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Photography by Jennifer Silverberg
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Bob O’Loughlin leans on a brass rail inside Union Station and looks out at the Midway’s shuttered shops and restaurants, imagining the crowds that once coursed across this expanse toward the vast Victorian train shed. Soldiers and scalawags, opera singers and nervous families and at least one grizzly bear crossed that span to reach their trains. It was Union Station that helped St. Louis lure the 1904 World’s Fair, Summer Olympics, and Democratic National Convention. In the 1940s, at the station’s peak, 100,000 people passed through in a single day.
He doesn’t want that history lost.
The minute people heard O’Loughlin was interested in this place, letters poured in: memories of Union Station, old photos, ideas for its future. He likes the idea of having a few grand old passenger trains around, for parties. But the letter-writers urged him to bring back luxury trains for private excursions. Trains to Missouri wine country or Kansas City. Trains that would pull right onto the grounds of the Kentucky Derby. Dinner trains—isn’t Michael Slay a chef on a luxury train? Maybe he’d come back…
O’Loughlin closes his eyes and envisions people standing on the boardwalk by the Union Station lake, sipping cocktails, then stepping aboard a train for a weekend out of town.
Trains are this place’s lifeblood. He can’t imagine redoing it without them.
When Union Station was dedicated, in September 1894, it was bigger than the largest railway station in Europe. It predated New York’s Grand Central Station by almost a decade, and its beauty stunned thousands of travelers every day.
Then those train travelers took to the friendly skies. In 1978, even skinny little silver Amtrak pulled out of Union Station for good, downsizing to an “Amshack” one block east. By 1980, Union Station was the obvious set for the gladiatorial fight in the dystopian Escape from New York.
In 1985, the first developer stormed the barricades. Steve Miller of Oppenheimer Properties amassed $135 million, and The Rouse Company, using HOK as its architect, restored the station’s grandeur and filled it with shops and restaurants. “It came down to this indescribable thing, a feeling in my gut that, considering the price we could buy it at, we could make something out of Union Station,” Miller told SLM at the time.
The Rouse “festival marketplace” concept revitalized urban historic sites all over the country. But only a few survived—those planted in densely populated city centers, surrounded by office workers and residents as well as tourists.
Union Station thrived for several years as a novelty, but soon its only regulars were post-office workers grabbing a quick lunch at the food court and tourists charmed by the gusty singing at The Fudgery.
In 2005, Mike Kelly of Chicago bought Union Station and invested, as far as O’Loughlin can tell, about $105 million in it. The bottom fell out of his financing in 2008, and the station froze in place. Union Station’s retail mall was losing about $1 million a year, and soon its holding company owed back taxes. A broker called Bob O’Loughlin.
He waved away the silver platter that held Union Station’s mortgage; he didn’t want his company, Lodging Hospitality Management, to buy just the note. A year went by. In fall 2011, a different broker called: Union Station was officially up for sale.
“The place needs a lot of fix-up,” replied O’Loughlin, a master of understatement.
In October 2012, a full two years after the first tentative negotiations, he bought Union Station for $20 million.
He’d spent $30 million just to renovate the Hilton St. Louis at the Ballpark. Now he’d bought one of the most majestic railroad stations in the world, inspired by the walled city of Carcassonne in France, for $10 million less.
The deal fit O’Loughlin’s business formula perfectly: Find underperforming properties that have important locations, good bones, and if possible, iconic status. Take your time. Buy at the right price.
“He’ll wear you down negotiating,” says Craig Cobler, LHM’s senior vice president of development, laughing. “He does his homework. Never takes any notes, but never forgets. He can tell you exactly what he’s put into every hotel and what he paid for it. He takes a long, long, long, long time to make a decision—his heart’s not in it, where he’d chew his nails. He can be patient.
“Once the deal’s done? Get out of the way.”
Early March sunlight glints across Union Station’s burnt-red turret roofs, picking out the roughness of the limestone. O’Loughlin walks through the Market Street archway, climbs the wide stairs, and looks around at the Paris green, crimson, and pale gold of the Grand Hall, hand-carved plaster ornamenting every surface. Such grandeur—this place should be a focal point for all of St. Louis. Instead, it’s deserted and grim.
He plans to spend $25 million renovating. They can get the 539 hotel rooms freshened; rip out storefronts; create an exhibition hall; handpick a smaller, more alluring retail mix; bring in a few more restaurants. Maybe they can even make the trains run again. But this lobby needs to be more welcoming, and it needs an event. Like the Peabody ducks, waddling downstairs every afternoon to splash in the Memphis hotel’s fountain.
Can’t do ducks here. What about holograms? He and his son Steve went to see the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Ill., and the holograms blew their minds. Here, you could sit in the lobby, sip a drink, hear the Frisco Express coming in with a squeal of brakes or the Pennsylvania chugging out of the station. And then maybe you’d look up and see President Harry S. Truman the day his train stopped here, when he hopped off Track No. 32 and bought a Chicago Tribune that said “Dewey Defeats Truman,” holding it aloft for the boys from the press.
That would bring people.
O’Loughlin crosses the lit floor toward the room where the ladies once awaited their trains, safe from the fog of the men’s cigars. This is where he’ll put a Starbucks and a little market—something more than the usual hotel gift shop, so people can buy miniature trains as souvenirs. He wants to put a model train in the Starbucks, so people can watch it navigate curves and chug through tunnels while their latte gets frothed. And his British general manager wants afternoon tea served in the lobby bar.
Tea won’t be enough, though. Somehow he has to make that bar extraordinary—a meeting place, a destination.
And he has to bring back real trains.
He imagines a dinner train, with scenery sliding by the windows as night falls, the wheels’ soothing rhythm a backdrop for an exquisite six-course dinner followed by brandy or chocolate. Trains are civilized. They add a little fun, a little glamour. They take their time.
They’re a lot like Bob O’Loughlin.
Well-born and self-made, O’Loughlin has the easy air of a man with nothing to prove. His grandfather delivered babies and tended to the sick in rural Connecticut. His bubbly, outgoing mother grew up in a 22-room mansion with maidservants and had exquisite taste. His father was a lawyer and judge. Bob felt no call to either medicine or law; he grew up loving sports, numbers, and the game of Monopoly.
He dressed Brooks Brothers casual, dreamed big but cautious, craved quality but not pretense. Tall, relaxed, and affable, with his mother’s gift for putting people at ease, he worked harder than he seemed to, 365 days a year. While he was still in college, studying accounting, he married, quite literally, the girl next door, Kathy Guertin, and they had the first of their three children before he graduated. At 21, he became assistant controller of a Hilton hotel. Five years later, he was general manager of the Oakland, Calif., Hilton—the youngest manager in the chain’s history.
GM was the coolest job in a hotel, he’d always thought, because you lived in a big suite at the hotel and got maid service. Of course, by then, he and his wife had three children and didn’t want to live in the hotel and get maid service. And now O’Loughlin owns 18 hotels, but he rarely spends the night in one. When an ice storm zapped the power in their Kirkwood house, Kathy woke him at 2 a.m. and said, “We need to get a hotel room—do you think we can?”
“If there’s anybody in St. Louis who can get a hotel room, it would be us,” he replied, grinning in the dark.
But since then, he’s bought a generator.
What O’Loughlin loves about hotels isn’t rumpling somebody else’s sheets and calling room service. It’s making others feel welcome. “Most of us just fall into something,” he says, “and I fell in love with hotels.” They were cities within cities. Inside their walls, he learned the world.
Conrad Hilton was wrong about “location, location, location,” O’Loughlin decided; your facilities had to be first-class, too. And every guest should be greeted at the door, directed to the front desk, made welcome in a warm and inviting lobby. First impressions mattered.
He spent afternoons watching football games with Bob Hope. Met four presidents. Shot hoops with George Clooney. Back in California, he gave Tom Hanks his first job, as a bellman. (Hanks then developed such a crush on Chrissie Evert that he knocked on her door, forcing the tennis pro to get out of the shower, furious, to answer.)
“Once, I thought we’d lost the secretary of state,” O’Loughlin says. “We had Henry Kissinger on the dais at Stouffer’s, and he pushed his chair back and tumbled.” On another occasion, the chief engineer put too much chlorine in the Oakland pool, and a lady with bleached-blond hair stomped into O’Loughlin’s office with leprechaun-green hair, and it was all he could do to keep a straight face and tell her they’d take care of it. Then there was the woman whose suitcase got misplaced behind a display. “Every day, she would insist on a new outfit, and I’d buy her one. And then we found the suitcase, and she wanted me to buy her another suitcase to put all the new outfits in!”
He came to St. Louis in 1977 to manage the 900-room Stouffer’s Hotel (later Clarion, then Regal, and now Millennium) for Aircoa. “I didn’t think I was going to stay,” he admits. “But I really liked the Midwest and the Midwestern people. They are honest, open, hardworking, charitable.”
Can you generalize about a region’s people? Not by accident of geography. But maybe by the choice to stay here, in a less than glamorous place, where putting on airs would look ridiculous, and you rely on the people around you and find yourself accountable to them. “St. Louis people like to do business with St. Louis people,” O’Loughlin realized—and that was an asset. He passed up a chance to move to Denver, instead starting his own company, LHM, in 1986.
“There’s no reason to move anymore,” he told Kathy.
Bob and Steve O’Loughlin walk through the food court, speculating about what kind of office tenants—architectural firms seem obvious, and marketers and graphic designers—will be drawn to Union Station. Bob’s willing to devote between 60,000 and 100,000 square feet to offices. He’ll keep The Fudgery, of course, and the Cardinals Clubhouse, and bring in higher-end boutiques—no more predictable chains, nothing tacky or saccharine. But he wants plenty of office workers, who’ll use the restaurants and shops and keep the place feeling alive during the weekdays.
He invited the Museum of Transportation to move to Union Station, but it belongs to St. Louis County and can’t cross the line. So he approached the St. Louis Sports Hall of Fame instead. Founder Greg Marecek was looking for a location of his own, not just exhibits at Scottrade Center, and he went O’Loughlin one better: Maybe he could even build a free-standing building on the Union Station parking lot…
At 1 p.m., the O’Loughlins make their way to the Grand Hall and commandeer a low table in the lobby. They’re meeting with the Chicago interior designers who did the Cheshire Inn project and will now redesign Union Station’s Grand Hall, Gothic Corridor, and hotel rooms.
Joe Hartness and Fred Kovar, principals in The Harrick Group, are as mild and low-key as the O’Loughlins, but there’s an undercurrent in their voices, an excitement they can’t quite conceal. Hartness spreads out drawings and old photos. “Here’s Harper’s Magazine the month after the station opened,” he says. “At the opening ceremony, they had 10,000 people.”
He slides over another image, a detail shot of flowing arabesques and Celtic-knot borders. “The architects who helped Theodore Link on this project spent three years working with Louis Sullivan on the Auditorium Building, Chicago’s great hotel in the 19th century.” They brought Sullivan’s impulsive love of ornament—the freshened, unfussy acknowledgement of the past and the graceful curves of nature—inside a French walled city with Romanesque architecture. “This is a remarkable space,” Hartness says with reverence. “It’s been called the most beautiful Art Nouveau in America.”
Kovar tells the O’Loughlins about the wood pergola they’d like to put in the lobby, to create a little more warmth and intimacy, and the focal-point bar they want to run along the back wall, “similar to the old Shanghai Long Bar.” A haunt of British gentlemen, the Shanghai Club had, in the 1930s, the longest bar in the world, 110 feet.
Hartness inquires, carefully, about the possibility of lowering the raised area under the pergola. Bob lets the conversation flow on, but later he makes it clear that he likes the varied floor heights. “That’s fine,” Hartness says quickly. He jots a note and reaches for another photo: “Here’s the Gare de Lyon, and here’s St Pancras in London. All of these stations were built within five or six years of each other. Gare de Lyon has never changed; St Pancras has been completely redone. Do you like the modern feel, or do you want it more period?”
“More period,” Bob says without hesitation.
Hartness looks relieved.
“I think you go with more period, with some details being more contemporary,” Kovar interjects. “Maybe some polished-nickel grillwork, laser-cut with Sullivanesque ornament, over the bar’s center panel?”
Bob nods. “I mean, this is so beautiful, you want to keep it,” he says, gesturing in a wide arc. “You don’t want to clash with it.”
“And once those lampposts are gone”—Kovar points to a faux gaslight, circa 1985—“you’ll really see the space.”
“Lighting will be very important,” Bob says, “because at times this can seem so dark, it feels like a mausoleum.”
“They’d love you forever in St. Louis if you re-created the old chandelier,” Kovar teases.
“If I re-create the chandelier, I may not have enough money to do the rest of the building!” Bob retorts. He’d rather create something with light. He mentions his quest for a Peabody ducks experience, and the hologram idea.
“That’s very nice,” Kovar says.
“You could put something on the balcony, centered right over the clock,” Steve says suddenly.
“Very dramatic,” Kovar says. “It would draw people in.”
The next morning, Bob starts making calls, trying to find somebody who can do the holograms. He brings in a few companies, but learns that holograms are actually old technology, and their projectors are space hogs. When a Cincinnati museum consultant mentions “this 3-D mapping thing,” Steve nods eagerly; he’s seen digital mapping on a building facade in New York. Bob calls Technomedia Solutions, based in Orlando, Fla., and famous for mapping Cirque du Soleil’s Michael Jackson ONE show at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. Founder John Miceli flies in to show the O’Loughlins how he can animate light, using intense beams directed by computer from about 14 different projectors. Virtual images could play across the walls and ceiling of Union Station, flowing and transforming in ever-changing patterns.
It would be the first show of its kind here. It would be expensive. But it would get people into that lobby.
Bob’s learned to recognize St. Louis’ inferiority complex, but he still doesn’t get it: “First-class zoo, symphony, sports, and the people are friendly. Go try living in Chicago or New York, maneuver through that traffic, and have no sense of community.”
He’s been on the St. Louis Convention & Visitors Commission’s board for 35 years—hospitality being both his livelihood and his natural disposition. He stepped down as chairman this fall, to give more time to Union Station and his other hotels. Since starting LHM, he’s bought 21, and the 18 he’s kept are all in St. Louis.
You’d think him a sentimentalist, of late, because he’s been buying up St. Louis’ faded glories: the Hilton St. Louis at the Ballpark, Westport Plaza, The Cheshire, the St. Louis Airport Marriott, Union Station…
He can afford to have a little fun these days.
But the deal is still what matters.
“We buy them at the right price,” he says, “and after a while, you get to know what that is. So when they become available, I will be very patient and wait.” He waited four years, for example, for The Cheshire. Once it’s time to close, he pays with cash, instead of leveraging, so during a recession, he makes plenty of money he can then use to buy more hotels. But only after acquisition does he fully realize—and begin to restore—their sentimental history.
“People have such great memories of The Cheshire,” he says, almost awed. “I had no idea.” His first clue came from George Bauer, his business partner on 10 hotels, who’d bought his future wife one of the famous Medart’s hamburgers, and upped it to a cheeseburger on their 50th anniversary. But after LHM bought the hotel, perfect strangers wrote to Bob, thanking him for saving the place where they stayed on their honeymoon or went to their first grown-up restaurant or loved the piano player at Fox & Hounds Tavern…
In July 2011, he opened the Three Sixty rooftop bar at the Hilton St. Louis at the Ballpark—built on top of the Spanish Pavilion, near the site of the Battle of Fort San Carlos, the only battle of the American Revolution fought west of the Mississippi River. The bar idea came when he stood on the roof with his son, glanced down at the stadium, and breathed, “Boy, this has a good view.” He and Steve (who’s now president and COO of LHM, with Bob as chairman) went to Chicago’s theWit Hotel to check out its rooftop bar. Then Bob called Robert Amick, founder of Concentrics Restaurants in Atlanta, and asked him to design “a rooftop bar like theWit but on steroids.”
Cobler was the only LHM exec who, when O’Loughlin took a vote on the Three Sixty concept, kept his hand in his lap. The two men have known each other since O’Loughlin’s days with Stouffer’s; Cobler has helped him buy, run, and sell more than 70 properties. Granted, one was the rainbow-lit, space-themed Moonrise Hotel, but mainly, Bob’s style is conservative: “He’s driven a gray Lexus for 20 years. His suits are Hart Schaffner Marx; his shoes are loafers. He’s not flashy at all,” Cobler says. Three Sixty would be, and Cobler worried that it wouldn’t endure. “It turned out just the opposite,” he admits. “Frommer’s named it one of ‘Ten Best New Hotel Rooftop Bars Around the World,’ and people tell out-of-towners, ‘You’ve got to go to Three Sixty.’”
In June 2012, LHM bought Westport Plaza, once a hot date spot because it was a charming Swiss village with everything from a lake to live comedy, a playhouse, and samurai chefs. Over the years, the focus narrowed to commercial tenants, and the place turned drab. LHM made it pretty again, then brought in a few solid tenants it knew well, like Paric (a construction company), Cassidy Turley (a commercial real-estate firm), and M.I. Industries (owner of Nature’s Variety pet food). In one year, Westport’s commercial occupancy has risen to 90 percent, Bob says, “and now the retailers are starting to perk up.”
A month after buying Westport, he bought the iconic St. Louis Airport Marriott and began bringing it back to life.
That October, he bought Union Station.
On May 2, the mall’s empty and dimly lit, the lilt of Muzak mocking the mechanical fortuneteller and Fat Sassy’s tiny metal replicas of the Gateway Arch. A guy slaps fudge onto marble yet another time, singing like he’s at home in the shower. In the distance, jackhammers rumble. I walk past deserted storefronts until I reach the rubble. Paric has forged a temporary office in the hollowed-out Einstein Bros. Bagels, laying two-by-fours across beams.
Project superintendent Wally Meyer detours an indoor puddle. “This place has a lot of leaks!”
“At some point here, the Midway’s gonna start heating up,” warns Kurt Gildehaus, project manager for Paric, explaining safety rules. “If you plastic that area off, Wally, can you engineer a little window, so people can see?” Meyer nods.
Preservation consultant Karen Bode Baxter is thrilled: Gildehaus has finally found the right quarry in France and can get tile mined from the same part of the quarry the existing tile came from. “Right now, it’s a little orangier-looking,” Baxter says.
“It’s clean!” says Lisa Morrison, an interior designer who’s managing the Midway project for the Lawrence Group.
“By the middle of the week, we’re gonna be taking these storefronts down?” asks Chad Smith, LHM’s vice president of design and construction.
“Yeah,” says Gildehaus. “That OK?”
“We’re all excited to see what it’s going to look like opened up,” Smith says. He asks about a set of doors. “I think they’re from 1985—everything they did earlier was an arch. Will historic have a problem with them being glass?”
“Right now, I’ve got pricing coming in as though it’s gonna be glass with a transom,” Gildehaus says. “If historic comes back, we’ll just have to do a horse trade… I can get it shop-drawn, but I won’t put a saw to it until I know.”
“Don’t even do shop drawings yet,” Smith cautions him.
“One of the plans we came across in Washington University’s Link collection was a historic basement for that area,” Baxter tells him.
Gildehaus nods. “We thought the old luggage went down into it, like a carousel or a sorter. It’s under Senior Julio’s. There was probably an addition to handle all the troops’ luggage. I mean, they had millions of soldiers coming through.” He asks about mooring external signs, so they don’t have to tear up the concrete.
“I don’t know what’s under there,” Smith says. “There’s a lot of crap under the Market Street sidewalk.”
“That’s his baby,” Gildehaus says.
“All right, let’s tee it up,” Smith says.
Baxter looks up. “If you damage any of the masonry and have to patch it, we have to get approval of the mortar mix.
“You’re not mixing what it was, you’re trying to come close to what it is now?” Smith asks.
“Well, that’s the fun part,” she says. “You want to match the surface, but…”
“I’ll take a picture so he can see that it matches,” Gildehaus says, “and it’s got horsehair or whatever he wants in there.”
On May 29, Bob and Steve meet with a lighting firm after dark in the Grand Hall. At the touch of a button, white light soars 65 feet above their heads, picking out the gold-leafed Celtic knots and lacy vines twining up the barrel-vaulted ceiling. The dim, dingy feeling evaporates. Then the place goes dark again, and at the press of another button, soft blue light washes across the ceiling, pulling out the Paris green, turning the whole room dreamy.
They flash other options: red light to celebrate a Cardinals victory; a spectrum of colors that will take the Grand Hall from late-afternoon amber into the lavender of twilight and the blue of evening.
The LHM team has already seen what Technomedia’s proposing as a light show. In the first proposal, torches appear around the archway, then flare into brilliantly colored flowers that bloom across the ceiling. Trains cross the space. A semicircle of piano keys plays music, and the sculpted female figures that ornament the archway come alive and dance.
There’s more—World War II planes overhead, other wonders, a history video. Shows would rotate every week, and special shows would be created for holidays like Halloween and Christmas. In winter, the whole ceiling could look like a snowy sky. Dolby surround sound would make it obvious that the trains are approaching and crossing the space, then soften their whistles as they chug away.
The price tag is $1.5 million, and Bob hasn’t quite decided yet.
Now he also has to choose between plain white traditional light and an LED system with infinite color possibilities (an extra $150,000).
By June 6, the Midway looks like an indoor ghost town, the ground vibrating with jackhammers getting the tile up. Sparks fly from metal railings. In the office, billowy rolls of blueprints keep recurling. Tim Cooper, general manager of Union Station’s DoubleTree by Hilton hotel, holds one end flat with his hard hat, which his staff had custom-made with a British-flag motif as a birthday present.
The morning’s big topic is trains. Bob’s heard that the old Macy’s American Flyer model train might be available, and he wants it for the hotel lobby. Meanwhile, Ohio River, a 1920s sleeper car, is about to glide into Union Station, its first passenger train in eight years. Workers are clearing the train shed, getting ready.
“We’re still waiting to hear back about the outside signs,” Smith says. “The exterior signs were approved by [the city’s Cultural Resources Office], but the city said there was too much square footage of signage, so we have to get a variance. So we’re three months out.”
“Three more months of pain and suffering? Perfect,” Cooper says, mock-martyred.
“If it really takes three months, that could put us in a pickle,” Gildehaus says. He moves through his checklist, brow furrowed. “All the historic tile is cut loose. I want to get it in. In Europe, they shut down everything in August. I want it on the friggin’ boat or plane before then.”
“Where’s this tile coming from? France?” asks Cooper, his Cambridge accent even crisper than usual. “I don’t want French tile in my hotel!”
Gildehaus grins. “You just get my stuff approved,” he tells Smith. “Don’t wait till the eleventh hour.”
They have until October to turn the Midway into a sleek exhibition hall. The first event’s booked already, a Washington University reception November 1. The hotel-room renovation will begin as soon as possible; because the hotel’s the engine funding these renovations, it has to keep the cash flowing. Bob’s itching to get going on the Grand Hall. He wants the showpiece lobby ready by spring. Then he’ll start the final phase: the office, food court, and museum spaces in the south extension. Offices will go in as they’re rented. Retail will probably arrive last.
“The biggest challenge of this project is the historic-tax-credit regs—federal and state,” Smith tells me after the meeting. “When we build the bar against the wall, we can’t touch the wall, can’t screw anything in. The wall’s historic. DoubleTree requires so many decorative light fixtures, and historic wants it to be what it was in the 1900s, which was barebones. And what happens there is, historic wins.”
It’s not even easy to know what the place looked like, Baxter says later. “There are thousands of photographs, but they all have human bodies standing in the way, because it was always in use, 24 hours a day. We want to see what the door handles were—it’s been driving us nuts. We want to see the floor finishes.
“The historic-preservation movement has changed a lot in the last 30 years,” she adds. “In the early and mid-’80s, they were concentrating on the exterior facade and the major interior elements. They didn’t push as much on the details we now see as contributing to the overall ambience and character. We want people to walk in and immediately sense what it was like to be in that building in its heyday.”
On July 19, Bob makes his decision about the lighting: They’ll do both—the LED system, with the flexibility to change color hourly, and the $1.5 million digital mapping. “The whole enchilada,” as Cobler puts it.
Bob flies to New York to talk to St. Louis expat Danny Meyer about bringing one of his restaurant concepts home. They meet at Meyer’s new trattoria, Maialino. Bob tells him about Union Station and The Cheshire. Meyer lifts an eyebrow. They agree to continue talking.
In late July, the American Flyer “S” Gaugers of the St. Louis Area—the club that restored the Macy’s train—gives it to the Museum of Transportation instead of to Union Station. Disappointed, Bob goes to see a garden-scale railroad layout and falls in love with the size of it—big enough for lots of detail and scenery. The Gateway Garden Railroad Club, with the help of the Southern Illinois Train Club, happily agrees to put a model train together for Union Station.
In August, Bob and Steve fly out to Kansas City and meet with RED Legacy, whose managing partner recently shifted gears from outlet malls to specialty retail. They hire RED Legacy as a consultant, to help them fill the old Houlihan’s space with the right restaurant. They want to review a restaurant concept from Steven Schussler, famous for the Rainforest Cafes and T-REX restaurants that now dot the nation. Bob doesn’t want to re-create the Amazon or the Cretaceous Period, though; he wants a transport theme. He decides he’ll also bring in Amick, who designed Three Sixty and The Restaurant at The Cheshire. There’s also room for two additional new restaurants. He’d rather find reputable operators than own them himself.
But he’ll do whatever it takes to infuse this vast place with energy.
The morning of the August 15 meeting, even the air feels different. Music from the Hard Rock Cafe floats across the lake, and the cannas in the pots by the south entrance have grown tall, their orange petals backlit like a sunset. Inside, everything’s shiny-clean. More people are strolling through the mall.
The Midway’s buff brick looks cleaner with all the fuss removed. Three arches stand like Roman gates where the old Dierdorf & Hart’s patio was. Years before, a tiny brick building occupied that space, an old version of a breezeway. Now all the narrow staircases and the patio have been removed, replaced by a ramp and a single grand staircase. “It’s just right,” exclaims Morrison. “It makes that space feel a little more intimate.” She loves the varying scale of this project: the huge Midway, the small alcoves. “We’re giving people little vignettes,” she says.
She shows me her palette: warm, rich colors—crimson, a soft buttery yellow, bronze, a dark brown—and textures of the leather suitcases, trunks, and vintage hatboxes from luxury travel in the Roaring ’20s. That’s the fun part—“but I also love the hiccups,” she confides, “all these little things we didn’t expect and couldn’t foresee. You have to incorporate what you find into your design and make it seem like it was always meant to be there. It’s design-discover-build!”
The rest of the team has arrived, and they’re passing around an old photo showing a fireplace and a fountain. “You can’t cover that up; that’s cool!” Gildehaus tells Smith. The last third of the tile has shipped out of France, he announces, and it’s due to arrive September 10. Cooper is gleeful: “We get to walk on the French!”
The Midway should be clean and furnished by the end of October. The hotel already has a thousand people booked for the first week in November.
They talk about costs they need to control. Smith reduces the ample 33,000 feet of insulation he’d ordered.
“Really?” Gildehaus says.
“When you’re tiling your house, and you’re over budget, and there’s tile $10 a foot and tile $2 a foot, which one do you pick?” Smith retorts.
“The one my wife likes.”
“The problem is, my wife’s Bob O’Loughlin.”
Technomedia asks whether the Discovery Channel and National Geographic can follow the digital-mapping project from start to finish. “We’ll take that kind of advertising,” Bob says, chuckling. “Absolutely.”
The September 12 meeting starts under the high whine of a grinder—a sort of sustained, low-level hysteria—as concrete’s prepped for a ramp. Work’s accelerating, and the October deadline is in clear view. But “there’s about 15 association planners coming in from Jefferson City in late September,” Cooper says, “and it could mean millions of dollars for us in future business. It’s a one-time opportunity.” The team members toss out ideas, strategies to make the place look presentable ahead of deadline.
The group arrives on a chartered excursion train, oohing over the view from the second floor of the glass-domed lounge car. “They were blown away by the Midway,” Cobler says. They arrived just in time to hear the latest news: In April 2014, the Circus Harmony Center in City Museum will open a Flying Trapeze Center at Union Station. So trapeze artists will be practicing and putting on shows all summer in the open-air train shed.
They won’t swing into a museum building; Marecek’s decided not to try to raise millions for a free-standing St. Louis Sports Hall of Fame. He’ll be 70 soon, and he doesn’t want to wait forever for his museum. He’s opting for O’Loughlin’s original suggestion: renting the two floors above the old Houlihan’s space, with the glass elevator a cool way to move visitors up and down. “Then we can spend more money making it interactive,” Marecek tells me, “so people want to come back every month, because it’s always new.”
The Midway finishes on schedule. It’s huge: 50,000 square feet, with room for 140 ample booths. Add the ballroom and meeting spaces, and Union Station now has 100,000 square feet of meeting space, more than any other hotel in Missouri.
For the hotel rooms, Hartness and Kovar find carpet with an overscale Celtic-knot pattern, to echo the lobby’s ornament. “Each floor is dedicated to a special train line, like the Frisco,” Hartness says, “and the art sets each room apart.” They’ve been researching the station’s rich history and finding images to reflect it.
After all, Union Station has seen even more presidents than Bob O’Loughlin. In 1922, President Warren G. Harding stood on a Union Station platform and declared, “We are all Americans now,” urging an end to political partisanship. In 1936, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s train came in on Track No. 42, gateman Raymond Trueman later recalled, and he swung himself down the ramp holding the arm rails, then got down on his hands and knees, and somebody took his feet like he was a wheelbarrow, and he walked to the touring car that way, scrambled in, lit a cigarette, and roared away.
Fannie Wood Brown, a.k.a. “Mother Brown,” the Union Station matron, spent more than a quarter of a century helping stranded travelers, cradling abandoned babies, soothing lost children, and laying cool cloths on the foreheads of women who’d fallen ill. Couples eloped and even married here (rules against the throwing of rice and old shoes were ignored). Suitors found quiet nooks for what was then called “lovemaking,” as they said their desperate goodbyes. The first of the famous Fred Harvey restaurants opened here—a classy precursor to Hooters, with its pretty, perky Harvey Girls well-chaperoned. Judy Garland played one in The Harvey Girls, O’Loughlin tells people.
He’s fallen in love with this place’s back story. And he’s hired Dan Dewes—who helped run RailCruise America, the luxury train that was last to leave Union Station—as a consultant, to smooth the return of the excursion trains. “The railroads are all privately owned—they’re not like interstates—so it’s all about relationships,” Dewes explains. He’s helping rebuild them, talking with “Amtrak, the Terminal Railroad Association that does the local switching, and the big guys, Union Pacific and Burlington Northern.”
Passenger excursions can be chartered now. Bob also wants to renovate one of the old, stationary train cars in Gilded Age splendor, and perhaps offer the other for children’s parties. In spring, the Columbia Star will begin dinner trips to Missouri wine country.
He’d hoped to have the Grand Hall completed by then. But the federal government shut down, which meant no historic-preservation approvals for weeks, plus a backlog of work for that office when it reopened. Bob sighed and extended the deadline by 90 days. Meanwhile, he chatted with St. Louis expat actor John Goodman about narrating a history video as part of the light show.
The final phase—museums, shops, and office space—will add another $20 million to the budget, bringing the grand total to $65 million. It’s tense, waiting for restaurants to materialize and office tenants to sign on. But in Bob’s mind, his success will be defined by that lobby—whether it can become a regular gathering place for St. Louisans and not just an eyebrow-raiser for the tourists. He’s living with his fingers crossed.
“I’m anticipating it will be spectacular,” he says. “It’s like when we did Three Sixty. We had the concept, it was under construction, but we still didn’t know: Just how cool would it be? And then when it got done, it was even better than I had thought it would be.
“I’m hoping for the same thing in the Grand Hall.”
