Denver Union Station

A Beaux Arts Terminal Of 1914 On 1881 Foundations, Derelict For Decades And Reopened In 2014 After A Restoration That Turned Its Great Hall Into A Public Room With Bars, A Bookshop And Shuffleboard In It, And A Hotel In The Floors Above. Still A Working Station. · Denver, Colorado

Denver Union Station is the rarest thing in American civic architecture: a great railway terminal that was saved, and then actually used. The first station went up in 1881, burned, and was rebuilt in 1914 in Beaux-Arts stone with a neon sign on the front reading TRAVEL BY TRAIN. By the late twentieth century it was a near-empty hall with a handful of Amtrak passengers a day. The restoration finished in 2014 and did something unusual with it - rather than making a museum of the Great Hall, the city filled it with bars, a bookshop, long communal tables and shuffleboard, and let people sit in it all day for nothing. The upper floors became a hotel. Trains still leave: light rail, the California Zephyr, and since 2016 a direct line to the airport. The building is why Lower Downtown looks the way it does now, and the restoration is studied elsewhere for exactly that reason: a transit hub that pulled a whole district after it by giving people somewhere to sit for nothing.

1701 Wynkoop Street, Denver, Colorado, 80202, United States

The Great Hall is open daily and is free to enter and sit in - no ticket, no purchase required, which is the point of it. Individual bars, restaurants and the bookshop keep their own hours, generally from morning until late. The transit concourse operates on rail and bus schedules, with the airport line running from early morning to late night and the Amtrak California Zephyr calling once a day in each direction. The building is busiest on weekend evenings and during Rockies home games.

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