Columbus’s Union Station Arch: What’s Left of a Daniel Burnham Landmark

When the city demolished Columbus Ohio’s Union Station in 1976, a last-minute legal scramble saved one arch.

But that act would help launch Columbus’s entire historic preservation movement.

Columbus’s Grand Union Station and Daniel Burnham’s Design

Columbus had already gone through two early union stations: the first built in 1850 was called a “crucial step toward establishing the area’s reputation in transportation and manufacturing” but later “the station and tracks came to be hated for cutting the city in half.” So it was repaced by a second station that was built a few hundred yards east of High Street.

By the 1890s, Columbus was growing and needed a new station grand enough to match the city’s ambitions. So it turned to one of the country’s most prominent architects to build it.

It was designed starting in 1893 by the firm of Daniel Burnham, the architect who designed Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition; the new station opened in 1897, with its street-facing arcade completed in 1899.

The building’s Beaux-Arts Classicism style drew directly on Burnham’s experience from the Chicago exposition.

The arcade originally had two matching arches; the southern one, the original main entrance, was demolished as early as 1928 to widen the roadway for truck traffic.

The surviving arch features Corinthian columns, and elaborate cornices and friezes.

Union Station’s Decline and a Calculated Attempted Demolition

In Columbus as well as many other American cities, passenger rail service declined steadily from the 1950s through the 1970s.

By 1973, the arcade’s storefronts sat vacant except for a single cigar store, the plaster ceiling was crumbling, and the smaller arches lining the arcade’s interior passage had become a nesting spot for pigeons.

The city approved purchasing the Union Station site in January 1973 for a planned 27-acre downtown convention center.

The Union Station entrance and arcade were added to the National Register of Historic Places in February 1974. But this would not prove to be enough to save the building.

Historic preservationists believed the arcade itself was still planned to be incorporated into the new convention center, and were caught off guard when demolition began on the night of October 22, 1976, timed, by at least one account, to reduce the arcade to rubble before anyone could act to stop it.

How the Union Station Arch Was Saved, and Sparked Columbus’s Preservation Movement

Preservationists George C. Smith, also Franklin County’s Prosecuting Attorney, and Judy Kitchen immediately contacted attorney C. William Brownfield who drafted a legal complaint. Brownfield struggled to find an available judge, since much of the city’s judiciary was attending an Ohio State football game that Saturday.

But Franklin County Common Pleas Judge George Tyack signed the temporary restraining order at 5:45pm on October 23, 1976.

Then the order was rushed to the demolition site and delivered to the crew just minutes before the last arch would have come down.

The demolition of the rest of Union Station was complete by 1979, but the surviving arch’s rescue directly led to the founding of the Columbus Landmarks Foundation in 1977.

The Union Station Arch Today, on the Former Site of the Ohio Penitentiary

The arch has had almost as eventful a life after its rescue as it did on the night it was saved.

It was dismantled and placed in storage in 1977, then re-erected at nearby at Marconi Boulevard and West Hickory Street, where a small Arch Park was dedicated in 1980.

In 1999, it was in the way construction of Nationwide Arena, so it needed to be moved again.

This time it couldn’t be disassembled, however, so instead the arch was slowly inched several blocks by professional movers to its current home at McFerson Commons.

McFerson Commons sits on the former grounds of the old Ohio Penitentiary, which had just been demolished a couple of years earlier.

Sources

Historical Marker Database, hmdb.org.

Touring Ohio, touring-ohio.com.

Ohio Outdoor Sculpture, sculpturecenter.org.

The Clio, theclio.com.

Cooperatives Wiki, coop.fandom.com.

Cultural Heritage Site, Union Station Arch Columbus Ohio, mcalho10.wixsite.com.

Scioto Mile, sciotomile.com.