Salt Lake City Union Pacific Depot

The building that just came into view was once the gateway to the American West. The Salt Lake City Union Pacific Depot opened in nineteen oh nine at a cost of roughly four hundred fifty thousand dollars, built jointly by two Union Pacific affiliates: the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad, and the Oregon Short Line. Together those two lines stitched southern California to the Pacific Northwest, and Salt Lake City sat squarely in the middle.

The architects chose French Second Empire style, a grand statement in a city that was barely sixty years old. The first story is clad in pale sandstone quarried at Glencoe, Wyoming; the upper walls are Salt Lake City pressed brick. Inside, the waiting room featured a terrazzo floor and a row of stained-glass windows by San Francisco artist Harry Hopp showing mountain passes, trestles, and agricultural scenes. The ceiling carried a larger mural by artist John MacQuarrie depicting the driving of the Golden Spike at Promontory Summit in eighteen sixty-nine, the moment the transcontinental railroad was completed forty miles north of this very city.

For nearly eight decades this depot was where Utah met the rest of the country. Soldiers shipped out through here in two world wars. Immigrants from dozens of countries stepped off trains into the mountain air for the first time. Amtrak began running trains out of the building in nineteen seventy-seven and kept at it until nineteen eighty-six, when passenger rail moved to the former Denver and Rio Grande depot across town.

The building sat quiet for years, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-five but without a clear new purpose. In recent decades it was converted into an event space and hotel, giving visitors a chance to sleep inside the waiting room where generations of travelers once watched the clock and listened for the locomotive whistle.