Burlingame’s front door: Train station museum set to reopen this fall

Members of the Burlingame Country Club lobbied for the train station, selected its location, and chose its architects. The members also insisted that the station stop be named “Burlingame” after their club.

The Southern Pacific Railroad was involved, of course, but it contributed less than half the cost of the station — the country club members picking up the bulk of the tab. As architects, the BCC selected George H. Howard, a club member and a scion of the family who owned the property on which the station would sit, and Joachim B. Mathisen, a Norwegian immigrant who had been a draftsman in the office of A. Page Brown at the time Brown designed the California Pavilion for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Commissioned to reflect the uniqueness of California, Brown designed the temporary Chicago structure to resemble a California mission. Although some critics found the building abhorrent (especially when contrasted with the classical white formal Beaux Arts-style of the rest of the fair’s buildings) others recognized that a new California-inspired regional-style was emerging. After the fair, Congress gave Brown a merit award for the building.

Thus, when the BCC members sought to put their stamp on the train station that would welcome privileged guests to their new club, it was not a surprise that Howard and Mathisen chose the new Mission-style as their theme. Both Brown and Howard were members of the BCC. In fact, Brown had recently designed the five cottages off El Camino Real that formed the nucleus of the early club. One suspects that the only reason Brown was not directly involved with the Burlingame train station is that he was too busy, having just been selected in late 1892 to design the Ferry Building.

The Mission Revival-style, first employed by Brown at the Chicago Fair, and then by Howard and Mathisen in Burlingame’s train station, became a popular architectural style. More than half a century after it was built, the Burlingame Train Station was awarded both California landmark status and a listing on the National Register of Historic Places because of its architecture. It is the first permanent structure that employs all the elements of what came to be called the Mission Revival-style.

With the new train station, the BCC had created a welcoming “front door” to their club. They were justly proud of what they had created, especially when, two months after its opening, the San Francisco Chronicle gushed that the station was the “prettiest on the line.” The importance of the new station was not just for San Francisco’s upper class, however. The area always had a mixed population of economic levels, even before the 1906 earthquake when more middle-class people fled to the safety of Burlingame. Farmers, carpenters and stable hands were just some of the skills needed for this budding community. The four dirt lanes surrounding the station became known as the Burlingame Square. There you could find a blacksmith, a liquor store and a dry goods outlet. Locals came to the station to get their mail, their telegrams and to use the phone. The waiting room became an unofficial community center, hosting church and club meetings. There, stationmaster George W. Gates welcomed Pullman cars filled with San Franciscans ready to dance the night away while drinking Champagne from copper-lined horse troughs at Harriett Pullman Carolan’s country home. On other evenings, the stationmaster’s wife, Estelle Gates welcomed the horse-drawn wagon of Mr. Guido coming up the road from San Mateo to sell vegetables and fresh meat.

The Golden Gate and Bay bridges transformed San Francisco’s Ferry Building: Instead of being seen from the ferries on the Bay as the main portal to San Francisco, the large building was more often viewed from the west as the anchor of Market Street. The rise in automobile use did much the same for Burlingame’s train station. The station still sat handsomely at the end of Burlingame’s main commercial strip but its importance as the portal, or front door, diminished throughout the 20th century. The rapid rise in automobile use in the 1920s drastically reduced train and streetcar traffic. By midcentury, the automobile had killed the Peninsula streetcar altogether. The 40-line electric streetcar (that ran roughly parallel to the Southern Pacific tracks) with a stop in Burlingame since 1903 made its last run in 1949. SP’s commuter train traffic survived, no doubt in large part because the tracks also served commercial freight trains.  

 ‘Save our Station’

By the 1980s, the station was in bad repair. There were gaping holes in the plaster and tiles were falling off the roof. Residents became alarmed. The station no longer served as the portal to our community, but would Burlingame be Burlingame without its train station? Residents could no more envision a Burlingame without its iconic station than a Paris without its Eiffel Tower. What if it ceased to survive? Sacre bleu! A Save our Station group quickly formed to raise the necessary funds to repair the station. Like the coalition that originally built the station, the funds came from both public and private sources. The station’s rededication ceremony in June of 1986 was nearly marred by a gruesome murder of the station ticketing agent some months before. In March, 59-year-old George Grant was found at the station lying in a pool of blood having been stabbed 18 times. The community was shocked that such a murder would occur in Burlingame, let alone in their beloved train station.

Later changes

By the early 2000s, the station’s in-person ticketing agent had been replaced by machines located under the outside arcade. The 100-year-old station waiting room was closed to the public.  

Although there was no access to the inside, the station continued to remain a favorite stop on the Burlingame Historical Society’s third grade Passport Tour of local history sites in Burlingame. There, the children took delight in seeing the garden where the stationmaster’s children played and seeing how much the palm tree, planted in the 1800s, had grown. They learned that stationmaster George Gates used a Morse Code system of dots and dashes to send telegrams from the station. They practiced saying say “hi” in Morse Code (dot dot dot dot — dot dot) and laughed when they heard that Mr. Gates named his two dogs “Dot” and “Dash.”

With the station vacant and unoccupied in the early 2000s, the Burlingame Historical Society saw an opportunity. Around the time the city celebrated its 100th birthday in 2008, the society entered into an agreement with Caltrain that permitted the society to open a museum in the old waiting room. Staffed by the all-volunteer society, it was open every first Sunday of the month for close to 10 years until it was forced to close due to the 2020 COVID pandemic restrictions.(One part of the train station did “reopen” during the pandemic, however. In March of 2024, San Mateo County prosecutors charged a Caltrain executive with surreptitiously spending taxpayers’ money during 2019-20 on remodeling and living in the Gates’ family’s old two-bedroom apartment in the south side of the Burlingame train station. The case is still pending).

A new future

Now, after a total revamp of its exhibits, the museum is set to open once again this fall, concurrent with rail electrification, 161 years after the steam-driven railroad started a passenger line down the San Francisco Peninsula, and 130 years after Burlingame railroad station’s remarkable construction. Community celebrations of the new electrified rail, including free rides, will take place on Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 21-22. The Burlingame celebration will be from 1-2 p.m. on Sunday. Go to caltrain.com/launchparty for more information.

Joanne Garrison is the author of “Burlingame Centennial: 1908-2008” and a board member of the Burlingame Historical Society (burlingamehistoricalsociety.org).