by Jerry DeMuth
Washington DC’s 1907 brick and granite Union Station was dead as a train station. Even after the federal government spent nearly $40m to convert it to a short-lived tourist information centre in 1976 it still was dead. The only life was the toadstools sprouting on the rain-soaked floors, and the homeless and the drug addicts who left the building filled with rat-harbouring trash and drug paraphernalia.
But two years ago, after 24 months and $166m of publicly and privately financed work that restored its former beaux arts beauty — and added a five-level parking garage for 1,550 cars and 80 buses — architect Daniel Burnham’s station, modelled on the Diocletian Baths and the Arch of Constantine in Rome, reopened as a successful retail and office centre.
All across the United States nearly 1,000 little-used and abandoned train stations, many called Union Station, have been restored and converted to retail and commercial use. The work has been spurred financially by the availability of rehabilitation and historic tax credits and property tax abatements, and commercially by the huge open spaces and extravagant settings.
But some renovated stations, like Washington’s Union Station, were not initially successful. Success has depended not only on the correct new use but also the right timing in relation to other activity in the surrounding area.
The revival of these large buildings with their luxurious architecture and rich histories dating back as far as 1885 have spurred and been spurred by the redevelopment of surrounding areas.
In the 1980s, Boston’s once-neglected South Station suddenly found itself in the heart of one of the city’s more vibrant real estate markets. This led to a $93m renovation that included rebuilding the tracks, ticket counters and baggage and waiting rooms, as well as adding retail and office space. As part of a $28m second phase, the station was connected with Boston’s rapid transit system, making the 1899 classical revival building a transportation hub for the entire city, as well as a retail and office centrepiece for the area.
Providing a new business and entertainment centre for the area was also the objective of the $75m renovation and redevelopment of West Philadelphia’s 1934 neoclassical 30th Street Station. The retail space was more than doubled to 30,000 sq ft and a 450-car underground garage added.
Jonathan Bortz, vice-president of Chicago-based LaSalle Partners and development director of Washington’s Union Station project, said his aim was to bring people back so that the station would again be “part of the city fabric”.
“We tried to create a unique sense of place through a mix of atmosphere and environment.”
“Union Station is no longer just a place to catch a train,” said Roger K Lewis, a practising architect and professor of architecture at the University of Maryland, 4 miles outside Washington. “It has become a new kind of civic centre. For many local residents it has become a destination, an architecturally exuberant hangout in which to spend both time and money.”
It is also spurring commercial growth in the once-depressed surrounding area. The vacant six-storey Old Post Office, immediately west of the station, was converted into a retail development so successful that another 340,350 sq ft was added, increasing the space by 50%. And two new office buildings totalling almost 500,000 sq ft were constructed just north of the station.
“All this development has been spurred on by the renovation of Union Station,” said Shalom Baranes, the Washington DC architect who worked on the renovation and conversion of the historic Old Post Office. “There’s a lot happening around the railroad station.”
Washington’s Union Station, which was built between 1903 and 1907, attracted 40,000 passengers a day during the mid-1930s and 200,000 a day during the second world war. The revived station, which again is being used by train passengers, has been bringing in 50,000 people daily.
“The new Union Station offers something for everybody,” pointed out William Swanson, managing director of LaSalle Partners, referring to the mix as “the right formula”. “Some come to admire the genuine beauty of the restored station, while others come to enjoy the entertainment, browse through the new shops or visit the trains with their children.”
The station, with its restored frescoes and gold-leaf-covered columns and ceilings, features a nine-screen theatre, more than 100 stores, 33 food shops and five full-service restaurants. The Presidential Suite now houses an upmarket restaurant. Weekly jazz concerts and other entertainment increase crowds still further.
Cincinnati officials and business leaders hope that their second attempt to redevelop the city’s 400,000-sq ft Union Station is a success. Closed in 1972 and purchased by the city in 1975 for $3m, the building was leased four years later to a developer who transformed it into a retail shopping mall, which lasted less than six years. The station, located a mile from downtown, is now being converted into a museum complex.
Indianapolis, Indiana’s Union Station which was closed in 1970, had two false starts in the mid- and late-1970s when attempts to create a shopping complex and then a visitors’ centre never progressed beyond a few repairs. But in the mid-1980s, following the completion in 1983 of a domed sports stadium and a convention centre nearby, the 1888 station with its 750,000 sq ft of floorspace was successfully converted into hotel space, 116 shops and restaurants and seven entertainment spots, plus a carnival section of electronic and traditional games.
Developer Robert A Borns said his plan was inspired by the activity he had seen at London’s railway stations.
The renovation preserved the Romanesque Revival architecture of the main station and the art deco of the train shed. In the station, $3m was spent on restoring the decorative plaster moulding and more than 3,000 sq ft of stained-glass windows and skylights that crown the 70ft vaulted ceiling. Thirteen Pullman or sleeping railroad cars were converted into 26 hotel suites.
“We had a derelict train station that people wanted to consign to oblivion and tear down,” said Mayor William H Hudnut III several months after it reopened in April 1986. “Instead, we now have a $60m centre that is a magnet to shoppers and tourists and an anchor for the central business district.”
The project was a partnership between private developers and the city, with the city, among other things, granting a tax break that is reduced over a 10-year period.
Newark NJ’s renaissance was given a boost by architect Anthony Belluschi’s design for the Jersey Central Terminal across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Skylights were put into the vaulted ceiling of the waiting room and a 200,000-sq ft shopping and dining complex below.
“So much disintegration had happened downtown you almost got a ghetto-ish feeling,” he said. “Then, because of the proximity to Manhattan, developers began buying up and renovating entire blocks. A renaissance began happening.”
But the city’s old railroad station, abandoned for 20 years, remained unused, a blight only a block from city hall.
“It’s not a terribly architecturally significant building, but we’re reusing it because it’s a large space in a steel frame structure and has the ambience of a train station,” explained Belluschi, a partner in the Chicago-based architectural firm of Kober Belluschi Associates. “Like a lot of old buildings, it’s more exciting than newer spaces.”
The dying downtown of St Louis, Missouri, received a boost when its 1894 Union Station reopened in 1985, seven years after being abandoned by Amtrak Rail Passenger Service.
The historic buildings, with fresco ceilings in the station and a glass roof in the train shed and marble and stained glass everywhere, were converted into a two-level, 160,000-sq ft retail store, restaurant and hotel complex. The station’s grand waiting room, with its 65ft high barrel-vaulted frescoed ceiling, marble floors, mosaic tile, gold-leaf decor, stained-glass windows and a sweeping double staircase, now serves as the lobby and cocktail room for a 550-room Hyatt Regency Hotel. Beneath the hotel is a 1.5-acre lake which provides a setting for concerts, dining and boat rides.
When the Urban Land Institute gave the project its award for excellence the organisation of government officials, developers and architects noted how the project had “spearheaded an economic resurgence and renewed pride and spirit in the community”.
In the 1940s St Louis Union Station, a national historic landmark, was the largest and busiest passenger rail terminal in the world, handling more than 300 trains and 100,000 passengers daily. But, like the city’s prosperous position as a flourishing gateway to the west, it came to an end. Now the city’s downtown, with Union Station and its 22,000 daily visitors, has been reborn. Two office and retail developments, a hotel and a 10-screen cinema have opened adjacent to the station, and other new construction has occurred nearby.
In San Antonio, Texas, the Missouri Pacific Railroad Station — abandoned and decaying despite the Mission Revival building’s listing on the National Register of Historical Places — is now the banking headquarters for the San Antonio City Employees Federal Credit Union.
Michael A Dolan — senior vice-president of HBE Bank Facilities, St Louis, Missouri, who were in charge of the project — said the restoration gave the credit union a prominent landmark location at no more cost than a new building. It may be the only bank with a domed roof and stained-glass windows.
Both HBE and the credit union received a national preservation award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation for “outstanding restoration and innovative re-use”.
In Cleveland, Ohio, a $105m, three-level, 350,000-sq ft shopping centre was constructed in the interior of the city’s former main station as the first stage of a $1bn, 83-acre office, shopping, hotel and residential project.
Smaller stations also have been targeted for conversion in smaller cities.
In Phoenix, Arizona, the 1923 Union Station, after 50 years of neglect, was restored in 1989. The cavernous waiting room in the centre is still used by passengers. Long-distance telephone company US Sprint Communications Co own the Spanish-style building, and they restored the terracotta tile floors, the stucco walls, the marble rest-rooms and the oak and brass partitions, doors and trim.
In Madison, Wisconsin, the retail, restaurant and office space in the 15,000-sq ft Madison Depot was expanded with the incorporation into the old station of a locomotive and four passenger cars.
In St Paul, Minnesota, the 37,000-sq ft main concourse of the former Union Depot is being converted into a contemporary art museum. And the once-abandoned station at Waterbury, Connecticut, is now the offices of the local newspaper.
While all these new uses of old train stations have been commercial, apartments — as well as office and retail space and a 4,000-sq ft restaurant in the former waiting room — were included in Pittsburgh’s 1902 Pennsylvania Railroad Station, a historic landmark now called the Pennsylvanian.
“We looked at the low vacancy rate of the other apartment buildings within Pittsburgh and wondered why no one had looked at the Pennsylvanian as apartments,” explained Carl Dranoff, president of Historic Landmarks for Living, the developers and syndicators of the conversion project, which opened in 1988.
The 242 apartments include loft apartments in the former 10th-floor executive offices, which are rich with features such as oak mantels and panelling, ornate plaster cornices, hardwood floors and arched windows.
In Chicago, two stations — the abandoned Dearborn Station, built in 1885 on the southern edge of downtown, and the still-used Union Station, built from 1914 to 1925 on the western edge — have been targeted for redevelopment. But, while the latter is on its way to becoming successful, Dearborn Station remains a failure despite a decade of efforts.
About 95,000 commuters and long-distance travellers pass through Union Station each weekday, making it the most used train station in the US outside New York. Those passengers and the tens of thousands of nearby office workers are a target for the two-level, 65,000-sq ft store and restaurant complex which is being built in the station’s waiting room with its Tuscan-styled colonnades and pink Tennessee marble floor.
The restoration of the Romanesque Revival-style Dearborn Station, with its exterior of red sandstone, red brick and terracotta ornamentation and its interior with cast-iron columns and stairways and coffered ceilings, has received architectural preservation awards. But the few new stores in the renovated station, which is located in a growing area whose converted loft buildings have made it a new residential neighbourhood, have yet to attract much traffic. Half of the space remains empty, a situation blamed by many on lack of promotional and entertainment activities as well as pedestrian flow.
A new owner plans to demolish a largely empty addition to the station to increase the number of parking spaces in the hope that this will help to attract more people. “Dearborn Station needs a fresh start,” argues new owner Sam Roti, who feels that, like other station revival efforts, it can still be a success.
