An inoperable silvery-blue bus is parked at a dying Greyhound Lines terminal in Cleveland, Ohio, and it is becoming a beehive of activity.
Its presence has stirred up “so many different emotions”, says Robert Louis Brandon Edwards, an historian, artist and preservationist based in Cleveland. Last year, he bought the bus, which was manufactured for Greyhound in 1947, and had it trucked from a Pennsylvania junkyard to Ohio.
The bus station, built in 1948, is a Streamline Moderne masterwork by the architect William Strudwick Arrasmith (1898-1965), with hairpin curves and silvery-blue tiles resembling the fleet that once passed through it. The station will shutter late this year as Greyhound sheds its real-estate portfolio amid industry decline. Plans are afoot to recycle the station into public space for its new owner, Playhouse Square, an adjacent nonprofit compound of century-old performance venues…