Tower City (RTA Rapid Transit station)
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Tower City Station is a rapid transit station in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. It is the central station on the RTA Red Line and the major station on the RTA Green and Blue Lines. The station is located directly beneath Prospect Avenue in the middle of the Tower City Center shopping mall. The station is only accessible through the Tower City Center shopping complex, and, for this reason, the public concourse of the shopping mall is open at all times that the RTA Rapid Transit is in operation. The station is the only RTA Rapid Transit station serving the main part of downtown Cleveland, and it offers connections to all RTA buses serving Public Square The station also includes a “Walkway to Gateway,” which is a completely enclosed and air-conditioned walkway from Tower City Center to Quicken Loans Arena and Jacobs Field of the Gateway Sports and Entertainment Complex, allowing RTA passages, as well as those using the Tower City parking facilities, to walk to the arena and/or ballpark without going outside. The station has two fare-collection entrances, one leading to a low platform station for use by the light rail Green and Blue Lines, and one leading to a high platform station for the heavy rail Red Line. Both entrances open from a lobby located on the lowest level of the Tower City shopping mall, and this lobby is accessible by escalators and elevators from the other levels of the mall. Each entrance has multiple fare gates along with two operator booths. The entrance for the Green and Blue Lines collects fares from passengers entering and leaving the station, since westbound passengers Blue and Green Line trains pay their fare upon leaving. To transfer from the Red Line to the Green or Blue Lines, or vice versa, passengers must exit through the fare gates at one station entrance and enter through the other station entrance. The high and low platform portions of the station can also be reached from each other without going through the lobby by an access passageway located on each side of the lobby along the tracks; however, this passageway is normally closed except during special events such as Cleveland Browns games. [edit] HistoryWhen the Cleveland Union Terminal (CUT) was built in 1930 as part of the Terminal Tower complex, the train station allocated the northern set of tracks for interurban or rapid transit service and the southern set of tracks for intercity train service. The portion of the station above the interurban tracks was called the Traction Concourse and the portion above the intercity train tracks was called the Steam Concourse. The Van Sweringen brothers who developed Terminal Tower complex and built Cleveland Union Terminal[1] envisioned a network of interurban or rapid transit lines extending from the CUT in all directions. They even acquired right-of-way for some of the lines. |
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Since the Van Sweringens owned Cleveland Interurban Railroad which served the suburb of Shaker Heights, the interurban portion of the CUT was immediately occupied by the Shaker trains upon completion in July 1930. (Previously, the Shaker trains had used streetcar tracks to reach downtown from East 34th street, which caused significantly slower service.) The Shaker rapid transit station was located along the northern most tracks of the complex, and it included a small yard for the storage of a few trains and a loop to allow trains to reverse direction. Development of the other interurban services, however, was stalled by the economic downturn in the 1930s which hit the Van Swerigens particularly hard. By 1944, ownership of the Shaker rapid transit passed to the city of Shaker Heights.
The Shaker rapid transit remained the only service using the interurban portion of the CUT for 25 years. When the Cleveland Transit System its rapid transit (later designated the Red Line) in 1955 (using much of the right-of-way previously developed by the Van Sweringens), another rapid transit station was built in the former interurban area of the CUT to serve it. Since the CTS Rapid Transit (Red Line) and the Shaker rapid transit (Green and Blue Lines) were owned by different entities at the time, there was no fare transfer between the trains, and the stations were entirely separate. Amtrak left CUT in 1973, using a smaller train station built directly upon the intercity line along the lakefront.
Both lines were merged upon the formation of RTA on September 5, 1975, but the two stations remained separate until 1990, when a completely new station was built with the development of Tower City Center.
[edit] References
- ^ Van Tassel, David D., ed.; John J. Grabowski, ed. (1996). The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, 2nd ed., Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-33056-4.
