Next time you’re walking through Chicago’s Loop, make your way over to the corner of Randolph and State Streets. If you look up, you’ll see a high-rise that houses both apartments and retail stores, called “Block 37.”

Now look down. If somehow you could see through the sidewalk below, you would see that you’re standing atop a vast underground government structure, which is roughly the size of a football field.

The structure lies below the atrium stores and offices, below the pedway underneath, and even below the subways further down.

The structure was constructed to serve as a sleek new “superstation” designed to whisk people on high-speed trains to both of Chicago’s airports.

But that was not to be. Instead, the structure is now nothing more than a gigantic, unfinished, abandoned money pit.

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David Greising, president of the Better Government Association, is a former Chicago newspaper reporter who once ventured below ground to see the structure.

“Have you ever been to a cavern?” Greising. said. “There are not stalagmites and stalactites, but it has the feeling of spelunking. You feel like you’re in a cave that has been abandoned for eons.”

The idea for this station was sparked 20 years ago, when the city approved construction of the mixed-use building that now sits on Block 37 – a prime Loop lot which had remained tantalizingly vacant for decades. Why not build a giant station underneath?

“It did speak to this notion in Chicago of big ideas, and it was a big idea,” Greising said. “But just like Block 37 defied redevelopment for many, many years and decades, [the superstation] has also defied conclusion, although we have spent a substantial amount of money getting it started.”

How much money? When NBC 5 Investigates ran the numbers a decade ago, we found that taxpayers had already paid more than $400 million for the station’s construction costs, plus interest on the bonds and loans used to build it. That was just for the station itself.

Officials estimated that it would eventually cost another $1.5 billion more to actually create the high-speed tracks and trains needed to reach the airports.

So, by 2010 – in the midst of the Great Recession – the city mothballed the project, turning the colossal, oversized cellar into a mysterious, padlocked crypt. Since then, it’s been referred through the years as “The Batcave,” “The Money Pit,” “Moria” (from The Lord of the Rings), or – as NBC 5 Investigates has described it – “The Superstation to Nowhere.”

“All of a sudden, we, as journalists, get summoned to a press conference in the megastation that is in mothballs,” Greising said. “We go down the elevator, and there’s Elon Musk and [then-Mayor] Rahm Emanuel announcing that they’ve reached a deal [with] Musk and his Boring Company.”

In 2018, then-Mayor Emanuel still wanted to make something of what was – at that point –a literal hole-in-the ground. Emanuel sent out requests for proposals, and Musk responded.

Along with his companies Tesla and Space-X, Musk had created the Boring Company – yes, “Boring” – after he got frustrated with traffic james in Los Angeles.

The company’s website shows a large, cylindrical machine – nicknamed “Prufrock” – which can drill horizontally underground. Boring says Prufrock is “designed to construct mega-infrastructure projects in a matter of weeks instead of years.”

“We think the Loop system, which will ultimately transition to the hyperloop system – there’s the potential for a revolutionary transport system,” Musk said during the 2018 press conference with Mayor Emanuel.

It certainly looked revolutionary: Musk’s company created detailed animation showing people in a sleek and renovated superstation, boarding Tesla-like glass pods, which are then lowered and moved on “sleds” through a network of underground tubes at more than 150 miles an hour, reaching the airport in just about twelve minutes.

“Getting from the city to O’Hare, or back from O’Hare to the city, is a race against time,” Mayor Emanuel said at the time. “And we’re going to give commuters a leg up in that race.”

“It had the feel of a sort of late-night conversation – big ideas, two big thinkers, the sky’s the limit,” Greising said. “Elon Musk was sort of at the height of that period in which he was doing a lot of creative things. …. There was a mystique to him.”

In fact, Musk promised that he would dig all the tunnels, and supply all of the high-speed transport in just three-to-four years. He also vowed that he wouldn’t spend a single cent of public money.

“We were, I would say, in the press corps, almost universally skeptical that it would ever happen,” Greising said. “It had the feel of a pipe dream.”

It turns out that feeling was prescient. In the months and years following that 2018 press conference, Greising said he would circle back from time-to-time, checking with the city to see if anything might be going on with the Musk proposal. “And I never saw any evidence that there was anything serious underway,” he said.

Eventually Mayor Emanuel left office, and his successors had absolutely no interest in Musk’s proposal. Musk himself quickly moved on to buy the social media company Twitter (which he re-named X), and now oversee budget cuts for the Trump administration.

Unfortunately, however, that may not be the last we hear about the abandoned superstation: The city of Chicago used federal grant money to pay off the loans which had been taken out to build the station. However, that money – according to the U.S. government --- was earmarked specifically for transportation purposes. If the underground structure never serves as a transportation hub, the government could conceivably claw back that grant money.

To date, however, no one has come calling for a payback.

Meanwhile, the padlocks and mothballs are back in place – with no future in sight – for Chicago’s Superstation to Nowhere.