30th Street Station

Locals may forget to stop and appreciate the beauty of Philadelphia’s [2] 30th Street Station while they run for their trains, but it happens to be one of America’s finest transportation hubs and one of the few remaining grand railroad stations in the country.

The Pennsylvania Railroad needed a location between New York and Washington on what is now known as the Northeast Corridor, so the neoclassical structure was built in 1929–1934 by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White. It is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The 90-foot-high ceiling creates a majestic atmosphere, and it’s easy to imagine an early-20th-century bustle not all that different from today. Inside, you can see the sculpture by Walker Hancock created in 1950 to honor Pennsylvania Railroad employees killed during World War II; it includes an archangel Michael lifting the body of a dead soldier out of the flames of war.

The station was featured in the 1983 film Trading Places and M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable (2000), but its most famous screen moments are from the now-classic scene in Witness (1985), in which a young Amish boy traveling through Philadelphia [2] with his mom witnesses a murder in the bathroom of the station. Fortunately, it was just a movie and the station is a relatively safe place.