Union Station: Denver's Grand Terminal

As you roll past Union Station, its Beaux Arts facade fronts a great hall inside. Along the cornices in there, carved plaster columbines, the pale blue Colorado state flower, repeat in shallow bas relief, twenty three hundred of them ringing the room like a printed wallpaper made of stone. Three brass chandeliers hang above the floor, each about eight feet across, throwing warm light onto a floor of pink and cream marble that covers four thousand six hundred and ninety square feet.

Along the wall inside sits a long wooden bench, a single slab of tiger oak. It was carved for travelers in this building's first decades, lived in the hall through the war years and the postwar slump, then vanished in nineteen sixty three. For sixty years it sat in private storage.

When the bench came back, the craftsmen sanded it, stained it with a color called Golden Harvest, and finished it with five coats of polyurethane. The hands of soldiers and grandmothers and runaways and porters have worn its grain smooth. Above, on the upper floors, are one hundred and twelve hotel rooms, called the Crawford Hotel in honor of the preservationist who kept this building standing.

Some are compact Pullman cabins, fitted like sleeping berths into the building's narrow inner wing. Others, up under the eaves, are broad attic lofts with old beams overhead. The Union Station Alliance closed this building on December first, two thousand twelve.

It reopened on July twenty sixth, two thousand fourteen, about twenty months and a fifty four million dollar restoration later, exactly one hundred years to the year after the architects Aaron Gove and Thomas Walsh raised this Beaux Arts headhouse over an earlier station's foundation. As you pass under the neon sign on the roof and out toward the plaza in front, notice what is not there. A welcoming arch used to stand there, the Mizpah Arch, and the city took it down in the middle of the Depression.

The space it left in the sky has never been filled.