Word: station
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...circus. When a presidential blind trust effectively cut him out of the Carter warehouse business that he had run for years, Billy began drinking heavily. He ran for mayor of Plains, and was defeated. To pay back taxes, he had to sell his property, even the filling station -- "the only thing that was really mine." He became a registered agent for Muammar Gaddafi's regime in Libya, with a $220,000 Libyan "loan...
...Make no little plans," architect and city planner Daniel H. Burnham wrote at the century's turn, "they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized." When Burnham's plan for the glorious beaux- arts Union Station was realized in Washington 81 years ago, it was one of the world's biggest rail terminals but otherwise very much of its time. Before World War I, budgets for civic building were generous, beaux-arts neoclassicism was almost obligatory, and the U.S. had more than 80,000 busy train stations...
...long last, here again is Washington's Union Station. Last week, after a thoughtfully conceived and meticulously executed $160 million restoration, the great national depot -- the bustling terminus for hundreds of thousands of troops sent off to two world wars, the Capitol Hill transit point for eleven Presidents and 11 zillion federal hangers-on -- reopened in something like its original form for the first time in more than a decade. It may be the most breathtaking public interior in the U.S. The vast, spiffed-up old station, packed with 140 new shops and restaurants and movie theaters (replacing, among other...
Despite the renovation, a sense of Manifest Destiny grandeur and industrial heft remains. Diesel locomotives will use the station as well as croissant- eating lawyers. "This isn't a suburban mall," says Benjamin Thompson, the renovation and revitalization architect, based in Cambridge, Mass., who designed the new retail spaces. "This is Washington, D.C. We wanted to maintain Union Station as a transportation center." Until Amtrak service is fully restored, within a year, rail passengers will continue to use a dreary annex built in 1975, when Park Service officials turned the main station into a tourist-information bureau. The National Visitor...
...first several decades of its existence, Union Station was a wonder, a glowing masterwork of civic architecture that the authorities maintained and everybody used. Its redemption today is salutary not just as an example of impeccable restoration but also as a reminder that in this age of retrenchment and diminished dreams, ambitious federal public works can still amount to something more than strategic-weapons systems and superhighways...