Union Station
Built 1892-94
Architect Theodore Link
Architectural style Romanesque Revival
St. Louis Union Station, a National Historic Landmark, was a passenger train terminal in St. Louis, Missouri. Once the world's largest and busiest train station, it was converted in the early 1980s into a hotel, shopping center, and entertainment complex. Today, it serves only local rail (MetroLink) transit passengers.
The station opened on September 1, 1894, and was owned by the Terminal Railroad
Association of St. Louis. Designed by Theodore Link, it included three main
areas: the Headhouse, the Midway and the 11.5-acre (47,000 m2) Train Shed. The
headhouse originally housed a hotel, a restaurant, passenger waiting rooms and
railroad ticketing offices. It featured a gold-leafed Grand Hall, Romanesque
arches, a 65-foot (20 m) barrel-vaulted ceiling and stained-glass windows. The
clock tower is 280 feet (85 m) high.
Union Station's headhouse and midway are constructed of Indiana limestone and
initially included 42 tracks under its vast trainshed terminating in the
stub-end terminal.
At its height, the station combined the St. Louis passenger services of 22
railroads, the most of any single terminal in the world. At its opening, it was
the world's largest and busiest railroad station and its trainshed was the
largest roof span in the world. In 1903, the station was expanded to accommodate
visitors to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.
bar
In the 1940s, it handled 100,000 passengers a day. The famous photograph of Harry S. Truman holding aloft the erroneous Chicago Tribune headline, "Dewey Defeats Truman", was shot at the station as Truman headed back to Washington, DC from Independence, Missouri after the 1948 Presidential election.
The 1940s expansion added a new ticket counter designed as a half-circle and a
mural by Louis Grell could be found atop the customer waiting area which
depicted the history of St. Louis with an old fashion steam engine, two large
steamboats and the Eads Bridge in the background.
As airliners became the preferred mode of long-distance travel and railroad
passenger services declined in the 1950s and 1960s, the massive station became
obsolete and too expensive to maintain for its original purpose. With the
takeover of national rail passenger service by Amtrak in 1971, passenger train
service to St. Louis was reduced to only three trains a day. Amtrak stopped
using Union Station on October 31, 1978; the six trains daily did not justify
such a large facility. The last to leave Union Station was a Chicago-bound
Inter-American. Passenger service shifted to an "Amshack" one block east, now
the site of the Gateway Multimodal Transportation Center.
In August 1985, after a $150 million renovation designed by HOK, Union Station
was reopened with a 539-room hotel, shopping mall, restaurants and food court.
Federal historic rehabilitation tax credits were used to transform Union Station
into one of the city's most visited attractions. The station rehabilitation by
Conrad Schmitt Studios remains one of the largest adaptive re-use projects
in the United States. The hotel is housed in the headhouse and part of the train
shed, which also houses a lake and shopping, entertainment and dining
establishments. Omni was the original hotel operator, followed by Hyatt Regency
Hotel chain and Marriott Hotels.
changing light
In January 2010, St. Louis Union Station is under major redevelopment with the expansion of the station's Marriott Hotel in the main terminal building. The hotel will take over the Midway area of the station and all stores have been relocated to the train shed shopping arcade. These major improvements and redevelopments will be finished by 2011 according to Marriott St. Louis Union Station.
Lodging Hospitality Management bought Union Station in 2012. It rebranded the hotel as a DoubleTree.
Some architectural elements from the building have been removed in renovations
and taken to the Sauget, Illinois storage site of the St. Louis Building Arts
Foundation.
Text from Wikipedia
Station Grille
fresh chips served in newsprint
rustic club sandwich
salad
shop area in the renovated trainshed
trainshed
