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The doors to the J. Douglas Galyon Depot on E. Washington Street are a sort of time portal. Step through its arched entry and the Beaux-Arts facade and Ionic columns, vaulted ceilings, rows of dark wood phone booths, and barbershop signs take you back nearly 100 years, to the train station’s grand opening.
In 1927, its $1 million price tag was staggering. But it was a statement about how Greensboro saw itself—a bustling hub of textiles and insurance that had recently added a first skyscraper to its skyline. The new train station, larger than Atlanta’s and one of the finest on all the East Coast, was designed by Alfred Fellheimer, lead architect of New York’s Grand Central Station.
When this week’s postcard was sent in 1935, the depot—then the Southern Railway Passenger Station—was less than a decade old and still seeing 42 passenger trains a day, making Greensboro a true “Gate City.”
“The 20s was such a boom time in Greensboro,” said Glenn Perkins, curator of community history at the Greensboro History Museum. “It was a massive railway hub at a time when passenger railways were really in their primacy, before the car was entirely common. It connected the city to the rest of the state and the wider world but it also said something about us as a center of commerce and people coming to us, that optimism of Greensboro in the 1920s.”
Of course, that boom time—and the impressive passenger railway station that represented it—wasn’t experienced the same way by all passengers.
One of the historical artifacts now in possession of the museum: the “Colored Entrance” sign, carved in limestone, that once made clear the strictly segregated Southern social order in places like the city’s train station.
“There was a big waiting room that was very elegant,” Perkins said. ” But the right side when you were facing it was a segregated place, an efficiency-oriented way of keeping the races separate in the Jim Crow South.”
An article on the station’s opening from “Railway Age” magazine described the different experiences white and Black passengers had.
“As the new station serves a southern community where it is necessary under the law to provide separate accommodations for colored people, the interior of the station has been laid out to that end,” the article reads. “In its arrangement, the facilities for white patrons occupy the main part of the building back of the main entrance, while those for colored patrons are located along the west side of the building proper, in a wing, about 66 ft. long by 37 ft. wide, which is fitted with five back-to-back oak settees and used for a waiting room and for a woman’s rest room and toilets.”
The design, Perkins said, kept white and Black passengers separate from the moment they arrived until they boarded the segregated train cars. While all the Black areas and facilities were smaller and lesser, having the words “Colored Entrance” chiseled into stone on part of the building itself says a lot about the community for which it was then being designed.
“This marquee spot of the city had what were considered very elegant ways to separate the races,” Perkins said. “It was supposedly dignified. But of course, in the end, it was very detrimental to the city and to our society.”
The Civil Rights Movement and official desegregation brought an end to those separate rail experiences even as the explosion of highways and car ownership made rail travel less important. The depot was donated to the city in 1978, the year before the Southern Railway did away with passenger service altogether.
The station, like the city’s downtown itself, entered a fallow period. But in the early 90s there was a movement to restore it—something that finally came to pass in 2005, when it was rechristened for long-time civic leader J. Douglas Galyon and re-opened to the public. It’s since seen improvement and expansion, again becoming a major transportation hub in the city for everything from Greensboro Transit Authority and Piedmont Area for Transit (PART) buses to Amtrak and Greyhound.
Earlier this year, at the Downtown Greensboro Inc. “State of Downtown” presentation, CEO and City Councilman Zack Matheny said the more than 65,000-square-foot depot is “one of our greatest assets.” Now, he said, it’s time for the station to see another revitalization. This one, he said, could be key to downtown’s next chapter.
“We want to take this and create what Union Station did in Denver, Colorado,” Matheny said.”Make it a hub of activity for the community so folks can socialize, interact.”
With $1.3 million in federal funding, Matheny said, a public/private partnership is at the preliminary stages of a redesign that could see retail, an outdoor terrace and food hall, large public social areas with a splash pad for families, as well as office space and an “African American Entrepreneurial Hub.”
Some of these development plans have been at the heart of tensions between developers and advocates for those experiencing homelessness. As The Thread has reported, staff and leaders at the non-profit Interactive Resource Center believe Matheny and others want to relocate the center, now just blocks from the depot, to ensure those enjoying the newly gentrified area have minimal contact with the homeless.
Matheny denies that. He says more development in downtown Greensboro is good for the entire city, which has funded and worked with the IRC for years but is concerned the increase in homelessness isn’t being properly addressed.
From more lighting to signs branding the area “The Depot,” Matheny said, a change is already underway that he hopes will culminate in an area that will bring families together and more people into downtown.
“We’re doing this stuff now,” Matheny said. “You may not see it every day, but we’re doing this stuff now.”
“Right now, this area is an underused asset,” Matheny said. “It doesn’t have to be.”
Joe Killian is The Assembly’s Greensboro editor. He covered cops, courts, government and politics at Greensboro’s daily paper, The News & Record, for a decade. He joined us from NC Newsline in Raleigh, where he was senior investigative reporter.