book review

Transit Authority

Still Standing: A Century of Urban Train Station Design
By Christopher Brown
Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN; 2005
133 pp.; hardcover; color photographs; $49.95
ISBN 0-253-34634-7

Reviewed by Hadiya Strasberg

By the late 1920s, Broad Street Station in Philadelphia, PA, could no longer accommodate trains serving New York City. To remedy this, a second station was constructed from 1929 to 1933 on the west side of downtown. Designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White of Chicago, IL, Thirtieth Street Station is a Neoclassical building with 71-ft. exterior Alabama limestone Corinthian columns; a red, cream and gold coffered ceiling; a Tennessee marble floor; and Roman travertine walls. With a 290-ft.-long by 135-ft.-wide concourse, it is the U.S.'s largest surviving passenger station.

Thirtieth Street Station is one of 40 international train stations covered in Christopher Brown's Still Standing: A Century of Urban Train Station Design. A variety of historical stations, spanning the years 1846 to 1951, are presented in this visual survey – some still serving their original purpose and some adapted for alternate uses. It is a delight to have them documented in this book with original photographs.

In half of the four-page introduction, the architectural history of railroad stations is summarized. "As expected, most early stations were adapted from a previous use," writes Brown, "whether it be a storefront, a converted house, an inn, or a warehouse." After that, railroad-station design mirrored the architectural style du jour. The first stations built for railroad purposes – in Europe in the 1820s and '30s – were in the monumental Classical style. The subsequent decade saw the adoption of the Italian Villa style, which became known as Railroad Style due to its popularity and prominence.

Station design in the 1850s was influenced by London's Crystal Palace, built in 1851 of cast iron and glass. With this advancement in engineering, interior spaces could be constructed on a grander scale. The arched form lent itself well to the design of stations, because their height allowed the smoke and steam exhaust to rise well above the passengers. According to Brown, "The arch utilized in shed construction is often cited as the single most important design innovation of the entire nineteenth century."

While the United States joined the railroad-station building craze mid-century, it was not until the late 1870s that the country built a "world-class" station. After stations in Dublin, Paris, London and Glasgow, Polk Street Depot (later known as the Dearborn Street Station) in Chicago, IL, is the first U.S. station presented in Still Standing. Designed by New York City-based architect Cyrus L.W. Eidlitz in a "softened" version of the Romanesque Revival style, Polk Street Depot was completed in 1885. In 1971, after 86 years of service, it was decommissioned; in the 1980s, it was restored and adaptively reused for office and retail functions.

Beaux Arts was one of the next styles on the scene of railroad-station architecture. Union Station in Washington, DC, and Grand Central Terminal in New York City – built from 1903 to 1907 and 1903 to 1913 respectively – are the best examples of this. Despite the Great Depression, "a handful of high-profile station projects were completed," Brown points out. These were Art Deco and Art Moderne mixed with Neoclassical styling. Europe had strayed even further from its Classical-style roots during this period and was experimenting with the International Style. Brown offers the example of the 1935 Stazione di Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

Brown believes that after the 1930s, railroad-station design was rarely inspired. As everyone knows, Americans "embraced their automobiles and never let go." Across the ocean in Europe after World War II, many stations were destroyed, some of which were eventually restored, while others were deemed too damaged for repair. The latter were replaced with Modernist architecture or, more often, "mediocre replacements like those found in Berlin or Munich. […] And so it was that this great arc of urban train station design came sputtering to an end with the use of concrete slabs at London's second Euston Station in 1968 and Paris's Montparnasse in 1969."

On the whole, Still Standing is informative and charming. But it is a picture book more than a history and it stands apart only slightly from other books of this genre. Kevin J. Holland's Classic American Railroad Terminals (MBI, 2001) is similar, with definitions, history and an architecture analysis of terminals – though only American and Canadian examples. Like Brown's book, it includes numerous photographs, but is wordier and not as cleanly laid out. Great American Railroad Stations by Janet Greenstein Potter (Wiley, 1996) is, at 576 pages, a more comprehensive review of train stations. Again, the architectural history of American stations, both lost and saved, is its focus.

And one must mention the definitive work in this field, that of Carroll L.V. Meeks, the so-called father of railroad architectural history. Meeks' The Railroad Station: An Architectural History (Dover Publications, 1956) is, as Brown himself writes, an "evolution of architecture, well illustrated, of those of Europe and America from the 1830s to the 1950s." Still Standing is maybe an updated, more attractive, but condensed version of The Railroad Station. No matter, though: To page through it is to glimpse the "great theatrical experience" of the train stations, as Brown intended. TB

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