C70:railroad (06/09/82)
>From Weinstock@CMU-20C Wed Jun 9 13:57:01 1982
BC-UNION
By BEN A. FRANKLIN
c. 1982 N.Y. Times News Service
WASHINGTON - In the annals of federal fiascos, there is now perfect
bipartisan agreement here, there is no more classical list of
government blunders than those that befell Washington's Union Station.
According to Amtrak, 20,500 passengers will have boarded or
detrained here by the end of the Memorial Day weekend. Most of them
will have found it a bruising experience.
The good news is that the Department of Transportation is stepping
in to undo what has been done. The bad news is that it may take years.
Congress decided more than a decade ago to convert the great Beaux
Arts Union Station into a national visitor center. But the droves of
visitors never came, not even at the Bicentennial in 1976, for which
the project was hurriedly completed.
One night in January 1977, guests at one of President Carter's
inaugural balls burned $20,000 in cigarette holes in a carpet laid by
the visitor-center planners over multilevel platforms built on acres
of marble floor.
The Interior Department spent more than $100 million converting the
station, which has two concourses, each large enough to receive the
Washington Monument lying down.
The National Visitor Center included a ''hall of flags,'' a
''national book store'' and rows of patriotic and historical displays
and information and souvenir booths. There were two movie theaters
and a giant mauve-carpeted ''pit'' cut into the main waiting room for
a musical slide show that turned out to have technical bugs and few
viewers.
The Interior Department labeled the multiprojector display PAVE, for
''primary audio-visual experience.'' After the slide show broke down,
rail passengers regularly rode escalators into the pit in pursuit of
their trains.
The passengers' ''replacement station,'' less than one-tenth the
size of the original, was tucked under what was planned as a
4,000-automobile parking garage and a bus terminal.
In lavishing largesse on the visitor center, the Department of the
Interior failed to fix the leaky roof. And when water finally rose
over the acres of scorched carpet, the center was closed, in February
1981.
Today the 75-year-old structure is neither a passenger terminal nor
a visitor center. It is neglected, boarded up, leaking, moldy and
derelict.
Through the grimy glass of its locked and chained front doors,
strangers peer into a cave littered with fallen plaster. Water has
damaged large areas of ceiling and there is danger of falling debris.
Toadstools flourish.
''Where are the trains?'' ask countless would-be passengers,
approaching across the heroic white and gold Columbus Plaza. The
answer is a hike of a third of a mile around the perimeter to the
Amtrak basement. The so-called ''replacement station'' has been
reviewed by critics here as suggestive of ''Hitler's bunker'' and ''a
hospital emergency room entry.''
Fixing responsibility for the disaster is not easy. However, it has
been shown that former Rep. Kenneth J. Gray, D-Ill., who was chairman
of the Buildings and Grounds Subcommittee of the House Public Works
Committee, conceived and promoted the visitor center plan in 1967. It
can be demonstrated that thereafter officials of the Department of
Transportation and the Department of the Interior's Park Service
engaged in a furious struggle.
And it is indisputable that when the center began to crumble and
government planners finally united in 1978 on plans to transfer
control back to transportation specialists, former Rep. Harold T.
Johnson, D-Calif., until 1980 chairman of the Public Works Committee,
repeatedly blocked such bills.
In December, after Johnson's defeat, the Reagan administration gave
its approval to restoring the defunct station to roughly its original
form. The Department of the Interior must still provide $7.5 million
to finish patching the roof. But the future of the building as a
train station is now in the hands of the Department of Transportation.
It has congressional approval to dip into the Northeast Corridor
Rail Improvement Fund for up to $29 million in restoration money. The
District of Columbia is to divert unused highway construction money
to complete the garage and bus terminal. And by December, Department
of Transportation consultants are to complete detailed proposals for
handling trains and passengers.
nyt-06-01-82 1052edt
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