South Station in Dewey Square, Boston, MA, 1955

About this postcard

The view shows the long curved granite front of South Station facing Dewey Square, its central pavilion framed by columns and capped with a clock pediment, flags above the entrance and pedestrians and automobiles crossing the plaza below. The caption identifies it as the station serving the New York, New Haven and Hartford and the Boston and Albany railroads, with trains leaving for the South and West. The sender wrote on Aug. 23, 1955, while touring the Revolutionary War sites around Boston and Concord as New England recovered from the August floods. Buses were rerouted around damaged roads, and the bridge at Concord, the "rude bridge" of Emerson's hymn, was closed by high water. South Station had opened in 1899 as a union depot replacing several separate Boston terminals, and in the 1950s it remained the city's main long-distance rail gateway.