This week in Philly history: Suburban Station opens to great acclaim, and reshapes the heart of Philadelphia

At 5:45 a.m., on Sept. 28, 1930, Broad Street Suburban Station officially opened in Center City when the first electric suburban train pulled out of the new underground station at 16th Street and Pennsylvania Boulevard — now known as John F. Kennedy Boulevard. The train made its way to the new West Philadelphia station at 30th and Arch Streets, the beginning of what we now call 30th Street Station.

A prescient advertisement in the Sept. 25, 1930, edition of The Inquirer touted Suburban and the new West Philly station as “... the first of the gigantic Pennsylvania improvements which will literally reshape the heart of Philadelphia.”

Suburban’s building was constructed by the Pennsylvania Railroad as a replacement for the old Broad Street Station as a terminus for suburban lines. The old station, built in 1881, featured an enormous train yard and sat in City Hall’s orbit at what is now Penn Plaza.

The railroad had hired the prestigious Chicago architectural firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst & White to erect an imposing office building that would be worthy of the railway company that touted itself as “The Standard Railroad of the World.”

Viewed from the street, Suburban’s grand art deco building featured limestone on the upper portions of the 21-story building, black granite along the street-level facade, and brass work on the entryways. Under the street, 325 multiple-unit electric trains ran between the city and suburbs daily.

So, you see, its name derives not from where the station sits, in the heart of a major U.S. metropolitan city, but from where its trains extend to, out into those blooming suburban towns.

» READ MORE: Why Philadelphia’s Suburban Station is in the heart of the city

The stops included towns along the Main Line (named after the railroad’s main line to Harrisburg), including Bryn Mawr, Haverford, Villanova, Paoli, Malvern, and Devon, as well as other stations in surrounding counties.

Broad Street Station was torn down by the 1950s. Once Suburban Station opened in 1930, it became the new, technologically advanced commuter terminal. Well, until its new friend in West Philly would grow over the course of three more developmental stages and steal the spotlight.