N&W Passenger Station (Loewy)

Raymond Loewy shaped how America looked — the Coca-Cola bottle, the Greyhound bus, Air Force One's paint scheme — so when the Norfolk and Western Railway commissioned him to design a passenger station in 1947, they got Streamlined Modern architecture in a region that leaned Colonial Revival. This was the last major passenger rail station built in Virginia, and it landed in the city the N&W had invented sixty-five years earlier. Roanoke exists because in 1882 the Norfolk and Western chose a salt lick called Big Lick as the site for its corporate headquarters and railroad shops. Within two years the population multiplied twenty-two times over and the renamed city became the railroad's company town. By the time Loewy drew this station, Roanoke was Southwest Virginia's economic and cultural hub, and the building he delivered was a clean-lined bet on the future from the most prolific industrial designer of the twentieth century. The station still works. Amtrak's Cardinal and Northeast Regional lines stop here, and the building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. You can stand on a platform designed by the same hand that styled the century's most recognized commercial objects, in a city that wouldn't exist without the tracks beneath your feet.