Hub, Home, Heart

Union Station, across First Street, was the world’s largest railroad terminal when it opened in 1907. Its construction took five years and displaced hundreds of small houses and businesses. Architect Daniel Burnham’s Beaux-Arts masterpiece, with its soaring, elegant and light-filled interiors, was the first of the series of Classical buildings demonstrating the sophistication and power of the Nation’s Capital. The station’s name refers to the of two competing railroad depots: the Baltimore & Ohio’s on New Jersey Avenue, NW, and the Pennsylvania’s which occupied 14 acres on the National Mall. The merger made train travel more convenient. It removed commerce from the Mall and eliminated the danger of tracks crossing city streets. Union Station and the railroads have employed thousands, many of whom lived nearby. For a white male immigrant of the early 1900s, a railroad job meant security for his family and, often, economic progress. For African American men the job of porter on a Pullman Company luxury rail car was among the best available. In 1925 A. Philip Randolph founded a pioneering black union, International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. DC’s station porters, or Red Caps, were the nation’s first to organize a local union, the Washington Terminal Brotherhood of Station Porters. Inside the station you can see a memorial to Randolph, who also worked to organize the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The Classical City Post Office, designed to match Union Station, opened on this corner in 1914. The Post Office (since reborn as the National Postal Museum) replaced Capitol Park (a.k.a. Swampoodle Grounds), where the first baseball team known as the Washington Nationals played beginning in 1886.