History
Unlike many union stations built in the U.S. to serve the needs of more than one railroad, this facility connected the Pennsylvania Railroad with several subsidiary lines; for that reason it was renamed in 1912 to match other Pennsylvania Stations.
The station building was designed by Chicago architect Daniel Burnham and built 1898–1903. The materials were a grayish-brown terra cotta that looked like brownstone, and brick. Though Burnham is regarded more as a planner and organizer rather than a designer of details, which were left to draftsmen like Peter Joseph Weber, the most extraordinary feature of the monumental train station is his: the rotunda with corner pavilions. At street level the rotunda sheltered turning spaces for carriages beneath wide low vaulted spaces that owed little to any historicist style. Above, the rotunda sheltered passengers in a spectacular waiting room. Burnham's firm went on to complete more than a dozen projects in Pittsburgh, some on quite prominent sites. The rotunda is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
On January 3, 1954 the Pennsylvania Railroad announced a $31.3 million (2012 dollars) in expansion and renovation for the complex.
The restoration of Union Station in the mid-1980s converted the office tower into apartments, and is now called The Pennsylvanian which opened to residents on May 23, 1988. The concourse, which is no longer open to the public, was transformed into a lobby for commercial spaces on the ground floor and the paint cleaned off the great central skylight. The rotunda which once offered shelter for carriages to turn around is now closed to vehicular traffic - modern cars and trucks are too heavy for the brick road surface and risk caving in the roof to the parking garage below it.
Read more about this topic: Union Station (Pittsburgh)
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“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)