Time Machine: Cedar Rapids’ Old Union Depot

It was ‘a foul blot, an insult, a monument to greed,’ The Gazette decreed As I wrote in a November 2014 Time Machine, “The Cedar Rapids Union Depot was a small, unattractive building that hardly suited a growing city.’ Plans for that first union depot began when the Chicago, Iowa & Nebraska Railroad ran a rail line through Cedar Rapids in June 1859, bringing passenger service to the city two years before the Civil War. Expecting more railroads would be coming, leaders began looking into building a “union” depot that...