Why was Union Station built so grand?

Why it matters

Union Station opened in 1907 as the railroad gateway to Washington, and it still works as one. It is Amtrak's second-busiest station and the southern end of the Northeast Corridor, the electrified line that runs north through Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York to Boston, the busiest passenger railroad in the country. Commuter trains from Maryland and Virginia, the Metro's Red Line, intercity buses and city buses all meet here (see getting here).

It is also one of the great buildings of the plan for the capital. Daniel Burnham set the station where two of L'Enfant's diagonal avenues meet, facing the Capitol five blocks away, and gave arriving travelers a Roman arch to walk through. For anyone who comes by train, the first sight of the city is the Capitol dome across the plaza from the front steps, a view Burnham planned on purpose.

A station that cleared the Mall

Before 1907 each railroad in Washington had its own station. The Baltimore and Ohio used a depot on New Jersey Avenue, and from 1873 the Baltimore and Potomac, part of the Pennsylvania Railroad, ran its trains across the Mall on 6th Street to a station on the Mall's north side, roughly where the National Gallery of Art's West Building now stands.

Tracks running across the Mall were exactly what the planners of the early 1900s wanted removed. Union Station was the answer: a single terminal for all the lines, built north of the Capitol and off the Mall. Burnham, the Chicago architect who also sat on the commission that shaped the design of the Mall, drew it up with Pierce Anderson.

It was built as a monument as much as a station. At the height of its traffic, during the Second World War, as many as two hundred thousand passengers passed through it in a single day. The building even carries an airport code of its own, ZWU, a reminder of how central it once was to travel into the capital.

Rome on Massachusetts Avenue

Burnham borrowed openly from Roman architecture. The facade, more than six hundred feet long and built of white granite from a quarry opened specially for the job, takes its central arches from the Arch of Constantine. The great vaulted rooms inside follow the pattern of the Baths of Diocletian, with gold leaf, marble and carved inscriptions completing the effect of a public monument rather than a railroad shed.

Above the main cornice stand six colossal statues by Louis Saint-Gaudens, modeled on the Dacian prisoners of the Arch of Constantine. Inside, he carved forty-six centurions, one for each state in the Union when the station opened. Their large shields were added shortly after installation, once early visitors complained about the figures' nudity from the hips down.

The result was meant to impress as much as to move passengers. Arriving by rail in Washington, in Burnham's design, meant arriving under Roman vaults and through a Roman arch, a deliberate echo of the ambitions behind the wider plan for the Mall nearby (see the plan).

Decline and return

As air travel and the car took over mid-century, the station declined. In the 1970s it was converted into a National Visitor Center for the Bicentennial, with a sunken pit built into the Main Hall for a slide show, which Washingtonians nicknamed the Pit.

With little publicity and poor parking, the center was never popular, and its theaters and slide show closed. In 1981 part of the ceiling collapsed, which alarmed Congress into action: money was found to finish roof repairs and build a parking garage, and the station was handed over for restoration as a working railroad station with shops.

The restored station reopened in 1988, with a new wing and shops set into the old halls. By 2014 it ranked among the busiest rail stations and shopping destinations in the country. The pandemic emptied many of its shops, and Amtrak took control of the station in 2024, beginning a renovation and expansion whose details for shops and non-rail spaces have kept changing since.

What you actually see

Come in through the central arch into the Main Hall, the old waiting room. Its coffered, gilded barrel vault rises ninety-six feet above the floor, and the centurions stand guard on the balcony line around it, shields held in front of them. Beyond the hall, the concourse leads on to the train gates and the Metro entrance.

Outside, walk back down the steps to Columbus Circle. The Columbus Fountain, by the Chicago sculptor Lorado Taft, was unveiled in 1912, and the city marked the occasion with three days of parades, concerts and fireworks that drew tens of thousands of spectators to the plaza in front of the station.

From the fountain, look south toward Capitol Hill: the Capitol dome closes the view, exactly as Burnham intended when he turned the station to face it. The short walk from the steps brings the Capitol and the Library of Congress within easy reach (see the Capitol).

How to visit

The station is a working terminal, and its public halls can be walked through without buying a ticket. The shops and restaurants inside have been changing since the pandemic and the start of Amtrak's renovation, so check the station's own pages for which are in business before planning a meal or a stop there.

Allow time for the building itself, not just for catching a train. The Main Hall is best seen from the middle of the floor, looking straight up at the vault, and again from the top of the front steps, looking back at the facade and out across the plaza to the Capitol dome.

For travelers, Union Station is the stop for Amtrak's Northeast Regional and Acela trains, for MARC trains from Maryland and VRE trains from Virginia, and for the Metro's Red Line. Intercity buses leave from a bus deck in the parking structure behind the station.

Honest notes

The centurions were not always so modest: the shields were a later addition, made after complaints about the statues' bare lower bodies. The station was never built for travelers alone; it was part of a wider plan to take the railroad off the Mall, which is one reason the Mall is a stretch of lawn today rather than a rail yard.

The building's commercial life has had several falls and recoveries, from the quiet years as a Bicentennial visitor center to the ceiling collapse of 1981 to the pandemic's empty storefronts and the renovation that followed. The architecture is the reason to come, whatever the shops happen to be doing on a given visit.

In 2014 more than forty million people a year passed through the station, while it served just under five million rail passengers in 2015. The numbers make the point plainly: most people who come to Union Station come to see it, not to catch a train.