Credit: Architect and Engineer Magazine, Nov. According to an article in Architect and Engineer Magazine, the panels between the ribs of the dome were “acoustically treated” to create better sound inside the bus depot. The San Pablo Avenue station’s dome and rotunda awed early California Transit customers.
Passengers gazed up at it while their luggage was taken to a mezzanine floor where it could be tied to the roof of the waiting bus. From the beginning, the 56-foot octagonal rotunda garnered attention, especially its 38-foot high dome.
When the depot opened in July 1926 dozens of people showed up including public officials and passengers. The total project cost $250,000 dollars, or about $4.2 million today. The company teamed up with Leon Nishkin on an ambitious four-month construction plan for the Company’s main bus terminal and business headquarters. And in 1926, California Transit was looking to build a station in Oakland. A grand place with a good feelingīefore Greyhound there was the California Transit Company, an early operator of buses, which were innovations in the early 20th Century. And while it’s still standing, we decided to give the building a sendoff by going deep into its historical importance. But because of its historic importance at the literal crossroads of many Oakland communities, The Oaklandside interviewed people with strong ties to the building and bus line, asking them why they associate it with a time in Oakland they loved, and what they think about the station’s demise. The Greyhound station is probably doomed. The building’s slow decline is due to changes in the bus transportation industry, including a recent buyout of many of Greyhound’s former properties by a hedge fund better known for destroying newspapers.
Shuttered since last year, the abandoned building has recently become a canvass for graffiti, stripped of its elements, broken into and vandalized, host for the occasional underground dance party, or used by homeless people as shelter to escape the rain. Greyhound pulled its buses from the San Pablo depot in 2021. When it first opened in 1926, the station’s Beaux-Arts design and octagonal ceiling were praised as wonderous additions to Oakland’s increasingly ornate cityscape.īut now, the station’s existence is threatened. Its architecture reflects grand ambitions. For many, the Greyhound station connected the community and provided a sense of safety in public space that is often missing today. Tucked next to Highway 24 on San Pablo Avenue, where downtown and West Oakland meet, the old Greyhound Bus Station is a place where countless Oaklanders started out on a trip beyond the city for the first time, where thousands of soldiers went to fight in more than five wars, from Germany to Afghanistan, and where people from all walks of life crossed paths and fell in love. Oakland’s Greyhound station today (photo by Amir Aziz) and in 2016 (photo by Hilda Chen).
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