Now Arriving at Union Station

The latest issue of Arcade, a quarterly journal of Northwest architecture, is largely devoted to the train stations of Vancouver (BC), Seattle and Portland. An article by Matthew Stadler, an editor with Clear Cut Press and a novelist, offers some fascinating historical details about Union Station.

Originally, Stadler tells us, the train station was planned to be much, much larger: “…a sprawling neo-Romanesque depot with symmetrical wings that covered twelve city blocks.” It would have been the largest train station in the world at the time. But instead, after recession and other problems forced a downsized design, the Kansas City firm Van Brunt and How designed something smaller and more pragmatic. Stadler continues:

“When Union Station (then called Grand Central Station) opened on Valentine’s Day, 1896, the depot stretched along two city blocks, forming a kind of elbow that opened gently, south and west, toward downtown. The only feature retained from the original plan was a square central tower….The tower’s neo-Romanesque rectitude and spareness of detail evoke the older towers of Sienna or Florence (cities often cited by Portland’s early planners), while below it the station’s sweeping, curved roof lines, deep overhanging eaves and ornamental bracing suggest the Italianate. The whole conjures the kind of mongrel assemblage native to older cities, where time has heaped style upon style.”

I love the Union Station we got, which is modest and dignified yet because of the tower has somewhat of an iconic presence in the city. But can you imagine if the original had been built? That would have a railroad station for a very different city, one where the Great Northern Railroad terminating here meant that Portland, not Seattle, was the economic capitol of the Northwest.

Later in this same issue of Arcade, Amtrak's Paul Clements is asked by interviewer Amy Kate Horn which of the Northwest train stations he likes best. "I definitely like Portland's better than Seattle's," he says. "Seattle's King Street Station of course has a lot of historical renovations underway and more planned, but with all the rosettes and cornucopias...I find it a little too fancy. I like Portland's. It's solid, with nice lines, and that great clock tower and neon. Sometime in the '80s, I remember coming through Portland on the Coast Starlight and they were selling pins and doing fundraisers to fix the clock--it was a community-based effort to renovate the clock tower. Portland's station is my favorite, architecturally and functionally."

Comments

[Ray Whitford]

I love Union Station too. But I just want it moved to its new "Trails End Transit Station" site (or TETS). Maybe if high speed rail becomes the spine of Ecotopia, a new station will be built on the Eastbank and the former train station could become a museum to save and show Portlands large machinery of the past (forestry, marine, agricultural tools, locomotives, etc.).

Ray Whitford