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Union Station

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1881, William E. Taylor. 1895, Van Brunt and Howe. 1912, Gove and Walsh. Wynkoop and 17th sts. (NR)
  • Union Station (Richard W. Longstreth)
  • (Hannerola)

Jay Gould, the New York tycoon, and local entrepreneur Walter Scott Cheesman put together a multiblock parcel to give Denver a consolidated train station. Rough-faced pink-gray rhyolite from Castle Rock and pale gray sandstone trim from Morrison sheathed the original Second Empire edifice, by William Taylor, a Kansas City architect. After a fire in the early 1890s, the Kansas City firm of Van Brunt and Howe rebuilt the central clock tower, switching from Second Empire to the more up-to-date Italianate. Their tower was demolished for the 1912 expansion by Gove and Walsh in the Beaux-Arts Renaissance Revival mode. with an exterior clad in granite and terracotta textured and colored to look like granite.

Amtrak and the Winter Park Ski Train still use this station, whose basement is occupied by a huge model railroad layout duplicating many Colorado trainscapes. Union Station remains the anchor of 17th Street, which has been lined since the 1880s with the city's tallest hotels and office buildings. The depot's sunlit great hall, with its grand, three-story round-arched windows, evokes the golden age of railroading when Union Station was the heart of the city.

Writing Credits

Author: 
Thomas J. Noel

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