Duluth Union Depot: Seven Railroads Through One Door
Near Duluth, Minnesota
When the Duluth Union Depot opened in eighteen ninety-two, it was the most ambitious building the city had ever attempted. The Boston architectural firm Peabody, Stearns, and Furber designed it in the French Chateauesque style: yellow brick and limestone with steep green slate roofs, round towers, and ornate dormers. The building took nearly two years and six hundred fifteen thousand dollars to complete.
By nineteen ten, seven separate rail lines funneled through its platforms, and up to five thousand passengers moved through the building every single day. Duluth at the time was one of the wealthiest cities per capita in the United States, built on iron ore, timber, and the Great Lakes trade, and the depot announced that fact to everyone who arrived by train. Rail traffic collapsed in the mid-twentieth century, and by the nineteen sixties the depot was in danger. A renovation costing about four point seven million dollars reopened it in nineteen seventy-three as the Saint Louis County Heritage and Arts Center, which it remains. The trains are gone but the steep French roofs have not changed.
