I'm 75 years old. Well before July 2024, as a kid, I remember my cousin and I took the SUPER CHIEF to Los Angeles. The train was also called the El Capitan. You'd see the television commercials of the Native American boy dancing around to promote it. That was my very firt trip to California. I had been to the station before then to greet relatives coming to Chicago for a visit. I remember the noise from the train engines, the announcements, people yelling. I got a big kick out of seeing the nervous anticipation on the face of my mother. I marveled at the size of the trains. Hadn't seen anything so big before!

As a 79-year-old retiree, I remember when railroads were more popular than airlines. I recall riding on the Rock Island Railroad from my home in south suburban Blue Island to the La Salle Street Station on Van Buren Street in downtown Chicago. And then there was the nearby Dearborn Station, also referred to as the Polk Street Station, which was the oldest of the six intercity train stations serving downtown Chicago. Located at Dearborn and Polk Streets, adjacent to Printers Row, the three-story, Romanesque Revival structure with the 12-story clock tower opened in 1885. Inside the pink granite and red brick building were the train platforms, a large train shed, ticket counters, waiting rooms and Fred Harvey Company restaurants. By 1920, Dearborn Station served as a terminal for 25 railway lines, serving 17,000 passengers daily on 122 trains. By 1976, the train shed was demolished and tracks were removed. The train station stood abandoned into the mid-1980s, then was converted into a shopping mall with retail shops, restaurants, bars and entertainment venues. Remember when it was incorrectly referred to as Dearborn Street Station in a 1974 episode of M*A*S*H in which Hawkeye Pierce (Alan Alda) craves the BBQ ribs from a fictional restaurant adjacent to the station. Dearborn Station was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 and designated a Chicago Landmark in 1982.

Station is nice historical building keeping it style in the middle of modern-architecture buildings. Inside is nothing special to see.

Not knowing anything about Dearborn station, but having seen the name on the front of the building from way up the other end of a street, we walked up and had a look around. It was very disappointing that none of the various shops inside, even one specialising photography, had even a post card of how the station looked originally, let lone any obvious history board describing the way the station functioned. While walking through the attractive parklands behind the building, which were once railway platforms and tracks, we had no idea, until arriving home in Australia and doing a search on Google, how extensive the area of railway activity once was. There should at the very minimum be an easily locatable information and photographic section within the restored building so that visitors can be informed as to the history of the site otherwise it doesn't mean all that much.

Perhaps because I live in Chicago. This building does not seem that special to me. Take a quick snapshot and leave. Unless you are a historian or love history, then you might want to study the deep story of the building.