SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA.- Museums and other cultural groups across the U.S. are converting old rail facilities to useful purposes. One example is the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, who is transforming the baggage building into an exhibition hall. According to Hugh M. Davies, director of the museum, "The whole space is thought of primarily as a sculpture space." If Davies has his way, this blue-collar building will be reborn in two years as an exhibition space--which may seem a novel transition, at first glance. In Los Angeles, since September, about 400 undergraduates and grad students have been gathering at another old rail facility to make little wooden models and pace the halls of a vast, concrete curiosity of a building, 40 to 60 feet wide and 1,250 feet long. This is the new home of the Southern California Institute of Architecture: a freight depot, built in 1907 by the same company that built the Santa Fe station in San Diego. "We like the unrelenting and extreme nature of the building," says Gary Paige, the SCI-Arc faculty member who served as principal architect of the adaptation.
Within the last five years, redevelopment campaigns in Los Angeles, San Diego, Baltimore, Kansas City, Tacoma and elsewhere have transformed historic railway buildings into museums or campuses, or both. In Baltimore, where Baltimore & Ohio railway workers laid the nation’s first mile of long-distance railroad track in the 1820s, several buildings from the early years of railroading have been converted to cultural uses, most recently the city’s 1849 President Street Station, which in April 1997 reopened as home of the Maryland Historical Society’s Baltimore Civil War Museum. In Tacoma, the University of Washington won a 1999 National Trust for Historic Preservation award for its renovation of six brick warehouses in the Union Station district to create a new campus. Federal officials had already turned the main station nearby into a courthouse and filled it with native son Dale Chihuly’s art glass pieces, including a massive cobalt chandelier. Now the campus enrollment has reached 2,000, and in the neighborhood surrounding the terminal, a history museum has opened, the Tacoma Art Museum is putting up a new building (to open in 2003), and a glass museum opened this month. In Santa Monica, city officials in the early 1990s found themselves in possession of Bergamot Station, a 7-acre rail yard where trolleys stopped as long ago as 1875. Developer Wayne Blank saw possibilities, made a deal with the city, and put together a complex of more than three dozen art galleries and related businesses, including jewelers, framers, an auctioneer and a cafe. The complex opened in late 1994, and the Santa Monica Museum of Art joined the scene.