Saint Paul Union Depot — Grand Terminal of the Empire Builder Era

The building you're passing through or near is one of the grandest Classical Revival train terminals in America, a fifteen-million-dollar monument to the age when Saint Paul was a railroad capital and passengers crossed a Great Hall of Tennessee pink marble to board trains that ran to the Pacific.

Designed by Chicago architect Charles Frost, the Saint Paul Union Depot broke ground in nineteen seventeen but stalled when the United States entered the First World War. Construction crews were pulled away for military priorities, and it took six years of interrupted work before the depot finally opened in nineteen twenty-three. The delay proved almost incidental: the building arrived just as passenger rail was hitting its peak.

At its height in the nineteen twenties, more than two hundred eighty trains arrived and departed every single day. The depot served as the departure point for some of the most celebrated named trains in American railroading: the Milwaukee Road's Hiawatha, the Burlington Route's Twin Cities Zephyr, and the Great Northern's Empire Builder, which carried passengers all the way to Seattle through the northern Rockies. During the Second World War, the depot handled troop movements on a scale that dwarfed normal operations, millions of soldiers and war workers passed through the marble hall and beneath the arched, partly stained-glass ceiling.

Then came the decline. Airline competition through the nineteen fifties and sixties gutted long-distance passenger rail, and train by train the schedules thinned. The depot closed entirely in nineteen seventy-one, and its extraordinary interior sat vacant for decades, used occasionally for storage and film shoots but largely forgotten.

The revival began in earnest in the two thousand tens, when a restoration costing roughly two hundred forty million dollars returned the Great Hall to public life. Today it serves Amtrak's Empire Builder, still running to Seattle and Portland, along with bus connections, restaurants, and event space. The Ionic columns and pink marble are back under the light they were built for.