Where Trains Stop: Promiscuous Stations and the Railway Panopticon

While the theater, post office, and ymca were all important spaces, none was so promiscuous, so trafficked, and so tied to the preeminent form of nineteenth-century corporate capitalism as the train station. Train stations were important both inside and out—that they had transformative effects both on the people who moved through them as well as the urban space they were built in. In 1851, St. Louis elites drained a mill pond on the city’s semi-rural fringe, transforming it into a station. While they erased one space where “promiscuous” mixing happened—between the genders, races, and classes—they created another. This paper discusses how elites used the railroad as an excuse to replace a semi-public space with one that ultimately, while very corporate, remained semi-public. Elites struggled to invent a new architecture to contain mixing, and municipal governments policed this highly surveilable transportation bottleneck to create a “railway panopticon” and materialize their governance. This presentation uses the railroad station to link the “macro” side of the spatial turn (how transformations in capitalism have reconfigured territory) with the more “micro” side (how the spatial imaginaries of architecture, town and city planning, etc., have shaped daily life).