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Originally Posted by ozone
@ wburg Have I seen some of the latest plans for LA's Union Station? No, but they are just future plans right? You made it seem like the area around the station had developed into this vibrant mix-use urban neighborhood and that's just bogus. I lived in LA for 10 years (mostly in the older neighborhoods closer to downtown) and I frequently caught the train down to San Diego to visit my family. So I'm pretty familiar with (Union Station).
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Ozone, when is the last time you were at Union Station or downtown LA? They have just about tripled the population of their downtown in the past decade or so, so yes, downtown LA in general is becoming a much more vibrant and mixed-use neighborhood, and you just haven't been there to see it. I get down to LA once or twice a year, usually via Union Station and downtown, and have seen a lot of positive change even from those visits. In between those visits I follow a lot of downtown LA development, and see the sort of things they are doing. One of those changes was the recently built housing just north of the station, which I mentioned. So maybe my idea of "vibrant" is different from yours, but my last visit to Union Station and the nearby Pueblo de Los Angeles was quite enjoyable, there were events going on around the old Pueblo in addition to in a public plaza alongside Union Station proper.
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LA's station is configured that way because they designed it that way from the beginning. I guess they had good reason - large number of tracks, alignment and orientation, accommodating the automobile, wishing to highlight LA's great climate, as opposed to the gritty stations back east? I don't know.
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Clearly you don't. LA's station has access to the track via an underground tunnel, so it certainly doesn't highlight LA's great climate--it's pretty much the same way that train stations in other cities with worse climates connect the passengers to the trains, either via overhead catwalks or underground tunnels. Sacramento's Southern Pacific depot used underground tunnels, much like the Los Angeles depot did a decade later. Alignment and orientation were also similar, with multiple tracks in parallel behind the depot, and a parking lot and streetcar access in front. The main difference was the difference in size between LA and Sacramento in the 1930s:1.2 million vs about 100,000, plus it was a union station with multiple railroads, while Sacramento had 3 different train stations (one for SP, one for WP, one for the electric interurbans.) But that's another story.
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But it's not at all the same thing here in Sacramento. But you keep saying it is.
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We're the closest station in the western United States to Los Angeles in terms of size and total traffic: they get 1.7 million a year, we get 1.2 million. The next busiest are San Diego, with around 700,000, Portland and Seattle with around 650,000. So yes, the kind of station we are shooting for is more along the lines of LA Union Station than the smaller, more modest passenger facilities in those cities. Our two commuter trains carry as many passengers as LA's commuter train when added together, plus they are preparing for major expansion which means an increase in traffic that will move us closer to their numbers. Their union station rehab plans don't include a lot of increase in train capacity--while we have room for growth in that respect that they don't.
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Is not the plan to build a whole new depot north of the old one? You call it "Amshack" but will not the new intermodal facility have a drop off, ticketing booths, waiting area, retail/cafe space, etc? The plans I saw were pretty nice. Granted they were a few years ago and this city loves to value engineer proposals down to crap.
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No, is not the plan. Plan is to
turn the entire area into a larger intermodal complex. And no, the new Amtrak facility won't have its own drop off space--there will not be road access (for cars) north of the historic depot. The larger complex, which includes most of the space between the tracks and the historic depot entrance, will include all of those things, in addition to the other transportation functions like buses, light rail, and streetcar. That's what makes it an "intermodal" depot. Trying to shoehorn everything into a small building close to the tracks would be a very, very tight fit--but, fortunately, there is lots of room.
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I'm glad you're infatuated with L.A.'s Union Station. And I understand that as a historian you probably would not only want to preserve the building but also maintain it's original purpose as much as possible. I get that. What I don't get is how you possibly imagine the old depot will be anything other than a "grand" pass-through (if even that) once the new station is built? I'd rather see it repurposed into something more than the latest Paragary venture and offices for Amtrak employees (who cares?). OK keep the old waiting area a public right-of-way but let's try and incorporate the old depot into something else like a hotel. Let's not waste the opportunity here. I'm big on historical preservation, but not so much on historical reenactments. That's all I'm saying and going to say on that.
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I'm not sure what being a historian has to do with wanting to preserve a building's original purpose--some of my favorite buildings are used for very different uses than their original purposes--it's called "adaptive reuse" and I'm a big fan of it (aka "new uses in old buildings") What I don't like is buildings that become vacant because some opportunist is waiting for an "opportunity" that might come someday, but in the meantime lets a building sit and rot.
This also has nothing to do with reenactment. It's about
building a bigger, more expansive transportation facility that requires the large amount of space that is now available between the relocated tracks and the historic depot. As the second busiest train station on this half of the country, with a lot of potential for traffic increase in the near future, we have to provide space for the transportation uses we expect, not just what we have now. What happens when hordes of visitors are trying to pile through Sacramento on train, light rail and bus on the way to or from Republic FC games in the Railyards, Kings games on K Street, or a future TBD Fest on the West Sacramento waterfront? How can we accommodate more commuters from Roseville, Rocklin, Auburn and Elk Grove on higher-frequency commuter trains unless we have a transportation complex that can handle more than a little box next to the tracks?
And you have things backwards--the Amtrak offices are temporarily located in the old depot restaurant space, then they will move into a new building closer to the tracks, which you refer to as the "intermodal depot" but really, the intermodal depot is a combination all of the above, roughly bounded by 5th Street, I Street, and the tracks. And there will certainly be room for a hotel in that complex too--I'm not sure how having the historic depot as part of the complex would prevent that. As to who runs a future restaurant, Paragary is getting on in years, I imagine if a new restaurant or two opens up in the Depot, it would more likely involve someone like Zoellin, Thiemann, Touhy, Ngo or Pechal. Maybe you haven't been keeping up on Sacramento restaurants either?
I'm not sure on what you consider "historic[al] preservation," Ozone. If you mean assuming that Sacramento is a small town and will never need expanded, big-city facilities for things like rail transit, you use a very different definition than I do.
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