Free The Best American Travel Writing 2015 by Andrew McCarthy

of a deal he cut with the railroads whereby they agreed to charge all his competitors as much as double the rate while providing Rockefeller with a secret discount and kickbacks on his competitors’ shipments.
    The landscape before me today, a hundred years later, tells a different story of corporate hegemony. The old Cleveland station, where intercity trains stopped until 1977, was an outstanding example of Beaux Arts design constructed in the late 1920s by local brothers named Van Sweringen in imitation of New York’s Grand Central.
    The station is still gorgeous, but trains don’t run there anymore, save for a few local commuter lines. Amtrak couldn’t afford the rent, so instead it lets anyone who wants to go to Cleveland off where we are, at Lakefront Station. Lakefront is what foamers call an Amshack—a building that looks as if it might be a storage facility for the files of an accounting firm that went out of business sometime during the Ford administration.
    It used to be that private corporations could be relied on to build exquisite public spaces at their own expense, not just slap their names on a finished product. American train stations were once the most magnificent in the world. Even in the smallest towns, they tended to be little jewels of craftsmanship. In bigger cities, they were the first monumental modern buildings erected without reference to God or king, built by the people to move the people.
    Most of the leading American architects from the 1890s through the next 40 years tried their hand at a train station, or more than one—Daniel Burnham, Cass Gilbert, Charles Follen McKim, Henry Hobson Richardson, Stanford White. What they produced were predominantly Beaux Arts beauties but also pretty much the entire array of architecture practiced in this country up through the 1930s, including some astonishing amalgams of styles.
    Many of the great stations have been ingeniously repurposed and restored as commuter-train stops, shopping malls, museums, restaurants, even movie theaters, thanks to the foamers and the more enlightened city governments stuck with them once the old railroads died. Yet the removal of function from form is an essential societal disconnect. As Ed Breslin and Hugh Van Dusen write in the lavishly illustrated
America’s Great Railroad Stations
:
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Each station functioned as did the main gate on a medieval town: it was the welcoming portal to that community, and it was meant to impress, comfort, and reassure the visitor. Each station was a focal point of collective pride, a civic monument large or small. All embodied America’s love of, and genius for, commercial excellence. Whether built on the scale of a small chapel, a substantial church, or a monumental cathedral, all of these stations personified and reflected America’s secular spirituality fueled by the belief that life could endlessly be enhanced by aesthetic beauty, industrial might, technological know-how, and creature comforts while traveling in style with alacrity from one point on the compass to another.
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    In Chicago’s Union Station, the Metropolitan Lounge is in chaos. The station is one of Daniel Burnham’s surviving gems, but for some reason its grand hall lies empty and still, while long-distance passengers and their luggage are jammed into a drab, undersized basement room. Only Amtrak could turn a luxury lounge into a refugee center. Most of the passengers struggle and sway hauling their baggage down to the train, then up the twisting stairs inside the double-decker cars.
    Gazing out the window in the dappled afternoon light a few minutes before we leave, I see luggage handlers piling bags atop an ancient, wood-bedded open wagon. I might have witnessed much this same scene, even this same equipment, at Lincoln’s first convention, back in 1860, the first in a long line of political conventions of all denominations—Democratic, Republican, Bull Moose, Socialist,