Detroit - Union Depot - Fort Street - 1907
by John Madison
Title
Detroit - Union Depot - Fort Street - 1907
Artist
John Madison
Medium
Digital Art - Digital
Description
Detroit Union Depot
"The first train steamed into the venerable Union Depot, downtown at Third Avenue and Fort Street, on Jan. 21, 1893.
Planning began in 1889, with James Stewart & Co. of St. Louis — one of America’s most accomplished railroad contractors - handling its design. Construction began in 1891 and took a couple of years to complete. Stewart carved the behemoth out of a dark red sandstone, choosing the Romanesque Revival style popular at the time. The style was based on the concepts of H.H. Richardson, a Boston architect who also designed the Bagley Memorial Fountain in Detroit. The depot’s appearance was similar to the still-standing Detroit Club on Cass and First Presbyterian Church on Woodward.
The station started as a depot for a combination of railways, including the old Wabash, the Flint and Pere Marquette, and the Detroit, Lansing and Northern. The depot was part of an area that was a major transportation hub, bounded by Fort Street to the north and the Detroit River to the south, and Cass Avenue to the east and what is now the Lodge Service Drive to the west. Steamships from the Detroit and Cleveland Navigation Co. would puff up to the docks at the end of Third. The steamers brought hundreds of people at a time from Cleveland and Buffalo, N.Y. Just a few blocks south of the Union Depot was its main competition, the now-demolished Michigan Central Railroad Depot. This meant that many people’s first views and impressions of Detroit were experienced in this block.
At the end of January 1974, the building would be destroyed. But instead of a wrecking ball, a crane with a jack-o-lantern-like clamshell bucket nibbled away on its red sandstone walls. A fitting, drawn-out demise for a building that had served Detroiters for more than 80 years"
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February 8th, 2013
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