South Station

Once the busiest train station in the world, this corner commuter building is getting its groove back. After sitting empty for two decades in the late 20th Century, this historical landmark is back to serving its intended purpose as a beating transit heart of Boston, along with housing a mysterious plaque.

Opening on New Year’s Day 1899, South Station was a marriage between five separate railroads consolidating into the Boston Terminal Company. Two years after its construction, additions to the station made it the largest train station in the entire world and the largest building in the city of Boston. In only a couple decades after its opening, South Station was overseeing the travel of over 125,000 passengers every day during World War II.

Suffering a fate similar to many of the grand train terminals of the United States, the Bostonian station’s rail traffic halted in the mid-20th Century due to the country’s shift to the automobile. The station sat empty for nearly two decades and was almost torn down before it was saved by preservationsits and added to the National Registry of Historic Places in 1975.

Thankfully, as urban planning shifted back to more commuter-friendly practices, South Station began to breathe again as an integral part of downtown Boston. The city’s “Big Dig,” erasing the invasive downtown expressway and replacing it with parkways and metro lines, left its mark on the station in a surprising way. A plaque in the Red Line Station platform memorializes a carpenter by the name of Fook C. Kan, who, the plaque notes, died during the station building’s construction work on August 17, 2000. However, records show he died a year earlier in 1999.

In 2025, a brand new tower opened on the station’s grounds, housing a variety of offices, and a majestic outdoor concourse now harkens visitors back to a time when American train stations were palaces. As for the Fook Choi Kan plaque, its creator and how it got on the wall of the platform are still unknown.