The Durham Museum

History Museum In Omaha'S 1931 Art Deco Union Station (Smithsonian Affiliate Hedge) · Omaha, Nebraska

The Durham Museum is Omaha's history museum, housed in Union Station, the Art Deco passenger terminal that the Union Pacific Railroad opened in 1931 at the south edge of downtown. Designed by the architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood, the station was one of the finest Art Deco buildings in the Midwest, and its Great Hall, with a tall coffered ceiling, big chandeliers, terrazzo floor and ticket windows, is still the main thing people come for. Passenger trains stopped using it in the early 1970s, and the building was given to the city and opened as a museum in 1975; it has since taken the name of the Durham family, its major donors, and is described as a Smithsonian affiliate. Bronze statues of 1940s travellers stand in the Great Hall, an old-fashioned soda fountain still serves malts and phosphates, and real railcars sit on the lower level beside galleries on Omaha history and a large coin collection. Travelling exhibitions rotate through, and a giant Christmas tree fills the hall in winter. It is not a working station: no trains stop here.

801 South 10th Street, Omaha, Nebraska, 68108, United States

NO OPENING TIME HERE WAS CHECKED. The typical pattern: open Tuesday to Saturday in daytime hours, roughly 10 am to 5 pm, and Sunday afternoons, roughly 1 to 5 pm, CLOSED ON MONDAYS and on major holidays; the soda fountain can close earlier than the museum. December brings extended or special evening hours for holiday events. The traps that ruin a day are arriving on a Monday, turning up in the last hour and missing the lower-level railcars, finding the Great Hall set for a private evening event, and assuming it is a working train station. Confirm current times before relying on them.

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