Westerly Railroad Station

This building unexpectedly turns out to be Mission Revival in style, as though displaced from the Santa Fe or Southern Pacific. Perhaps it should be called a building cluster, with waiting room, flanking wings, and arcaded entrance portico, all locked together, but with each functional component also given individual identity by an ingenious two-tiered, hipped roof structure in red tile with extravagantly projecting eaves. The various roof pitches and tiers are pinned together by a stubby ornamental clock dormer over the entrance. Another hipped roof caps a separate platform shelter, supported on paired Doric columns, alternating with arches, all exceptionally well proportioned. Down the tracks, a signal tower in the same style completes the complex. Who is responsible for such a sophisticated, well-detailed building? Perhaps the New York architect Cass Gilbert, who worked for the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad—his masterpiece for the line being the beautifully restored station in New Haven, Connecticut. At the time the Westerly station was designed, Gilbert's office also had commissions in the Southwest, which could account for this transcontinental import to Westerly.