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Denver's Union Station with light rail development. |
If you’ve taken the California
Zephyr across the country, you’ve stopped at Denver’s Union Station. There’s
been a station on this site since before the first Transcontinental Railroad
was completed. The current one, designed by Denver architects Gove & Walsh,
was built in the Beaux-Arts style and opened in 1914.
The station was built of marble quarried at Yule Creek
Valley in Colorado. This marble is so white, uniform, and workable that it was
also used for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Lincoln Memorial in
Washington, D.C.
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And how it looked to prior generations of rail travelers. |
Perhaps it was the whiteness of the marble that caused the
Denver Post’s Fine Arts Critic, Ray Mark Rinaldi, to accuse
the building itself of being racist.
“The symmetry, arched windows, ornate cornice and stacked,
stone walls have their roots in the glory days of France, England, Greece and
Rome, in empires that were nearly absent of ethnic minorities and who felt
fully at ease invading, exploiting and actually enslaving the people of Africa,
subcontinent Asia and South America,” he wrote.
It’s ironic that he omitted the legitimate acts of racial
oppression related to the Transcontinental Railroad: the abysmal treatment of
Chinese workers both on the railroad and in the mines, and the displacement of indigenous
Americans.
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Denver in 1859, Collier and Cleveland Litho Co. If 'exploitation' means indoor plumbing, I'm all for it..
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I went to kindergarten in a building that had separate boys’
and girls’ entrances. I wouldn’t even go so far as to accuse that building of
being sexist.
“There's no traditional Mexican restaurant…” Rinaldi
laments. Of course, had there been, it would have been built in another
exploitative style, since Mexican architecture borrows heavily from Spain.
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Al Khazneh in Petra.
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People borrow from other cultures even when they haven’t
been colonized or exploited by them. Consider all the paeans to “Asian
simplicity” in modern architecture. Al Khazneh in Petra looks like a Greek
building, but it was built by the Nabataeans while they were still independent of Rome. The Nabataeans just dug that Greek look.
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Crofutt's Trans-Continental Tourist's Guide Frontispiece
1870
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When Denver plopped its first rail station on that site, it
was a “city” of fewer than 5000 people. When it started building the station
that is there now, it was a boom-town of double-digit population growth. Its lovely
train station was aspirational, not racist or exploitative.