Postcards of the ‘Streamline Moderne’ Greyhound Terminals

Greyhound, the intercity bus carrier, that still serves over 3,800 destinations across North America began in Hibbing, Minnesota in 1914. Carl Eric Wickman who had been born in Sweden in 1887 started to transport iron ore miners from Hibbing to Alice (where the saloons were) for 15 cents a ride. The company started to use the name ‘The Greyhound Corporation in 1929 when Ed Stone the operator of the route from Superior to Wausau in Wisconsin saw a reflection of his bus in a store window. The reflection reminded him of a greyhound dog and he adopted that name for that segment but eventually applied to the whole network.

In 1934, intercity bus lines (of which Greyhound was the largest) carried around 400,000,000 passengers. The film It Happened One Night centered on an heiress (Claudette Colbert) traveling by Greyhound bus with a reporter (Clark Gable) and the movie is credited by the company for spurring bus travel nationwide.

To accommodate the rapid growth in bus travel, Greyhound constructed lots of new stations in the period between 1937 and 1945, most of them in a late Art Deco style known as Streamline Moderne. In 1937, Greyhound embarked on a program of unifying its brand identity by acquiring both buses and terminals in the Streamline style.[18] By the outbreak of World War II, the company had 4,750 stations and nearly 10,000 employees.