Sixty-two years ago, this past August, I packed a steamer trunk with a year’s worth of personal belongings and boarded a Union Pacific Railroad passenger train en route, through Chicago, Illinois, to Washington, D.C. Accepted to George Washington University, the first member of my family to attend college, and the son of a pipefitter/sheet metal worker in the Union Pacific’s Cheyenne rail yards, I was entitled to free use of a railroad pass to take me to university.
In the words of the late Steve Goodman’s country folk song, City of New Orleans, eight years later, like “the sons of Pullman porters, and the sons of engineers,” I was riding my “father’s magic carpets made of steel.” For five years, twice annually, I made the two-day round trip from the western edge of the Great Plains at the foot of the Rocky Mountains across two-thirds of the country to the nation’s Capital, which I entered through its magnificent Union Station.
THE WEST CELEBRATES THE END OF RACIAL GERRYMANDERING
The District of Columbia, established in 1791 as a congressionally designated federal territory to which the federal government moved from Philadelphia in 1800, was designed by Major Peter Charles L’Enfant, a Frenchman who met George Washington during the Revolutionary War. One hundred years later, the U.S. Senate Park Commission retained master American architect and planner Daniel Burnham to update L’Enfant’s design as befitting a world capital.
“Make no little plans,” Burnham said, “They have no magic to stir men’s blood….” Therefore, inspired by L’Enfant and drawing exclusively from the grandeur, symmetry, and classical designs of ancient Rome and Greece, Burnham’s Union Station, the epitome of Beaux-Arts architecture, became the grand entrance to L’Enfant’s city. When opened in 1908, it was the largest building in America; in fact, the Washington Monument, laid sideways, could theoretically fit inside its vast Main Hall beneath a 96-foot-high ceiling with soaring arches. Burnham’s luminous neoclassical building featured “Bethel white granite from Vermont on the exterior and interior” and his Main Hall’s “coffered ceiling [shone] brilliantly with gold leaf and reflects natural light entering from the large Diocletian windows.”
This is what my wide, western, Wyoming eyes saw arriving and departing. Fittingly, the year after I first arrived, Union Station was designated a historic landmark; in 1969, it was listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Sadly, over the years, it was allowed to decay. It reached its man-made nadir, however, after Congress, in 1968, turned it into the National Visitor’s Center for the 1976 bicentennial. Because of “a lack of funding for the conversion, poor design, and changing tastes,” it failed miserably. One hare-brained element, a “$1.6 million recessed theater for showing a slide show about the sights of the nation’s capital,” disparaged as “the pit,” went unused because visitors could step through Burnham’s vaulted entrances to view monuments firsthand.
That was the year I returned to Capitol Hill after serving in the U.S. Marine Corps following deployment to Japan and law school in Laramie. I was horrified with what had become of Union Station, steps from the Dirksen Senate Office Building. It got worse. In February 1981, after I joined the Reagan administration, heavy rains, a common occurrence in the Potomac River’s Foggy Bottom, caused the collapse of Union Station’s long-neglected, rotting roof. The National Park Service shut the place down, Congress got involved, and a panel of “architects, developers and other real estate professionals” declared it, “an embarrassment to the nation, to the federal government, and to Washington, D.C.”
The Reagan administration spent its term, from February 1981 until September 1988, with $181 million appropriated by Congress, using “master plasterers,” “artisans,” and marble “from the same Greek quarry that had supplied the ancient builders of the Parthenon,” repairing the decades of abuse and neglect to restore Burnham’s vision, wrote the Washington Post, “down to the tiniest cornice and curlicue.”
Unfortunately, by early 2025, Union Station, like the rest of Washington, D.C., suffered from the misreported lawlessness, soft-on-crime policies, and vagrancy that compelled President Donald Trump, last August, to take control of law enforcement and bring in the National Guard. Days later, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy took federal control of Union Station after noting that, instead of being a “point of pride,” it had “fallen into disrepair” because of decades of mismanagement. Duffy said, “[President Trump] wants Union Station to be beautiful again. He wants transit to be safe again. And he wants our nation’s capital to be great again.”
ALLIGATOR ALCATRAZ SHOWS WHY NEPA NEEDS REFORM
In September, Secretary Duffy announced the Trump administration’s plan to “fast-track restoration efforts, improve security, and attract new economic development,” after abandoning the Biden administration’s $10 billion, “taxpayer-funded,” “far-fetched,” “boondoggle.” Steve Goodman’s City of New Orleans may have had the “disappearing railroad blues,” but, if President Donald Trump has anything to say about it, Burnham’s Union Station will never suffer that fate.
Mr. Pendley, a Marine, Wyoming attorney, and Colorado-based, public-interest lawyer for three decades with victories at the Supreme Court of the United States, served in the Reagan administration, and led the Bureau of Land Management for President Donald Trump.