Union Station: The Dome That Became a Courthouse
Near Tacoma, Washington
The building stands at the south end of Pacific Avenue where downtown Tacoma meets the tideflats, and the first thing you notice is the dome. Ninety feet high, faced in copper that has gone green with age, it sits above a Beaux-Arts facade of multicolored red brick laid in Flemish bond, a pattern that alternates the long and short faces of each brick, producing a subtle visual texture in the wall. The architects were Reed and Stem, the same firm that had designed Grand Central Terminal in New York.
They broke ground in nineteen hundred and nine. Union Station opened on May first, nineteen eleven. For more than seven decades it served as the primary passenger rail hub for Tacoma, the place where travelers arrived from Portland and Seattle and, via the transcontinental connections, from Chicago and New York.
The trains ran regularly through two world wars and the intervening depression. Then the automobile and the interstate highway finished what they had started in the nineteen fifties. The last passenger train departed from Union Station on June fourteenth, nineteen eighty-four.
After that, the building sat vacant. In nineteen ninety-two, Union Station reopened after a significant renovation as a federal courthouse, the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington. The renovation required forty thousand pounds of new copper to recover the dome, which had been stripped.
It required substantial plaster repair for water damage accumulated over eight years of vacancy. And it required art. The government commissioned Dale Chihuly, who had been born in Tacoma in nineteen forty-one, to create glass installations for the rotunda.
Chihuly produced a twenty-foot chandelier composed of more than two thousand seven hundred cobalt-blue glass globes, which now hangs in the domed rotunda where passengers once waited for their trains. A federal courthouse is not the most obvious venue for a glass art installation. Standing in the rotunda, looking up at the blue chandelier suspended under the copper dome, the combination seems entirely correct.
