Union Station (Nashville) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Nashville's Union Station is a former railroad terminal opened in 1900 to serve the passenger operations of the eight railroads then providing passenger service to Nashville, Tennessee

Nashville, Tennessee

Nashville is the capital of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the county seat of Davidson County. It is located on the Cumberland River in Davidson County, in the north-central part of the state. The city is a center for the health care, publishing, banking and transportation industries, and is home...

. Built just to the west of the downtown

Downtown

Downtown is a term primarily used in North America by English speakers to refer to a city's core or central business district ....

area, its design placed it to the east and above a natural railroad cut through which most of the tracks of the area were routed which was spanned by a viaduct

Viaduct

A viaduct is a bridge composed of several small spans. The term viaduct is derived from the Latin via for road and ducere to lead something. However, the Ancient Romans did not use that term per se; it is a modern derivation from an analogy with aqueduct. Like the Roman aqueducts, many early...

adjacent to the station. The station was also served by streetcars prior to their discontinuance in Nashville in 1941.

History and architecture

The station is an example of late-Victorian

Victorian architecture

The term Victorian architecture refers collectively to several architectural styles employed predominantly during the middle and late 19th century. The period that it indicates may slightly overlap the actual reign, 20 June 1837 – 22 January 1901, of Queen Victoria. This represents the British and...

Romanesque Revival

Romanesque Revival architecture

Romanesque Revival is a style of building employed beginning in the mid 19th century inspired by the 11th and 12th century Romanesque architecture...

architecture

Architecture

Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...

and is highly castellated

Castle

A castle is a type of fortified structure built in Europe and the Middle East during the Middle Ages by European nobility. Scholars debate the scope of the word castle, but usually consider it to be the private fortified residence of a lord or noble...

. The tower originally contained an early mechanical digital clock

Clock

A clock is an instrument used to indicate, keep, and co-ordinate time. The word clock is derived ultimately from the Celtic words clagan and clocca meaning "bell". A silent instrument missing such a mechanism has traditionally been known as a timepiece...

; when replacement French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

silk

Silk

Silk is a natural protein fiber, some forms of which can be woven into textiles. The best-known type of silk is obtained from the cocoons of the larvae of the mulberry silkworm Bombyx mori reared in captivity...

drive belts proved unavailable during World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

, it was replaced by a traditional analog clock. The tower was originally topped by a bronze

Bronze

Bronze is a metal alloy consisting primarily of copper, usually with tin as the main additive. It is hard and brittle, and it was particularly significant in antiquity, so much so that the Bronze Age was named after the metal...

statue of the Roman god

Roman mythology

Roman mythology is the body of traditional stories pertaining to ancient Rome's legendary origins and religious system, as represented in the literature and visual arts of the Romans...

Mercury

Mercury (mythology)

Mercury was a messenger who wore winged sandals, and a god of trade, the son of Maia Maiestas and Jupiter in Roman mythology. His name is related to the Latin word merx , mercari , and merces...

; this was toppled in a storm in 1951. When a new Main Post Office

Post office

A post office is a facility forming part of a postal system for the posting, receipt, sorting, handling, transmission or delivery of mail.Post offices offer mail-related services such as post office boxes, postage and packaging supplies...

was built in Nashville in 1935, it was located adjacent to Union Station. A connecting passageway between the two served to transport mail to and from trains for over three decades.

The station reached peak usage during World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

when it was the shipping-out point for tens of thousand of U.S. troops and the site of a USO

United Service Organizations

The United Service Organizations Inc. is a private, nonprofit organization that provides morale and recreational services to members of the U.S. military, with programs in 160 centers worldwide. Since 1941, it has worked in partnership with the Department of Defense , and has provided support and...

canteen. It started a long decline shortly thereafter as passenger rail service in the U.S. generally went into decline. By the 1960s it was served by only a few trains daily. Much of its open spaces were roped off and its architectural features became largely the habitation of pigeon

Dove

Pigeons and doves constitute the bird family Columbidae within the order Columbiformes, which include some 300 species of near passerines. In general terms "dove" and "pigeon" are used somewhat interchangeably...

s. The formation of Amtrak

Amtrak

The National Railroad Passenger Corporation, doing business as Amtrak , is a government-owned corporation that was organized on May 1, 1971, to provide intercity passenger train service in the United States. "Amtrak" is a portmanteau of the words "America" and "track". It is headquartered at Union...

in 1971 reduced service to the northbound and southbound Floridian

Floridian (Amtrak)

The Floridian was an Amtrak route that ran from Chicago to Miami and St. Petersburg, Florida. Its route mainly followed that of several former Louisville and Nashville Railroad passenger trains, including the Humming Bird...

train each day. When this service was discontinued in October 1979, the station was abandoned entirely.

The station fell into the custody of the United States Government's General Services Administration

General Services Administration

The General Services Administration is an independent agency of the United States government, established in 1949 to help manage and support the basic functioning of federal agencies. The GSA supplies products and communications for U.S...

, which struggled for years to find a viable redevelopment plan as the station declined further. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places

National Register of Historic Places

The National Register of Historic Places is the United States government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects deemed worthy of preservation...

and had a tremendous sentimental appeal to many Nashvillians who categorically rejected any redevelopment plans which did not involve the retention of the main terminal building. In the early 1980s a group of investors came forward with a plan to finance the renovation of the station into a luxury hotel

Hotel

A hotel is an establishment that provides paid lodging on a short-term basis. The provision of basic accommodation, in times past, consisting only of a room with a bed, a cupboard, a small table and a washstand has largely been replaced by rooms with modern facilities, including en-suite bathrooms...

which was approved.

The hotel plan was based around the use of "junk bond" financing; the interest payments required were so severe that the hotel would require 90% occupancy at an average room rate of $135/night to break even. This was not supportable in the 1980s Nashville hotel market and the initial investors soon found the project to be bankrupt

Bankruptcy

Bankruptcy is a legal status of an insolvent person or an organisation, that is, one that cannot repay the debts owed to creditors. In most jurisdictions bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debtor....

. Many feared that this meant that the station was doomed; however, the new investor group who bought the hotel out of bankruptcy were able to operate it profitably because they had a much lower cost basis in it and were not forced to charge such exorbitant room rates or project such a high occupancy rate. By the mid-1990s they had restored Mercury to his place atop the tower, albeit in a two-dimensional form painted in trompe l'oeil
Trompe l'oeil
Trompe-l'œil, which can also be spelled without the hyphen in English as trompe l'oeil, is an art technique involving extremely realistic imagery in order to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects appear in three dimensions.-History in painting:Although the phrase has its origin in...

style to replicate the original. This was destroyed in the 1998 downtown Nashville tornado

Tornado

A tornado is a violent, dangerous, rotating column of air that is in contact with both the surface of the earth and a cumulonimbus cloud or, in rare cases, the base of a cumulus cloud. They are often referred to as a twister or a cyclone, although the word cyclone is used in meteorology in a wider...

but was soon replaced.

More problematic was the attempt to find a modern use for the massive train shed adjacent to the terminal building, where the passengers actually met the trains. The structure, said to be the largest of its kind in the world and an engineering

Engineering

Engineering is the discipline, art, skill and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, mathematical, economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design and build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes that safely realize improvements to the lives of...

masterpiece, continued to deteriorate as its fate was debated. Plans, including those involving raising it up to the level of the surrounding street (from the cut level) and making it into a farmers' market, never came to fruition. The structure was eventually demolished in late 2000 after a fire damaged the shed, and no viable preservation alternatives were identified. Its design had been carefully recorded.

History and architecture

See also