Union Station, New Haven
Near New Haven, Connecticut
The building you may have passed or glimpsed on Union Avenue is one of the finest train stations in New England, and it very nearly did not survive to see its hundredth birthday.
Union Station in New Haven was designed by Cass Gilbert, the same architect who gave America the Woolworth Building in New York City and the United States Supreme Court in Washington. The railroad that hired him, the New York, New Haven and Hartford, wanted a replacement for a previous station that had burned to the ground in May of nineteen eighteen. They did not want a simple depot. They wanted a monument.
Gilbert delivered. He drew on the Beaux-Arts tradition that had swept American civic architecture since the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of eighteen ninety-three, and the result, completed in nineteen twenty, was a four-story red brick and limestone palazzo on Union Avenue. Inside, the waiting room rises thirty-five feet overhead. Limestone walls, ornate plaster ceilings, and a grand suspended clock give the hall the feeling of a secular cathedral. The cost at completion was nine hundred thousand dollars, an enormous sum for the day.
For three decades the station was the pulse point of New Haven's connection to New York and Boston. Then the automobile and the interstate took over. Ridership collapsed after the Second World War. The station closed in nineteen seventy-three and sat empty and deteriorating while the city debated whether to tear it down entirely.
Salvation came from an unlikely direction. The federal Northeast Corridor Improvement Project poured money into the region's rail infrastructure in the late nineteen seventies, and New Haven was on the map. The station was painstakingly restored and reopened in nineteen eighty-five. Stainless steel ceilings were installed in the underground tunnels to the platforms, a gleaming contrast to the classical stonework above.
Today Amtrak, Metro-North, and Shore Line East all run through here. Gilbert's hall is busy again, connecting New Haven to New York Penn Station in under ninety minutes. A building that came within a vote of the wrecking ball is now on the National Register of Historic Places, serving more riders than at any point in its century-long life.
