Article Excerpt. JGPotter & Associates

Large corporations today pump up their prestige by sponsoring sporting events and spending millions of dollars on slick image-enhancement campaigns. In the 1930s, passenger-carrying railroads made powerhouse statements to their customers through station architecture and, by extension, through public art—the superscaled, dramatic murals and sculptures that railroads commissioned for inside and outside their buildings.

Public art, by the simplest definition, requires no admission charge and is accessible around the clock. At its most sophisticated, public art expresses the aesthetic soul of a nation. Public Art in Stations front page

It reflects an era's dominant social and cultural aspirations. When created for a railroad station, public art blends artistry, craftsmanship, and historical documentation with corporate horn-tooting.

During the first half of this century, most railroad travelers from small towns had never visited an art museum or a state capitol nor worshipped at a cathedral. Arriving at a big-city railway palace, they paused in startled awe at the sight of a 100-foot-long mural or a monumental, 40-foot-high sculpture. Yet many others treated art in railroad stations as anonymous, everyday stuff; commuters and railroad employees routinely hurried past these masterpieces in preoccupied oblivion.

People tour museum galleries deliberately to contemplate works of art. When inside civic or religious buildings, they can use the slow-paced, ceremonial atmosphere to savor the murals and stained-glass windows. But at a bustling railroad station, only a delayed train or a missed connection gives travelers the chance to focus extensively on a statue or a painting—to wonder what inspired it, who commissioned it, who made it, and what gives it meaning.

Railroad executives influenced the nation's collective memory by using public art to communicate a citizenship message or present the august image of a hero (even if that hero was one of themselves). The subject matter was usually commemorative and the artist's treatment often allegorical. Common themes included western expansion, the chronology of transportation modes, industrial and commercial progress, local history, and pivotal events in the patron railroad's development.

In the 1930s and 1940s, as the Great Depression pummeled the nation and Europe rumbled with war, railroads used art to conjure up a pure and noble American past and find secure meaning in the "American way of life." At new stations in Philadelphia and Cincinnati, they succeeded boldly, revealing surprising flexibility, uncommon flamboyance, and a generosity of spirit.

30TH STREET STATION, PHILADELPHIA
A Triumph in Plaster

In 1933, the Pennsylvania Railroad opened a new flagship station in West Philadelphia. Officially designated "Pennsylvania Station," it was soon known as "30th Street Station." This name distinguished it from PRR's North Philadelphia Station and from the railroad's famous Broad Street Station, then still in use across from City Hall, three-fourths of a mile away.

Broad Street Station was built in 1881 and substantially enlarged by architect Frank Furness just 12 years later. It was encrusted with sculpture, inside and out. Above the information booth was a high relief called the SPIRIT OF TRANSPORTATION, completed in 1895 by 28-year-old Karl Bitter. A deserter from the Austrian army, Bitter had arrived in the United States six years before.

He carried a portfolio illustrating his work and a pack heavy-laden with sculpture tools. Within weeks he became the protégé of world-class architect Richard Morris Hunt, who commissioned Bitter to sculpt numerous works for the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. Hunt also put Bitter in charge of the sculpture for two buildings at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, including the centerpiece Administration Building.