Left for Dead: Rochester's Union Depot

This article was scraped from Rochester Subway. This is a blog about Rochester history and urbanism has not been published since 2017. The current owners are now publishing link spam which made me want to preserve this history.. The original article was published November 09, 2012 and can be found here.

   I know I keep coming back to this     over    and     over    and     over    again. But I just can't believe we intentionally reduced this once world-class rail station to rubble only so we could pay tens of millions 50 years later in     an attempt

to build a much smaller and less impressive imitation of what we once had.

I'm not going to say much more about it. I just wanted to share these recently found photos of Rochester's half-demolished NY Central (Bragdon) Station. Like a decapitated, rotting corpse left to rot in public as a reminder of a brutal 'auto'cracy. Most of the building was torn down in the 1960's but one section stood like this for over a decade before it was finally removed altogether and replaced with the current Amtrak building in the mid to late 70's. Oy, how painful...

   This is what the interior of the station looked like in its glory days (above). And this is what we did to it...

   Would it not have been better to leave this station to rot indefinitely? At least the possibility of restoration would still exist. As in Buffalo where the     Central Station Restoration Corporation

has been slowly but steadily working toward restoring their once grand NY Central Terminal.

   Mr. Bragdon, we are so unworthy!!