Since Mike Gruss’s piece a couple of weeks ago on the absence of Amtrak service in South Hampton Roads, I’ve been curious about the once-fabulous era of passenger trains, how it came and how it went.
Thanks to newspaper clippings – not electronic files or microfilm but the real clips, dusty and fading in the newspaper’s library and the Sargeant Memorial Room at Norfolk Public – and thanks to some pretty terrific reporting and commentary, I’ve been able to recreate at least a couple of scenes and images.
The early part of the last century was a heady time for Hampton Roads. The 1907 Jamestown Exposition had spurred the growth of hotels. Electric and then steam trains were rambling over vast farmland to the oceanfront. Steamboats were calling at downtown piers every day. And then and there, an ambitious new entity was announced: Union Station, a collaboration between railroads, would bring them all together on East Main Street, somewhere near where today’s Harbor Park stands. And a seedy place it was.
According to a story in the early 1960s by George Tucker, the area was “famous for its flop houses, tattoo parlors, beer taverns and a striptease palace.” (If anybody remembers, I’d love to know what a striptease palace was.)
The station was not your typical beaux-arts or neo-classical edifice, like the ones in Washington and Richmond, at least not from the outside. It was an eight-story brick building, trimmed in gray stone. The building housed the offices of the railroads that used the terminal.
But inside the station, Tucker reported, there was an “imperial serenity.” The waiting room was all lofty marble and decorated plaster. Its elaborate stucco ceiling echoed continuously with announcements of arrivals and departures, especially during the world wars when millions of service people passed through. Think of the farewells, the hugs and kisses, and in some cases the last moments people had together.
But the advent of automobiles seemed to doom railroad passenger service. At least that’s what we thought, before Amtrak and light rail and, maybe ten years from now, high-speed rail. Most cities hung onto their train stations, but Norfolk seemed hell-bent on wiping out its architectural past. Union Station lived from 1912 to 1962, then slowly, brick by brick, memory by memory, gave up the ghost.
What struck me most in the clips was an editorial, written during the tenure of Lenoir Chambers, the editor who had recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his stance against massive resistance. I knew his writing then was logical and precise, but I hadn’t appreciated his gift of observation.
By the time of World War II, the editorial points out, the station “had become shabby. It smelled of disinfectant. The benches were scarred and notched. The ash stands and cuspidors were messy. The oversize radiators hissed and leaked. The premises were like an old stationmaster’s uniform – a little rumpled, a little soiled, very shiny.
“Now it is difficult even reach Union Station. Main Street has been stripped of its gaudy temples of appetite and hovels of exhaustion’ the thoroughfare is broken and barred. And once the station is reached, it stands dim, sad, and doomed. Even the shouts of greeting and the scrape of luggage and the click of loafer heels of girls coming home these days for Christmas from Hollins and Sweet Briar and Randolph-Macon and the other upstate colleges are swallowed in the gloom along the tracks and echo but thinly and momentarily against the once-elegant station walls.”
“But if the station is to have a swan song, these shouts must be it,” he wrote, noting that the station would be dismantled. “The pile of Old Norfolk rubble will rise a little higher.”
Union Station under construction, Dec. 1911, by Harry C. Mann. Norfolk Public Library.
Thanks to newspaper clippings – not electronic files or microfilm but the real clips, dusty and fading in the newspaper’s library and the Sargeant Memorial Room at Norfolk Public – and thanks to some pretty terrific reporting and commentary, I’ve been able to recreate at least a couple of scenes and images.
The early part of the last century was a heady time for Hampton Roads. The 1907 Jamestown Exposition had spurred the growth of hotels. Electric and then steam trains were rambling over vast farmland to the oceanfront. Steamboats were calling at downtown piers every day. And then and there, an ambitious new entity was announced: Union Station, a collaboration between railroads, would bring them all together on East Main Street, somewhere near where today’s Harbor Park stands. And a seedy place it was.
According to a story in the early 1960s by George Tucker, the area was “famous for its flop houses, tattoo parlors, beer taverns and a striptease palace.” (If anybody remembers, I’d love to know what a striptease palace was.)
The station was not your typical beaux-arts or neo-classical edifice, like the ones in Washington and Richmond, at least not from the outside. It was an eight-story brick building, trimmed in gray stone. The building housed the offices of the railroads that used the terminal.
But inside the station, Tucker reported, there was an “imperial serenity.” The waiting room was all lofty marble and decorated plaster. Its elaborate stucco ceiling echoed continuously with announcements of arrivals and departures, especially during the world wars when millions of service people passed through. Think of the farewells, the hugs and kisses, and in some cases the last moments people had together.
But the advent of automobiles seemed to doom railroad passenger service. At least that’s what we thought, before Amtrak and light rail and, maybe ten years from now, high-speed rail. Most cities hung onto their train stations, but Norfolk seemed hell-bent on wiping out its architectural past. Union Station lived from 1912 to 1962, then slowly, brick by brick, memory by memory, gave up the ghost.
What struck me most in the clips was an editorial, written during the tenure of Lenoir Chambers, the editor who had recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his stance against massive resistance. I knew his writing then was logical and precise, but I hadn’t appreciated his gift of observation.
By the time of World War II, the editorial points out, the station “had become shabby. It smelled of disinfectant. The benches were scarred and notched. The ash stands and cuspidors were messy. The oversize radiators hissed and leaked. The premises were like an old stationmaster’s uniform – a little rumpled, a little soiled, very shiny.
“Now it is difficult even reach Union Station. Main Street has been stripped of its gaudy temples of appetite and hovels of exhaustion’ the thoroughfare is broken and barred. And once the station is reached, it stands dim, sad, and doomed. Even the shouts of greeting and the scrape of luggage and the click of loafer heels of girls coming home these days for Christmas from Hollins and Sweet Briar and Randolph-Macon and the other upstate colleges are swallowed in the gloom along the tracks and echo but thinly and momentarily against the once-elegant station walls.”
“But if the station is to have a swan song, these shouts must be it,” he wrote, noting that the station would be dismantled. “The pile of Old Norfolk rubble will rise a little higher.”
Union Station under construction, Dec. 1911, by Harry C. Mann. Norfolk Public Library.
