The View Overhead Inside Nashville’s Union Station Hotel
By Tom Adkinson

The view overhead Inside Nashville’s Union Station Hotel. Image by Tom Adkinson.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Downtown Nashville visitors are getting used to looking up at the array high-rise buildings that seem to pop up like mushrooms, but the lucky ones look up while inside the Union Station Hotel to see this brilliant stained glass ceiling and accompanying chandeliers. The 65-foot-high barrel-vaulted ceiling was one of the highlights of the castle-like train station when it opened in 1900. Henry Hobson Richardson, one of America’s most famous architects, designed the building in the Victorian Romanesque Revival style for the L&N Railroad. The building, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, fell into disrepair after passenger trains departed Nashville in 1979, but it was rescued and transformed into a boutique hotel. Its neighbor, the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, is another example of adaptive reuse. It once was Nashville’s main post office.

Published March 23, 2018