Denver Union Station

The grand building ahead of you is Denver Union Station, and it has been the front door of this city for well over a century. Denver's railroads had scattered depots all across town until May of eighteen eighty-one, when this site on Wynkoop Street opened as a single consolidated station, crowned by a tall central clock tower. Thirteen years later, an electrical fire tore through the central hall and brought the tower down.

The rebuilt station that followed was again outgrown, and in nineteen fourteen Denver architects Aaron Gove and Thomas Walsh raised the Beaux-Arts headhouse you see today, its great hall ceiling soaring sixty-five feet overhead. For decades, out front stood one of Denver's most beloved landmarks, the Mizpah Arch, dedicated on the Fourth of July, nineteen oh six. The city-facing side read Welcome, and the departing side carried the word Mizpah, a Hebrew phrase meaning, the Lord watch between you and me when we are absent from one another.

It was a benediction for travelers heading back out into the world. Seventy tons of steel, two thousand one hundred and ninety-four light bulbs, and it was gone by December of nineteen thirty-one, pulled down as a traffic hazard the city could no longer afford to maintain during the Depression. The station's peak came during World War Two, when as many as eighty trains a day moved through here and the hall filled with soldiers on their way to and from the front.

The postwar decades were harder. Car culture and commercial aviation drained the crowds, and by the nineteen nineties the building sat nearly vacant. A fifty-four million dollar restoration, part of a larger transit redevelopment, brought it back to life, and on July twenty-sixth, two thousand fourteen, the doors reopened.

The upper floors became the Crawford Hotel, one hundred twelve rooms named for Dana Crawford, the preservationist who spent decades pushing to save this neighborhood and earned the title mother of LoDo. The main floor is now a public living room, twelve thousand square feet of marble and brass where anyone can pull up a chair. Outside, commuter trains run to Denver International Airport, Amtrak's California Zephyr still departs west toward the Rockies, and the neon sign on the roof that has read Travel by Train since nineteen fifty-two keeps its quiet, slightly wistful promise.