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Waiting For The 5:05 Terminal Station and Depot in America By Lawrence Grow SC
Waiting For The 5:05 Terminal Station and Depot in America By Lawrence Grow
Hard Cover with dust jacket
Copyright 1977 SECOND PRINTING
128 pages.
CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction by Clay Lancaster
I The Coming of the Railroad 22
II The Station Evolves 26
III The Art of the Engineer 38
IV The Railroad Style 44
V Country Gothic 48
VI The Railroad Hotel and Restaurant 56
VII Henry Hobson Richardson's Stations 62
VIII The Eclecticism of Frank Furness 68
IX The New Railroad Style 74
X The Spanish Influence 84
XI Transportation in Transition 96
XII The Station as Office Building 106
XIII The Beaux Arts 110
XIV Modern Lines 120
XV Reuse and Rehabilitation 122
Appendix-Canadian Stations 124
Index of Stations 127
The 5:05 headed west from the massive Chicago and North Western station each week day. Its first stop, some thirty-five miles from the railroad capital of America, was Geneva, and here several hundred commuters eagerly escaped from the rigors of business. But this was not the end of the day for the 5:05. It continued on along the Galena Division, dropping off packages for small town merchants, empty mail sacks and milk cans at rural flag-stops, and the remaining passengers. The end of the trip for the train's crew came only on the other side of the Mississippi, in Clinton, Iowa, 138 miles from Chicago. It was not a very exciting or romantic excursion, but, then, in the 1940s, it seemed the natural way to travel. For the average American, wherever he lived, going down to the station to meet or catch a train -interurban, suburban, or long-distance-was then as customary as heading for the freeway is now.
Waiting was part of the routine, for if a train departed on schedule, which was rare, it almost never arrived on time. But there were the stations-at each end of the trip-and these were true community centers. One could eat and sometimes sleep and bathe there, and, in some magnificent temples of rail transportation, there were movies to be enjoyed. Few of us thought very much of the stations then. Most were rather grimy, sad places. Now, only when many of them have disappeared from the centers of towns and cities, victims of the wrecker's ball, do we begin to understand their real and symbolic worth. Frost and Granger's early twentieth-century station set apart from others in the area by six massive Doric columns, still stands in Chicago, but has been modernized in a less than felicitous manner by a well-meaning Chicago and North Western management; in little Geneva, the low-lying Richardsonianstyle stone depot has been leveled and replaced by a nondescript box. The story is sadly similar elsewhere.
As Clay Lancaster notes in his Introduction which follows, the historical importance of the railroad station is more than the sum of its architectural forms. A vast majority of buildings were designed by engineers rather than architects, and as the reader of this book will discover, stations of exactly the same form and decorative elements were virtually mass-produced by the railroad companies. Most of the trains that arrived and departed were not of the glamorous sort nostalgically recalled today-the Twentieth Century Limited, the Burlington Zephyrs, the Wabash Blue Bird. The majority of trains carried passengers, whether daily commuters or not, for only relatively short distances. Most of the stations that were used were usually modest structures, however distinguished their design. The importance ascribed to them and the interest displayed in them today is a reflection of our concern for the loss of a meaningful community institution.
In Lancaster's words, "The train station was the image of the community, presenting at a glance something about its size, affluence, livelihood and social range of its citizens, their taste in architecture.... The railroad depot is the foremost symbol of the evolving period of American civilization, of which there has been no replacement." Nor
does there seem to be any real prospect that the station will again play any important role. Rail transportation is on the comeback trail, but the stations of the past, if saved at all, are more likely to be used as restaurants and cultural centers. Because of their central geographic and historical position in the community and usually ample physical dimensions, more and more stations are being recycled. Hopefully, this trend will continue.
Still, for those of us born before the jet age, it is difficult to deny memories of real railroading-of listening to the long whistle and rumbling of cars crossing a high iron viaduct, of winding across a labyrinth of switches and tracks to arrive in the terminal of a new city, of gazing up at the play of light and shadow in the seemingly endless expanse of iron and stone which defines so many urban terminals. And if we do appreciate good architectural design, there can be no denying what was an impressive record.
The Historic American Buildings Survey has attempted to document this record since the 1930s. An archival service of the National Park Service, its aim is simply "preservation through documentation," and this is achieved by means of measured drawings, photographs, and the recording of architectural and historical data at thousands of sites across the country. Traveling exhibitions of photographs and drawings further spread the work of this governmental agency to the general public. Waiting for the 5:05 is based on such a show, "Terminal, Station and Depot in America," which began a nationwide tour in the fall of 1976 under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. By the fall of 1978, the show will have been seen in fifteen cities.
The majority of illustrations in this book have been drawn from material prepared for the exhibition by HABS and its sister archival service, the Historic American Engineering Record. Some changes in organization of materials have been made, however, and the number of illustrations increased. A last section of the book is devoted to a sampling of Canadian stations, a chapter in railroading history closely linked with that of the United States.
In compiling all of this material, Mary Farrell, HABS exhibitions coordinator, has been of inestimable assistance. She and John M. Poppeliers, chief of HABS, have generously shared their expertise and resources. Other individuals who have greatly aided the search for accurate and informative material are Eric Delony, principal architect of the Historic American Engineering Record; Robert M. Vogel, curator, Division of Mechanical and Civil Engineering, Museum of History and Technology, Smithsonian Institution; and the following private collectors of railroadiana : H. H. Harwood, Jr., Barton K. Battaile, Dr. Wendell H. McChord, Norton D. Clark, and Dudley H. Brumbach.
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