The Great Hall Where a Movie Staged Its Most Famous Shootout

Inside the building on your right sits one of the great interior spaces in American rail travel, the Great Hall of Union Station, a vast room lit from above through a skylight set into a barrel vaulted ceiling. The station opened in May of nineteen twenty five after roughly a decade of construction, a Beaux Arts hall of marble columns and tall arched windows built when railroads still assumed every traveler deserved to feel the weight of a grand entrance.

More than sixty years later, the Great Hall became a movie set. For the nineteen eighty seven film The Untouchables, director Brian De Palma staged the story's climactic shootout on the station's great staircase, a sequence built as a direct homage to the Odessa Steps scene in the Soviet silent film Battleship Potemkin. In the finished scene, federal agent Eliot Ness helps a mother wrestle a baby carriage up the stairs just as gunfire erupts, the carriage bouncing down step by step while bullets fly around it, one of the most quoted sequences in American crime cinema. The production had originally planned to film that scene inside a hospital, but moved it to this station once the filmmakers saw what the Great Hall's marble staircase and towering windows could do for the shot. Commuters still cross that same staircase every day on their way to real trains, mostly unaware that one of Hollywood's most famous set pieces was staged on the exact steps beneath their feet. The Great Hall survived a long stretch when the rest of the station around it was threatened with demolition, and a series of restorations since has kept its skylight, its marble, and its row of tall wooden benches close to the condition travelers would have found when the station first opened its doors.