s because a new entrance that leads into the Great Hall was opened in the middle of the Clinton Street block of Union Station in early August.
“There’s a great change between the street level and floor level,” said Marc Magliari, spokesperson for Amtrak. “We gutted out that space.”
The Clinton entrance has been walled off since a 1980 fire, Magliari said. After the fire, from which one person died of smoke inhalation, he said, windows were removed and the openings were bricked over.
Now, the entrance is wide open with new windows looking into the Great Hall. The entrance also has ADA accommodation with a short elevator ride, Magliari said, though Amtrak has been seeking quotes for a temporary ramp from street level to floor level.
The Clinton Street entrance at Jackson Boulevard has long been equipped with automatic door actuators and a ramp into the Great Hall as well, Magliari said.
Colorful posters of Amtrak trains across the United States span across the walls above waiting chairs for passengers. These were reserved from the former Union Station parking lot after it was sold for the BMO Tower, Magliari said. Part of the proceeds from the sale, $10 million, was used to fund the renovations for a planned food hall, Magliari told the Sun-Times in 2019.
Posters from the Union Station’s former parking garage were preserved and are now on the walls of the Union Station lobby on South Clinton Street as seen on Sept. 20, 2023.
Pat Nabong/Sun-Times
“We wanted to preserve them,” he said. “It’s better than bare white walls.”
The food hall project was started in 2019. Though it’s may have seen some delays due to COVID, Magliari said, Amtrak’s main goal was to finish the entrance and space before construction began on Canal Street.
The space, between the Great Hall and Clinton Street on the station’s west side, was once the Fred Harvey Lunch Room, part of a national chain that catered to rail passengers.
Magliari said Amtrak doesn’t yet have a definitive timeline for the food hall but that the rail agency is in discussions with possible tenants. Amtrak is hoping to find a “master tenant” that will market out the space to different vendors.
The space is “roughed in,” Magliari said, meaning it is prepared for vendors to move in, but they will also be able to customize that space to their needs.
Plans for the food hall follow other renovations to Union Station, which opened in 1925. The Metropolitan Lounge, which offers soft drinks, coffee and snacks for passengers in business class, opened in 2016, the same year the former Women’s Lounge was revamped to be an event space. A skylight in the Great Hall was restored in 2018, fixing decades-long problems of water leaks.