Indiana Historical Society

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Although Cleveland voters had approved the lakefront depot in 1915, in 1919 the voters instead approved one on Public Square by a wide margin. The Van Sweringen brothers were now free to implement their plans for what would become the Terminal Group, a massive project that changed the face of Cleveland and gave the city its most enduring landmark. The “Vans,” as they were called, constructed the Hotel Cleveland on the west side of the square in 1918. Legal and political delays kept the rest of the project from proceeding until 1923, but by 1934, when the U.S. Post Office building was completed, the huge construction site seldom was quiet.9

Cleveland Union Terminal opened on 29 June 1930, some two years after completion of the complex’s feature building, Terminal Tower. The project made use of huge amounts of air rights. It was not readily apparent to visitors that virtually the entire Terminal Group—buildings, roads, and all—was built up on a steel structure rising several stories above ground level. Cleveland Union Terminal itself was contained entirely within the complex and was not visible from the exterior. Sharing the barrel-vaulted entrance rotunda of the Terminal Tower office building, the station floor was some thirteen feet below the level of Public Square. Four sloping ramps connected the entrance rotunda with the station. Two straight inner ramps provided direct access to the “steam” (that is, main line, not transit) passenger facilities, consisting of a ticket lobby and a skylighted concourse at the south end of the station. Two additional dogleg ramps took transit passengers to and from east and west “traction” concourses that gave direct access to the transit tracks, which were located north of the through tracks for the steam railroads. Cross passages connected all the various spaces, which were lined with shops and stores catering to travelers and also featured an elegant restaurant known as the English Oak Room.

The project was massive. Covering some fifty acres, it required demolition of nearly 1,500 buildings and major reshaping of the land between Public Square and the Cuyahoga River. It included construction of a four-track high-level viaduct across the river valley, as well as seventeen miles of new electrified route mileage. This was the domain of the famous P-Motors, which hauled trains to and from Union Terminal between 1930 and 1953 to keep steam locomotives out of the station. Completion of Union Terminal was celebrated in the railroad press and elsewhere (the Cleveland Plain Dealer published a thirty-two-page tabloid to celebrate opening day), and the project forever altered the Cleveland skyline.

Although the Pennsylvania Railroad never became a user of Cleveland Union Terminal, all other train service in Cleveland ran through it. It was exclusively for passengers and mail—freight trains stayed on their traditional routes through the city. Except for removing most passenger runs from the congested trackage within the city, the terminal had little impact on railroad operations generally. It did, however, cause a wholesale revision of how passenger trains—from all-Pullman expresses to lowly locals—came from and went to the City on the Lake.10

Cincinnati Union Terminal
In the mid-1920s, while Cleveland was beginning work to draw its disparate rail passenger facilities together into a single union terminal, Cincinnati was getting serious about doing the same. Similar to Cleveland, the Queen City suffered from the cramped quarters, slow service, and inconvenience of having to use multiple depots that were charming of countenance but woefully outmoded. However, it faced an additional problem Cleveland did not: Ohio River floods. The extensive system of flood control dams that today keep a fairly tight rein on the river did not exist then, and the unpredictable Ohio regularly inundated the city’s riverfront depots.

The solution was a new union depot on high ground. From an operation and construction standpoint, the only logical location was the valley of Mill Creek west of downtown Cincinnati, where numerous rail lines already ran. Involving some 5.5 million cubic yards of grading, excavation, and fill, the project to build the new depot lasted from 1929 to 1933 and took on a massive character and included work well beyond the passenger depot itself. The project included a coach yard, engine terminal, mail facility, two major street viaducts, and five new connections to the seven railroads that were participants in the Cincinnati Union Terminal Company. A large public park extending several hundred yards east of the terminal building made it the principal jewel in the Queen City’s crown. As in Cleveland, the new terminal project was celebrated in the press and various other publications.11

The depot was, or course, the focal point, and neither Cincinnati nor the world has seen anything else like it. Described as resembling an old radio, a quarter of a cantaloupe, or Half Dome in Yosemite, Cincinnati Union Terminal was a complete departure from traditional railroad station architecture and was a stunning manifestation of the streamline/art deco/art moderne aesthetic just then sweeping the country in designs ranging from cream separators to zeppelins.

The terminal achieved its purpose brilliantly. Designed to accommodate more than two hundred arrivals and departures daily, it never reached that level. Nonetheless, it functioned smoothly and well, making train travel—at least at one end of the trip—something special again. The project was unaffected by the depression (its bonds had been sold before the 1929 crash) and in fact was an economic and civic bright spot in a difficult period.

Requiring as it did a wholesale reorientation of passenger routes into and out of Cincinnati, Union Terminal had a major effect upon rail operations. New freight yards filled the Mill Creek valley, and many passenger trains were diverted from traditional routes well outside the downtown area in order to line up for their approach to the new terminal. The Mill Creek valley remains the focus of rail operations in the city today.12

Architecture
Columbus Union Station
As discussed earlier, Columbus Union Station had two principal parts: the High Street arcade and the depot building itself. Though both were the work of a single architectural firm, each was distinctly different and reflected two different eras in design.13

The arcade was by far the more flamboyant. The dominant style of Burnham’s work at the Chicago exposition was, for its time, the latest thing, a French-derived style known as Beaux-Arts classicism. Based in classical architecture, and other reflections of Greek and Roman design, this style came from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The common “spotting feature” of the style was the paired columns or paired pilasters (engaged columns projecting from a surface) used on both interior and exterior walls.

The union station arcade was pure Beaux-Arts. It was constructed of terra-cotta (Italian for “cooked earth”), a clay material pressed into molds and fired like a brick. This material could be produced in complicated forms and often was employed to resemble cut stone. Arches, modillions, paired columns, cherubic figures, and medallions with the profile of Christopher Columbus all graced the arcade, and there was nothing else like it in the city.

The exterior design of the depot itself hearkened back to the recent past, to a style known as Richardsonian Romanesque, named for Boston architect Henry Hobson Richardson. Where the arcade was ornamental and exuberant, the depot had the dark color, simple form, and heavy feel of its style. Heavy masonry construction, employing arches, thick walls, and small window-to-wall ratios all came from Romanesque design of the medieval period in Europe, and Richardson turned these elements into a style all his own. Columbus Union Station is a good example of the style, but even so, it revealed details and elements that had an unexpected charm and craftsmanship, particularly in the high quality of the exterior brickwork.

Once the traveler entered the depot, however, he was transported back to the present and to a glorious Beaux-Arts interior. The main waiting room had a forty-foot-high flat ceiling with coffers and skylights; flanking it on the east and west were barrel-vaulted corridors whose coffered ceilings contained plaster rosettes. The paired columns and pilasters typical of the style were there, and the whole space had a steady, traditional, permanent feel to it. In the 1931 concourse that replaced the original train shed, there was a spare, restrained modern version of the original Beaux-Arts design, complete with shallow paired pilasters and traditional wood waiting benches.

Cleveland Union Terminal
Terminal Tower, sometimes mistaken for Cleveland Union Terminal, was in fact an office building. It and other buildings in the Terminal Group (the Hotel Cleveland, Higbee’s Department Store, three office buildings, and the U.S. Post Office) had restrained modernist designs and lightly ornamented stone exteriors that put them at the forefront of late-1920s design. The whole group was the work of Chicago architects Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, designers also of Chicago Union Station in 1925 and Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia in 1920.

Terminal Tower had no direct relationship to the terminal except the shared entrance lobby off Public Square. On the interior, Cleveland Union Terminal was a curious blend of old and new. The entrance lobby was pure classical design, a barrel-vaulted space with pilasters, cornice, and a rosette-filled coffered ceiling straight out of Penn Station in New York or the baths of Caracalla in Rome. The main ramps to the traction concourses were much plainer. Rising some twenty-eight feet from the entry arcade was a double stair leading to the Prospect arcade, a branching corridor lined with shops and with a doorway onto Prospect Avenue, the street behind Terminal Tower.

The railroad depot—in both the steam and the traction areas—had plenty of classical elements such as columns and groin-vaulted ceilings, but it had a spare, contemporary character as well. The segmental-arched and skylighted ceiling of the Steam Concourse was surprisingly light and pleasant for a space that essentially was underground (while at the same time suspended twenty-two feet above ground level).