Chicago Union Station

This guide to Chicago Union Station follows the 1987 staging of a shootout on its grand staircase for Brian De Palma's The Untouchables, and the earlier film it was built to echo: Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 Battleship Potemkin and its runaway pram on the Odessa Steps. It traces the real travertine marble beneath that staged gunfire, quarried in Italy when the station opened in 1925, and the costly rebuild it needed decades later after generations of footsteps wore it thin. Listen for the newspaper shims workers found tucked under the handrails.