Brownsville’s Union Station ripe for restoration

Every year, the Young Preservationists Association of Pittsburgh selects 10 properties in the region for historical preservation. It’s a great idea that spotlights gems of local history that are often hidden or obscured.

Topping this year’s list is the former Saints Peter and Paul Church on Larimer Avenue. For decades, the church served a German Catholic congregation.

Today, this cathedral-style building is a decaying monument to the working-class communities who pooled their talents and resources to build grand architecture. It’s a perfect opportunity for a local group to pool its talents and resources to restore and preserve this once-magnificent structure.

The YPA’s top 10 includes several properties outside Allegheny County that could be easily forgotten. Among them: the old Union Station in historic Brownsville on the Monongahela River in Fayette County.

This town is mostly known in Pittsburgh as the namesake for Brownsville Road in Carrick and the South Hills, but it was long a thriving city in its own right. With its wealth of resources and strategic location along the river and the National Road, it became a center of the 19th-century American steamboat industry and one of the region’s most notable small cities.

By the 1910s, Brownsville had become an essential transportation hub. In 1915, 68 daily passenger trains stopped in the city. Every month, 2 million tons of coal rode up the railroad toward Pittsburgh. In 1929, the Monongahela Railroad built the stately Union Station to accommodate all its traffic and to house its corporate offices.

Brownsville peaked in the 1930s and 1940s; in the post-war years, passenger operations trickled. The Monongahela held on until Conrail absorbed it in 1993 and shuttered the Brownsville offices.

Now abandoned and boarded up, Union Station is today perfectly positioned to anchor a renewed downtown that could, in turn, underpin the lower Mon Valley. Brownsville mayor Ross Swords said a 2015 study pegged restoration costs at $5 million. With inflation and building deterioration, those costs have likely risen to $10 million. Nevertheless, it would make a great investment for foundations seeking an effective and dignified reuse of a historic building.

Nearly a century after the Brownsville Union Station bustled with passengers and goods, it could, once again, anchor and uplift a community.