The Station is Demolished

Sharp’s waiting station first appeared on a campus map in 1919. A 1931 map showed the station as well as the tracks themselves, but by 1935 the trolley tracks were no longer included. The last trolley tracks were removed from North Pleasant Street during the 1950s; a 1959 campus map did not list the waiting station, nor indicate its footprint. Nearly one-hundred years after the shelter’s construction, a new academic building was sited for the intersection where the waiting station sat. During the early months of 2012, local preservation groups worked to delay the station’s imminent removal. An appeals process was made mandatory prior to the demolition, but the construction firm responsible for the work did not await approval and demolished the waiting station without proper authorization. The shelter survived a century on a changing campus; first constructed at the edge of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, the waiting station spent its final years at the center of a much-larger University of Massachusetts.