Union Station & Streetcar Yard: Built! 
This project is now completed and has won the ENR Southeast Best Public Building Award! Everyone who worked on this project did an amazing job! It appears as if WSSU is in talks to lease the second floor, filling all of the building's office space. Five different restaurants are interested in the building's third floor retail/restaurant spaces, which should bring the building to 100% leased. Until a retail / restaurant tenant opens in the space, the city will only open Union Station for visitors once or twice a month. After a retail / restaurant tenant opens, visitors can look around while the tenant is open, since the retail / restaurant spaces are connected to the main museum space. This is a project I'll miss posting on. It was fun following the restoration of Union Station!
Did you know: Winston-Salem's Union Station was the only train station in North Carolina with rails that ran in all four directions! It was also the largest train station in North Carolina from April 15, 1926 until around 1950. Three or four different railroads operated passenger service from Union Station. There was a plan for a much bigger station than this, in the heart of the city, but World War I (The Great War) delayed the project, by several years, until this station was built. The location of this station is due to an International Rail Port in downtown, created through an Act of Congress, which was one of the nation's top-10 ports-of-entry. The rail port was demolished roughly 20-30 years ago. It made Winston-Salem the nation's top inland port city, at that time, but left no room for a new passenger station in the heart of downtown.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Time Magazine - 1926
Say "Winston-Salem" to any well-informed man and he will snap right back at you: "Biggest, fastest-growing city in North Carolina. Population three years ago, 48,000; now, about 70,000. Been booming like Billy-get-out lately. Livest town down South." A branch line of railroad takes you an hour or two back through the hills to a smart, new station. Like as not the Travelers Aid attendant will invite you to use her telephone instead of the pay-booth. She is Winston-Salem's first hostess and sets the pace for hospitality. Climbing a steep green hill you arrive in the city's centre. In the marble lobby of a hotel, the illuminated original of Camel's famed advertisement, "Standard Equipment," greets all comers, whose attention is next attracted by a tablet emblazoned with Winston-Salem boom statistics. With those statistics on view, it is natural for many a Winston-Salemite to believe that all the world lives in his prosperous city. But there is a cosmopolitan aristocracy there also, whose spacious country homes you come to while driving out of town on the well-paved roads. There are the Chathams, the Grays, Haneses, the Reynoldses, whose sons and daughters go north and abroad for school, clothes, weddings. They have a sporty little polo club, foxhunting, golf. And then you will hear of the finest roads in the U. S., the greatest educational strides in the South. All is orderly, vigorous, progressive. Before you leave town you will know that you have visited one of the country's model communities.
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Of course I have old photographs of this (architect) Fellheimer & Wagner building...
This train station once had a grand 2-road circular entrance with Victorian rowhouses (you can see a rowhouse unit on the far left side) leading up to it:
Credit: Winston-Salem / Forsyth County Library
The one-storey brick rowhouses and part of the 2-road circular entrance were destroyed by Interstate 40 construction in the 1950s. The circle is now a pie-shape, due to road widening, and half of the two road triangle was demolished for the Interstate.
A look at the three-storey section in a photograph, taken roughly 60 years ago:
Credit: City of Winston-Salem
This train station is unique due to how the three-storey building is entered on the top floor and the trains are on the ground floor. It takes advantage of the city's rough terrain to allow for more light and varied height ceilings in the waiting rooms that you can only have on the top floor.
Credit: City of Winston-Salem
A look at the grand reopening and completed restoration...
Credit: winstonwatchman
Credit: SarahinWS
Credit: walterrobbsarchitects
Credit: walterrobbsarchitects
Old photographs suggest this may have been a skylight, with the decoration lit-up:
Credit: scaramouch.fandango
Credit: SarahinWS
Credit: SarahinWS
unionstation9-7-19-49 by
City of Winston-Salem, on Flickr
unionstation9-7-19-48 by
City of Winston-Salem, on Flickr
unionstation9-7-19-46 by
City of Winston-Salem, on Flickr
unionstation9-7-19-75 by
City of Winston-Salem, on Flickr
unionstation9-7-19-60 by
City of Winston-Salem, on Flickr
unionstation9-7-19-56 by
City of Winston-Salem, on Flickr
unionstation9-7-19-54 by
City of Winston-Salem, on Flickr
unionstation9-7-19-52 by
City of Winston-Salem, on Flickr
unionstation9-7-19-51 by
City of Winston-Salem, on Flickr
unionstation9-7-19-50 by
City of Winston-Salem, on Flickr
Winston-Salem's traffic control center, on the ground floor:
unionstation9-7-19-84 by
City of Winston-Salem, on Flickr
unionstation9-7-19-82 by
City of Winston-Salem, on Flickr
unionstation9-7-19-83 by
City of Winston-Salem, on Flickr
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