Union Station is an Amtrak railroad station and mixed-use commercial building in downtown Erie, Pennsylvania, United States. It is served by the Lake Shore Limited route, which provides daily passenger service between Chicago and (via two sections east of Albany) New York City or Boston; Erie is the train's only stop in Pennsylvania. The station's ground floor has been redeveloped into commercial spaces, including The Brewerie at Union Station, a brewpub. The building itself is privately owned by the global logistics and freight management company Logistics Plus and serves as its headquarters.
The first railroad station in Erie was established in 1851 but was replaced with the Romanesque Revival-style Union Depot in 1866. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions by competing railroad companies which started not long after the establishment of Erie's first railroads, Union Depot became jointly owned and operated by the New York Central and Pennsylvania railroads. To meet the changing needs of the rapidly growing city, planners designed a more modern structure to replace the original depot. The new Art Deco Union Station, dedicated on December 3, 1927, was the first railroad station of that style in the United States.
While Union Station was busy from its opening and through World War II, passenger rail service began to dwindle after the war when air and highway travel became more popular. By the 1960s, the New York Central drastically cut service, while the Pennsylvania abandoned service to Erie altogether. Both railroads were merged in 1968 to form Penn Central, and passenger rail was transferred from Penn Central to Amtrak in 1971. At one point, from 1972 to 1975, even Amtrak service in Erie was suspended. With reduced demand for train travel, Union Station was neglected and allowed to decay until Logistics Plus bought it in 2003. Since then it has been restored, with portions re-purposed as commercial and retail space.
Design
Union Station is in downtown Erie on West 14th Street between Peach and Sassafras Streets. Designed by architects Alfred T. Fellheimer and Steward Wagner, it was the first Art Deco railroad station to be designed and built in the United States. Previously, Fellheimer had been influential in the design of Grand Central Terminal in New York City, and both architects collaborated on several railroad stations for the New York Central Railroad, including Buffalo Central Terminal in 1929 and Cincinnati Union Terminal in 1933.
The main building of Erie's Union Station, three stories tall, is of steel and masonry construction. The entire exterior is clad in "rough brown" brick and sandstone layered in a Flemish bond, trimmed in terracotta, and lined with granite at the ground level. The main station building has a frontage of along Peach Street and on 14th Street; a narrow two-story extension continues another towards Sassafras before terminating at a small, attached office building. The extension eased the transfer of mail, baggage, and freight between trains and street level while the offices of the freight company were housed in the attached building at the Sassafras Street end of the station complex.
When the station initially opened, entrances from 14th Street opened into a large, octagonal rotunda where ticket offices, checked baggage, and a newsstand were located. As the railroad tracks are grade separated behind Union Station, the platforms are accessed by a pedestrian tunnel under the tracks with stairs that lead to the platforms. The tunnel entrance is directly across the rotunda from the street entrance—a portion of which is now used as the kitchen for a brewpub housed inside the station. The concourse, off the rotunda, led to the Peach Street entrances, and contained space for a soda fountain, a barber shop, and telegraph offices, as well as access to the station's waiting room. Facing Peach Street, a dining room and lunch counter run by the Union News Company, which operated the majority of the dining services in New York Central stations, were at the opposite end of Union Station from the rotunda. The entire ground floor was laid with terrazzo featuring a mosaic border and Botticino marble paneling along the plaster walls. A green and tan color scheme was originally used throughout the entire building. Superintendents for both the New York Central and Pennsylvania railroads, as well as other railroad officials, had offices on the second floor of Union Station.