The new Boulevard Park newsletter has a somewhat innocuous listing about an upcoming forum regarding the train station. It has this rather casual statement " Ironically, Union Pacific’s decision to move the train tracks quite
a distance away from the old station means that a new one must be built closer to the new tracks. Hence there is a need to find new uses for this
terrific building and for the area immediately around it, which will gain even greater importance as an intermodal transportation hub."
WAIT HOLD UP, NEEDLE SCRATCHING ON RECORD SOUND. Are you telling me that since they moved the goddamned tracks ridiculously far that now they have eventually rendered this beautiful, functional building obsolete and freed it up to be a series of failing business!?! This is worse when they took our (not beautiful), functional bus station out of downtown and moved it out to Richards boulevard and now the building is STILL EMPTY.
You can just look at The Bank to see why Sacramento does not need more of this type of cavernous, echoey business space.
This is just awful and I feel like it can't possibly be true. It's too stupid. Or is it?
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5 comments:
I think the original plan was actually to move the existing train depot to the new location, but it's not actually structurally feasible and no one realized it until too late.
-biz
I remember the plan about moving the train station, which also seemed unbelievably stupid.
What we need is a MONORAIL from the station to the tracks, big-city style.
The distance from the train station entrance and the tracks is about the same as the entrance from Los Angeles Union Station's main entrance to the tracks. LA Union Station is the only Amtrak passenger station busier than Sacramento west of the Mississippi River, which implies that the station can support some retail uses like you find in other train stations and airports--retail stores for sundries and travel stuff, a few places to buy food. The general assumption by a lot of old-time neighborhood advocates is that they're abandoning the train station to be a T-shirt shop, but I don't think that's necessarily an accurate assessment of the plan for the historic depot. They're planning to move many of the depot functions to an expanded facility parallel to the path to the tracks, but the idea is that the historic depot remains the grand entrance to the station--and, for those arriving, the grand entrance to Sacramento. Think of the old depot the way we think of the big red bunny in Terminal B--it's not the whole station, since when that station was built the city was 1/5 the size and the metro region about 1/10 the population--but it's the familiar icon that greets you once you step off the concourse. It should also have practical uses for travelers.
And of course the move of the Greyhound depot was pretty much entirely about removing the perceived Greyhound customer from downtown, not any greater convenience or accessibility for the passengers (which would be beautiful if they hadn't slapped that ugly beige paint on top of the Gladding-McBean terra cotta tile walls.)
Thanks to the shout out to Gladding-McBean, the lone source of my hometown pride!
That's funny you mention the red rabbit because my mom recently saw it for the first time and was ranting about how stupid it is. But she's not much of an art critic. If it ain't Frida Kahlo, she hates it.
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