In praise of the Amshack?

Farewell to an American Classic

https://cultofamericana.wordpress.com/2015/12/02/farewell-to-an-american-classic/

Hmmph. I guess no matter what some people are fond of it. The Amshack was a bad design when it was created; wheelchair accessibility was already a legal issue ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architectural_Barriers_Act_of_1968) and Amtrak paid pretty nearly no attention to it.

I'll also grumble about the Amshak.

In the particular case of Rochester, the original station on the NY Central line was a Claude Bragdon building. He was one of the more notable architects of the early-to-mid-20th century. And the beautiful building was quite remarkable. It was knocked down to build the Amshak, and now we're knocking down the Amshack to re-build the Bragdon (modified to allow for bus service as well). Here's a bit more history on the Bragdon:

http://www.rochestersubway.com/topics/2010/01/rochesters_7th_most_beautiful_demolished_train_station_in_the_country/

But I'll also acknowledge the history that the Amshack represents...I'd just rather we had nicer buildings to represent it. My other "home station" is Elkhart, Indiana. That's a case of an original station that's been preserved quite well.

Interesting....just curious...I must have been there, but have forgotten.... what served as a station during the gap between the tearing down of the original station in 1965, and the construction of the "Amshack"?

Edit: All I could find online on the subject, was just some mention that some of the original building remained for that purpose, until 1978......

Reading the article, I can understand the nostalgia the author has for the 'Amshack'....after all, it is the station that he 'grew up with' and the only one he has known, as evident from his photo dated 1985....

And I have empathy.....you know you are getting old when you see them tear down buildings that you watched being built....such as sports stadiums, shopping malls, airport terminal's, and of course railway stations......

I would like to see a thread devoted entirely to all of the stations (not counting just simple shelter's) that Amtrak has built in its history, and which have subsequently been replaced.....should be interesting.....I believe the first was the Riverfront station in Cincinnati, abandoned and destroyed when Amtrak moved back into CUT in 1991....

You folks are right about how people react when they hear something is getting replaced. I wish I had a dollar for every person in NYC who disliked the Trade Center until it was destroyed

PVD said:

You folks are right about how people react when they hear something is getting replaced. I wish I had a dollar for every person in NYC who disliked the Trade Center until it was destroyed

Click to expand...

Good observation....I guess I am one of them....I always thought of the Twin Towers as "ugly", compared to the Empire State Building and the other art deco icons of the New York skyline. But I do miss them now, and not just because of the horrific cause of their demise....

We used to joke that the Twin Towers were the boxes that the Empire State and the Chrysler Building were shipped in.

The Amshack was a nice contemporary design, and effiiceint when kept clean. When not up kept it had all of the charm of a Greyhound Bus station.

The Amshack had it's place, and in some cases still serves it's purpose.

When these stations were built (mostly in the 70's), a number of them replaced large city stations that at that point in time, tended to resemble tombs.

Boarding a train at Buffalo Central (to give one example) was creepy as the building was so empty you felt like you were entering a bad time warp.

This was an era before the adaptive reuse of historic buildings came into it's own.

Ken

What ever happened to the Amshack at Deerborn? It was replaced with a proper station.

I have reminisced in another thread about my first Amtrak trip from Chicago Union Station to Rochester, New York. I was quite car less in late 1980, so my father had to collect the US Navy's newest Quartermaster Seaman Apprentice from that very Amshack. My father even said there used to be a bigger station for the trains, but went on to say that station had not be maintained over the years and this new station was nicer. He should know since he basically lived across the street on Lake Avenue when he first started at Eastman Kodak. That was my first and last experience with the Rochester Amtrak station.

I have encounter this type of station in Depew, New York, and Jacksonville, Florida. However, the only real Amshack was found in Hermann, Missouri. It leaked water and was home to some very mean wasps. I am glad that was replaced with some far more grand!

For me, it only made sense that a railroad would build a station according to its importance and expected usage. The D.W. & L built these little pagoda style station along the lesser stops on the Hoboken to Buffalo mainline. My hometown of Dansville, New York, had such a station on Lackawanna Hill (Dansville Hill, East Hill, etc.). It was an unique blue color similar to this on in Atlanta, New York.

Looking at the photo of the Rochester station building, I kind of imagine that there's a DMV office in there.

Of course our little depot served us well into the 1920s long before an Amtrak train was thought of.. the agent standing along the tracks ready to flag down the next passenger train..and a local hunter and his dog taking a break from the day's hunt. Thus, our little Erieshack produces great memories of a time passed..

The concept of the Modern Standardized Station was a decent one, but I don't think much of the way Amtrak executed it (and apparently most other people don't think much of it either). It was poorly designed from both a utilitarian and a decorative point of view. Then again, I can say the same of some of Frank Lloyd Wright's work (his houses are quite unpleasant to live in, apparently).

There were equally badly designed stations in the 19th century, but most of them got torn down in the 1920s. There's typically a form of survivor bias in buildings: old buildings are on average nicer than new buildings because the crummy old buildings got torn down! There are, however, exceptions to that, such as the "urban renewal" period in the 1950s/1960s when they ripped down nice buildings to build garbage, or the preservation of unliveable Frank Lloyd Wright designs.

Don't forget that Amtrak was trying to project a modern image, and the new Amshacks did just that. Modern looking Amfleet trains needed a modern looking station to pull into.

I certainly miss the old Anaheim Station.



I used this station for over 30 years. Then they replaced it with the ARTIC station and ran me out of town.

From the old station it was a 25 yard walk to track 1, and you went under the tracks, The new station has a pedestrian overcrossing. The old station had free unlimited parking. Every time I parked at ARTIC, I got tickets informing me I had to register to park overnight. I did so, and, of course, got a ticket telling me to register for overnight parking, I use Irvine Station now, which is not as convenient, but at least I don't get harassed.

Now you can have your very own Amshack for just over $25!

http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/933-3038

Trying too hard to "project a modern image" was a problem. The Amfleets had fake airline styling. Form should follow function. A choice to make a "modern" form without really thinking about the function is a bad choice.

ARTIC has much the same problem, actually.

neroden said:

Trying too hard to "project a modern image" was a problem. The Amfleets had fake airline styling. Form should follow function. A choice to make a "modern" form without really thinking about the function is a bad choice.ARTIC has much the same problem, actually.

Click to expand...

Yes Amfleet design was a mimic of an airliner, however the circular design gave tha Amfleet its tremendous strength for its time. It is one of the reasons it did relatively well in the Chase crash.

neroden said:

Trying too hard to "project a modern image" was a problem. The Amfleets had fake airline styling. Form should follow function. A choice to make a "modern" form without really thinking about the function is a bad choice.

ARTIC has much the same problem, actually.

Click to expand...

Indeed. It's fancy, all right, but not of much use to non-commuter rail passengers.

KC Ghost Rider said:

I have encounter this type of station in Depew, New York, and Jacksonville, Florida. However, the only real Amshack was found in Hermann, Missouri. It leaked water and was home to some very mean wasps. I am glad that was replaced with some far more grand!

Click to expand...

I agree. I wouldn't call Depew, Jacksonville, etc. shacks, St. Louis maybe, especially compared to the old Union Station.

But I'm sure others could come up with more real shacks. At least as bad was Kewanne, Il despite its "hog capital of the world" sign.



It has also since been replaced with one of my favorite small town stations.

A few random thoughts on the posts above:

Jacksonville gets saved from being ugly because it's in Florida, and when you get off the train there in the winter, the first thing you see is the palm trees and then you start thinking about how nice and warm it is....if Jacksonville were up north, it might look a bit dumpy, but not as bad as a shack.

The 1970s were, in my opinion, the most horrible decade (besides this one) to live through for style and class--there wasn't any. I have kept some things from the 1950s and early 1960s that are nostalgic to me, but everything from the late 1960s through the 1970s went in the trash long ago.

Finally, I am so glad to see that someone else doesn't think a lot of Frank Lloyd Wright, either. I think Fallingwater destroyed a perfectly beautiful waterfall.

I was visiting a famous Frank Lloyd Wright house in Chicago which is now a museum (I forget which one) -- and the thing which first soured me on him was the flatware (which was apparently his design too) -- it was just terrible. The fork doesn't have the appropriate curve in it, which is a 300-year retrograde change, and the spoon is badly shaped, too.

Then I started taking a look at the building and noticed the uninsulated and uninsulate-able walls, the leaky-to-the-outside cracks between adjacent walls, the low ceilings, the water ingress from the inappropriate-for-the-snow flat roof, the unnecessary stairs everywhere, the general poor material quality, etc. It's no wonder they were asking for money to restore it -- it was badly designed and badly built. I left saying "They should knock this down, unless they want a museum to warn people what mistakes to avoid."

Wright was pretty good at abstract art (and I like his prints, monograms, etc) but he should have stayed away from more *practical* areas like architecture. And I say this as a fan of modernism! Apparently nearly everyone who lives in an Frank Lloyd Wright house finds it incredibly annoying due to one poorly-thought-out design flaw or another, and the historic designations mean they can't even fix the design flaws.