Union Station tower is visible from almost everywhere in downtown Waterbury. McKim, Mead & White, who designed it, were the foremost American architects of the late 19th, and early 20th centuries and leaders of the City Beautiful movement. It had been in MM&W’s Classical temple to agriculture at the 1893, Columbian Exposition that Westinghouse and Tesla demonstrated the magic that would electrify the 20th century. The humanistic city of the future and its technologies were to be clothed in the venerable, architectural vocabulary of the Classical past. MM&W also happened to be designing Penn Station in NYC.
The initial Union Station design had no tower. The empty shaft was added to MM&W’s shaftless design at the insistence of an executive on the railroad board, we’re told. Or was it added so that Waterbury’s City Beautiful message might be seen above the soot? It stands 245 feet (24 stories) above the street, an enormous sculptural monument anchoring Waterbury’s importance and refinement along the Naugatuck Valley and the NYNH&H rail line to wherever it leads. The railroad board executive’s insistence on the tower assured his message would be a landmark throughout the valley and beyond, then and in the future. It also helped strangers to Waterbury get back to the station when their visits concluded.
