Office Building (Union Station)

Union Station was a product of the civic improvement fervor that swept the nation in the early twentieth century. Around 1905 Burlington's business leaders declared obsolete their 1861 station, a brick structure with arched trusses and mansard-roofed towers. They appointed a “Committee of Fifteen” to oversee planning for a new depot. After a decade of negotiation, two railroads agreed to serve a union station to be built on city land by the architects of the New York Central Railroad, who also designed stations in Buffalo, Cincinnati, and Detroit.

Typical of City Beautiful urban planning, seen in such places as New York City's Grand Central Terminal, the Burlington station was designed as the visual terminus of Main Street. The steel and concrete structure is clad in buff brick and granite, with a symmetrical facade of thirteen pilastered bays, a central pedimented pavilion with an arched entrance, and a clock with an ornamental surround. Waiting room walls and floor are veneered with Pittsford and Proctor marble. A flyover led passengers from the station directly to several canopied platforms for access to the trains.

After reaching peak traffic in 1925, the Central Vermont Railway stopped passenger service in 1938 and the Rutland Railroad followed in 1953. The building was used for many years as offices for Green Mountain Power, and today it remains an office building and the central focus of the Main Street Landing commercial development.