Poll: How Many Times Have You Been To St. Louis Union Station In The Last 12 Months?
St. Louis Union Station is just a few blocks away from my loft, so it’s convenient to stop there. I still marvel at the grandeur of the structure and wish I could go back in time to see at its peak.
In 1912 Union Station was a busy place, but who visits Union Station in 2012? Hotels guests obviously. Anyone else? Bueller?
In the poll this week I want to get a sense of how often the readers of this blog frequent Union Station. Hopefully I’ll be pleasantly surprised by the results. The poll is in the right sidebar and results will be presented on Wednesday August 29, 2012.
— Steve Patterson
What happended to the Marriott plan to upgrade the Station? It should not be on hold forever like Ballpark Village. Other hotels are expanding downtown — Hilton just opened the downtown Embassy Suites hotel, and openedn 360 atop Hilton Ballpark at the Village. Marriott could totally attract the business and vacation travellers back to Union Station if they return Union Station to the destination it was in the 1980’s and 90’s before it was as accessible as it is now with Metrolink and the Peabody right down the street.
During the past year, I have frequently transferred to the #70 bus there. So, it would have been nice to have been able to stop in and buy necessities, such as drugstore items.
I haven’t been to Union Station in a while. A beautiful building, I remember years ago wandering through it as a vacant, abandoned structure. (I climbed the stairs up to the top of the main tower, the building was wide open then).
It comes back to the same question, city planning. Why is this station not used for mass transit, Amtrack and so on?
Or, failing that why not feed the Union Station space with transit? This would have required the new central station to be flipped to 18th street instead of 14th. Would that have been better? All I know is that successful stations I have seen, especially central stations, open up onto commercial districts that are walkable and contain a wide variety of services.
The current central station in St. Louis is an abject failure by any measure. (It is the most desolate central transit station I have ever seen)
Of course if Union Station was a central station, it too no longer has a surrounding commercial district, but that is a question of policy. Which site in the long term has a better chance of developing a city plan to support a central station? That would probably be Union Station, especially if it follows a model such as Victoria Station in London that includes heavy commercial activity within the central station. (Of course Victoria Station also empties directly onto city streets filled with main street style, small scale businesses).
I probably have not been into Union Station for at least a couple of years. I do go by it a fair amount, it is a great building. The stonework is superb.
What’s wrong with the current central station? Some think it ugly, but that’s irrelevant. If it’s currently “desolate”, that’s more a failing of the city surrounding it than of the station itself.
You answered your own question, yes the city fails around the current central transit station, that is why they should have not have built the station at that location. Read the comment from JAE. The City of St. Louis is dead zone after dead zone, there is no attempt to create a cohesive whole, even on a small scale.
Maybe there is a site better than 14th street or Union Station, I don’t know. I do know the current station is a weak design solution that fails to serve the needs of the people of St. Louis and of visitors.
Union Station would have been a better site in my view than 14th street, it at least offers some options for creating a functional urban environment.
If Union Station was the central transit station it would have changed the nature of Steve’s question. It is a huge failure that the city government does not combine transit with the urban surroundings.
And if Union Station borders on failure now, it is the result of that poor decision making, there is nothing wrong with the building. It was a busy central central station in the past and should be now.
At the risk of stating the obvious; train stations are built where the train tracks are.
It’s not feasible to re-route tracks a mile north just for a nicer building that isn’t really suitable for transit anymore anyway..
The whole idea is to develop city plans that make sense. Union Station was the center of St. Louis transit for a long time, I hardly think it would be inconvenient to make it a central station. In any case the lack of foresight is the problem. The evidence of incompetence is overwhelming. St. Louis has the greatest percentage loss of population for any city in the world. Yet you defend the mediocre results we have to live with every day.
Sorry, the only thing obvious is that St Louis city government does not have a clue.
My father came from out of town to catch a long-distance Amtrak train. We took him out to dinner first, choosing the Hard Rock Cafe to be close to the station. We finished our meal early, and had around an hour to spend … it was very hard to spend an hour in the Union Station. The walk over to the Amtrak station was depressing (and difficult); the contrast between the two stations’ architecture could not be starker, though both have the same downtrodden atmosphere.
I run a “family adventure school” called Green Spiral Tours, designed to connect families and nature through field trips all over Saint Louis. Every Veterans Day we ride the metro, with little kids, strollers, moms, etc. down to Union Station to feed the goldfish, taste fudge and discover the “Whispering Arch” all over again… …keeping the flame burning for Union Station once again this year….