Head house

Since the mid-19th century, in the United States, a head house has often been the part of a passenger train station that does not house the tracks and platforms. Elsewhere, the same part of a station is known as the station building.

In particular, it often contains the ticket counters, waiting rooms, toilets and baggage facilities. It might also include the passenger concourses and walkways between the platforms and other facilities. The head house at Philadelphia's Reading Terminal, which fronts a two level shed with tracks and platforms placed above a covered market, combined both the older and newer meanings of the word.

Larger terminals had amenities that were contained within their own distinct building, which was separate from the railroad. For instance, when Cincinnati Union Terminal opened in 1933, the head house held a restaurant, lunch room, ice cream shop, news agent, drug store, small movie theater, men's and women's lounges, and restrooms that included changing rooms and showers.[1]

The head houses to Bowling Green subway station in New York City (above) and Arai Station in Sendai, Miyagi, Japan. (below)

In subway systems, a head house is the part of a subway station that is above ground, which contain escalators, elevators and ticket agents.

On the New York City Subway, a head house is called a "Control House". They were built, and are still used in certain locations (such as at Broadway and West 72nd Street), where a simple staircase or kiosk was not desirable. During the design and construction of the city's original subway line opened by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) in 1904, control houses were treated as integral architectural features of the system. In 1901, William Barclay Parsons, chief engineer for the Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners, had traveled to Boston with architect Christopher LaFarge, where he was apparently inspired by the ornamental houses he saw used as entrances to the Tremont Street subway.[2] In response, architects Heins & LaFarge designed each IRT control house to be an attractive exterior feature of the transit network system that was in keeping with its location. The buildings, which are examples of the Beaux-Arts style, are similar to other ground-level structures on the IRT, such as the powerhouses and sub-stations.