Denver Union Station

Author's Comments

The neon sign is the photograph everyone makes, and they are right to make it. Travel by Train, glowing red and white against a sky that has gone the particular cobalt of a Denver winter dusk, with the Beaux-Arts facade catching just enough ambient light to read as architecture rather than silhouette. Wynkoop Street is the angle. Stand across from the entrance, give yourself room to compose, and wait for the moment when the sign is fully lit but the sky has not yet gone black. That window is shorter than you think. Maybe twelve minutes in January, a little more in June. What I find more interesting is the interior in the hour after the building opens. Weekday mornings, before the commuters thicken and the bar at the center of the Great Hall starts pouring, the light comes through the tall arched windows and falls across the marble floor in long diagonals. The chandeliers are lit but mostly decorative at that hour. The contrast between the original 1881 bones and the 2014 renovation is most legible when the room is quiet, when you can actually see the way the new furniture sits inside the old architecture without arguing with it. I have made the blue hour photograph more times than I need to. The morning interior, with its slow light and its handful of travelers reading newspapers at the long tables, is the one I keep going back for. Bring a fast lens. Shoot from the mezzanine if you can find your way up. The geometry of the room rewards the patience of someone willing to wait for a single figure to walk through an empty patch of light.

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