Saint Paul Union Depot
Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport may provide (weather permitting) the quickest entrance and exit to the Twin Cities. It also is the most drab: Chain fast food restaurants, gloomy parking ramps and TVs on which The Airport Channel drone constantly give it a utilitarian feel at best. The super-tight security needed in this post-9/11 day and age does nothing to help that. The drabness hangs over both terminals thicker than the smell of jet fuel.
About nine miles to the east, a far different gateway to the Cities can be found. That is the Saint Paul Union Depot, a gem first constructed in the mid-1920s to serve the then-thriving passenger train network that linked the Cities to places on all four points of the compass. But by 1971, the passenger train was a species threatened with extinction. When Amtrak took over intercity passenger service, SPUD (as its abbreviation goes) lost its trains. At first Amtrak served the Cities via the Great Northern station in Minneapolis; by the late 1970s it had moved to a Spartan (but cheaper to maintain) station nestled in the industry-centered Midway area of St. Paul. Meanwhile, SPUD was split up between restaurants in the station's head house and the post office in the old concourse section, and the rails and platforms vanished. For the longest time, a partition containing a single locked door stood between the two sections inside.
Oh how I longed to walk that concourse, where the likes of Charles Lindbergh, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the crew of the USS Ward once passed through! On my 33rd birthday, that dream finally came true: Saint Paul Union Depot is now in the transit business again. The station and nearby grounds had $243 million poured into it so the station could become a multi-modal transit center. Currently the station serves Metro-Transit and intercity buses. By the end of this year, Amtrak will have moved in as well. In 2014, light rail transit trains will call at a satellite station located out in front of the historic building.
The concourse has been immaculately restored; only the renovation of New York City's Grand Central Station can rival how clean and fresh everything feels inside. The concourse offers ample seating; plentiful mixed-use receptacles for recyclables and trash; an electronic informational kiosk; flat screen TVs playing not The Railroad Station Channel, but historic photographs and transit information; direction signage; historic photo and artistic murals and scrupulously well-kept restrooms. Finally, the station has its own guest services/security office; and on a lighter note, out on a historic railroad platform that has been restored, is this Snoopy and Woodstock sculpture. After all, Saint Paul, MN, is Charles M. Schultz's home town.
The only drawback I encountered was that the user interface on the information kiosk was hard to use. The station only has one full-service restaurant (Christo's Greek Restaurant) and two vendor carts, none of which are open on Sundays. However, service on the six other days of the week should be adequate to serve traveler's needs, and plenty of dining out-options open Sunday can be had in downtown Saint Paul.
If traveling from SPUD, the station has ample (paid) parking beneath it; from what I could tell, the parking there looked super secure. All in all, Saint Paul Union Depot is the way to arrive in the Twin Cities! It is a far more pleasant experience, one that crosses over into being uplifting.
Photo of SPUD concourse taken by Richard H.