Union Station: Gateway to the Second Largest City in New England

The building on your left, the Beaux-Arts stone structure with the twin towers and the vaulted interior, is Union Station, and it opened on June fourth, nineteen eleven, to handle the rail traffic of what was then the second-largest city in New England.

Worcester's rise as a railroad hub had been rapid. The city got its first railroad connection in eighteen thirty-five, just seven years after the Blackstone Canal opened, and trains quickly demonstrated they could do everything the canal did and do it faster in every season. By the late nineteenth century, nine different railroad lines ran through Worcester, and the existing station could no longer handle the volume. So the city and the Boston and Albany Railroad commissioned Philadelphia architects Watson and Huckel to build a new one.

When it opened, the new Union Station was called the most beautiful building in Massachusetts. In its peak years, one hundred forty trains passed through daily. Passengers connecting between Boston and New York, between the coast and the interior, between New England mill towns and the wider country, all moved through this hall.

The station declined with the automobile and interstate highway system. By the nineteen seventies it sat largely abandoned, its vaulted waiting room used only by pigeons and vandals. A preservation campaign launched in the nineteen eighties saved it, and a full restoration completed in two thousand laid the groundwork for what is now a transit hub, restaurant and event space, and regional bus terminal.

The station is a reminder of what Worcester was: not a suburb of Boston, not a stopover, but a genuine industrial metropolis that other cities routed through when they needed to go somewhere important.