Indiana Historical Society

A Tale of Three Cities
The Union Stations of Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati
Jeffrey T. Darbee

Introduction
I was fortunate enough to attend college near Chicago in the late 1960s and became a railfan as I learned more and more about the vast tapestry of trains, junctions, stations, and operations of the nation’s Railroad Capital. Riding the fast-dwindling fleet of privately operated passenger trains became my passion, and in doing so I spent a lot of time in railroad stations, depots, and terminals. Large or small, elegant or spare, these were the primary point of contact between the railroad companies and the public. In smaller towns, “Down at the depot” was where an endless stream of passengers, baggage, mail, express, and telegrams arrived and departed, the focal point of much of the community’s economic life.

The depots played an important symbolic role as well. Often executed in distinctive architectural styles, they were intended to reflect well on the railroad company and to provide services and amenities in a setting that would impress, awe, or inspire patrons. Many times in smaller communities, the railroad station was the most distinctive and ornamental building in town.

The same was true in larger communities, and particularly so in the case of union stations, those shared by two or more railroad companies. Employing established architects working in cutting-edge styles, railroad and union depot companies built memorable stations in all sizes and designs.

As a railfan in the 1960s, I was as fascinated by the stations as I was by the trains that served them. Indeed my thirty-year career in historic preservation was inspired in large part, I think, by the time I spent in dusty, neglected but still glorious railroad stations.
I have always liked railroad stations for themselves, but as a preservationist I am also interested in how cities grow and change. I have long understood that railroads and railroad facilities have been powerful influences in shaping American cities, particularly in the location and design of passenger depots. Long after the departure of the last train, these places have continued to influence urban life and can be important components of vital twenty-first-century cities.

Ohio’s “3-C” Union Stations
Some time ago it occurred to me that the union stations of Ohio’s “3-C Route” (Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati) provide an instructive microcosm of the importance of union stations in the lives of cities. In all three cities, the union stations developed differently, had different fates, and survive today in distinctly different ways.
This essay will explore three aspects of the union stations in each of these Ohio cities: the stations’ histories and impacts upon railroad operations; their architectural designs; and their ultimate fates and influence upon the urban fabric of each city. The stations are considered in chronological order.

Early Ohio Railroads
Ohio’s pioneer railroads were built inland from established lake and river ports; the state was first crossed by routes running generally north and south, later the east-west trunk lines crossed the state on their way from eastern cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore to gateways such as Chicago and St. Louis. By 1851 two lake-to-river routes were in operation, one via the Little Miami Railroad (LM) and the Mad River and Lake Erie Railroad between Cincinnati and Sandusky; and the other via the LM, the Columbus and Xenia Railroad (C&X), and the Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati Railroad (CC&C) between Cincinnati and Cleveland by way of Columbus.1

Columbus Union Depot/Union Station
Rail passenger service came to Ohio’s capital city in 1850. Late that year, the C&X entered Columbus from the southwest, crossing the Scioto River about where the former Pennsylvania Railroad bridge is today. Crossing North High Street at what then was the city’s northern edge, the C&X entered the new Columbus Depot at the northeast corner of High and Naghten Streets (Naghten today is called Nationwide Boulevard in this area). Little more than a double-ended wooden barn, the depot had three through tracks. It became a union station in early 1851, when the CC&C was completed from Cleveland and entered the depot’s north end to link up with the C&X and LM, establishing the 3-C route connecting three of Ohio’s most important cities.2

The Columbus rail network grew rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the original frame union depot quickly became outmoded. It was replaced in 1875 by a brick structure, with a train shed that had seven tracks. Designed in a spare version of the then-popular French Second Empire style, the city’s second depot had at least a bit more character than its predecessor.3

Almost from the beginning, and especially after establishment of Ohio State University four miles north of downtown Columbus in 1870, the grade crossing at High Street west of the depot was a constant problem. As the city’s north end developed rapidly, the increasing number of trains—both freight and passenger—blocked the crossing for longer lengths of time. In one survey in the 1890s, the crossing was blocked more than seven hours in one twenty-four-hour period. The Union Depot Company had constructed a tunnel under the tracks before the completion of the second depot, but few people used it except riders of the city’s horsecars. A wood bridge built for the newly electrified city streetcars was built in 1888, which many trespassing pedestrians also used, but most preferred to take their chances at the High Street crossing. Delays and accidents were increasingly common.4

The answer to the problem was separation of street and rail traffic, which was achieved between 1893 and 1897 with construction of the third union depot on the same site. The project was the work of the firm of Daniel H. Burnham, the Chicago architect who was primarily responsible for the plan and design of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Key to the project was the complete separation of street and rail traffic by means of a viaduct over the tracks, along which there was an ornate entry arcade along the east side of High Street. A drive and walkway led back several hundred feet to the depot itself. The arcade served as a gateway to the city and, along with smaller and less ornamented extensions, housed commercial space for various businesses along both sides of the viaduct; the arcade also contained a street railway waiting room. The principal floor of the arcade and the depot was nearly thirty feet above the original ground level, yet someone crossing the viaduct would not even be aware that he was on an elevated structure. This arrangement remained largely intact for the life of the depot, by this time called Columbus Union Station. Major alterations included demolition of the southernmost of the two main arches of the arcade in the late 1920s to extend the original drive into a loop to accommodate autos; and removal of the original train shed and construction of an enclosed concourse with enclosed stairs to track level, completed in 1931.5

As can be seen on maps from the mid- to late-nineteenth century, the right-of-way through central Columbus and the union station property has always been the primary rail route through the city and remains so today. With few exceptions, every rail route constructed into Columbus between 1850 and the turn of the twentieth century focused on this central location. There were other depots in other parts of Columbus but, unlike Cleveland and Cincinnati, it never was necessary to consolidate disparate stations into a single union station—there always was only one, from the earliest days of rail travel, including bypass tracks to keep freight trains out of the depot.6

Cleveland Union Terminal
The union station in Cleveland was built at a different time and for different reasons. Rail service in the City on the Lake came a couple of years earlier than to Columbus, and the pattern of passenger depot development was different. As in numerous other cities, the various railroad companies—the New York Central, the Pennsylvania, the Erie, the Nickel Plate, and the Baltimore and Ohio (either the original companies or components of these systems)—all built their own depots near downtown Cleveland between the middle and the end of the nineteenth century.

As the twentieth century dawned and Cleveland became an industrial powerhouse and major urban center, there were plans for re-creating the city. Cleveland was one of the first cities to embrace the “City Beautiful” movement and even engaged its guru, Daniel H. Burnham. Inspired by the 1893 Chicago exposition, the movement drew together architects, planners, business people, and politicians, who were desirous of dealing with some of the many ills plaguing central cities.7

The Cleveland Group Plan published in 1907 called for reordering downtown Cleveland in a monumental way. Just off the northeast corner of Public Square was to be the south end of a large public space called the mall, around which major federal, county, and city buildings would be placed. Crowning the assemblage at the north end was to be a new Union Station, spanning the existing tracks along the lakefront.8

Although Cleveland implemented most of the Group Plan over the next three decades, the new depot never left the drawing board. As it happened, the Van Sweringen brothers, O. P. and M. J., began as developers of the suburb of Shaker Heights and ended up as railroad magnates who would remake downtown Cleveland in a completely different way than that envisioned in the Group Plan.

Rapid transit from Shaker Heights to downtown Cleveland was key to the Van Sweringens’ plans, and they proposed a transit terminal on Public Square, the part of downtown Cleveland most easily reached by the transit line. Even though the transit terminal plan had evolved to include the steam railroads as well, World War I demonstrated that the lakefront lines, where the Group Plan proposed its depot, were a serious bottleneck.