Union Station

1820 Market Street
St. Louis, MO

St. Louis' Union Station was designed by Theodore Link and opened on September 1, 1894. The station's headhouse featured a massive Grand Hall with a 65-foot barrel-vaulted ceiling and stained glass windows. The 11.5-acre train shed was a stub-end terminal that was the world's largest roof span at the time of its opening. At its peak, the station was one of the world's busiest, hosting 22 different railroads. In the 1940s it handled 100,000 passengers a day.

With the decline of passenger rail service in the 1950s and 1960s, traffic at the station reached a low point of three trains per day when Amtrak was formed in 1971. With the building too expensive for the railroad to maintain, service was moved to a much smaller building along the tracks to the south and the station closed in 1978. The building was subsequently renovated and repurposed, reopening in August of 1985 with a Hyatt Regency Hotel, offices, shops restaurants and a plaza for special events.

Official station site

Historic 1895 monograph on the building of Union Station

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