There are no men sporting top hats or women wearing gloves and floor-length dresses. No bellhops scurry about with luggage as passengers embark on journeys.
Yet the Union Station train terminal — a vast space that was chopped up for offices in 1979 — is now being being restored to some of its original grandeur.
“We’re trying to take that back now,” says Gary Oborny, chairman and CEO of Occidental Management. Oborny bought the Union Station campus of five buildings for $1.5 million in 2013 and, after working on some of the other buildings, is now refurbishing its showcase feature. The most significant change is the elimination of many of the steel frames that created mezzanines for office space.
Union Station was known as “the daylight station of America,” as one visiting Mississippi reporter put it before the 1914 opening, with an east bank of windows that “flooded light into the whole area,” Occidental president Chad Stafford says.
“So the mezzanine blocked a lot of that.”
With their demolition, Oborny says, “This is how the space looked . . . back in 1914. Very wide open, all the way up to the ceiling.”
(Read more: Wichita Eagle)