Bonaventure Station (1887–1952)

Bonaventure Station was the name of a railway station located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Its name was later adopted by a commercial development and a metro station.

Named for its location on Saint Bonaventure Street, now Saint Jacques Street, the first Bonaventure Station was built in 1847 as the main terminal for the Montreal and Lachine Railway. That company was leased by the Grand Trunk Railway in 1864 in order to obtain access to a more centrally located Montreal terminal. GTR subsequently purchased the company outright, becoming owner of the station.

Several other railways also used Bonaventure Station over the years, though it was not referred to as a union station. Notably, the Intercolonial Railway obtained running rights over the Grand Trunk into Montreal at the end of the 1880s; Bonaventure Station thus became its western terminal for service to and from Halifax, Nova Scotia and other points in the Maritimes (see Ocean Limited).

In 1887-8, a new, larger Bonaventure station building was built on the same site, to the plans of architect Thomas Seaton Scott in a flamboyant Victorian take on the Romanesque Revival style.

During the railway boom from the 1880s to the early 1910s, railways considered their terminal stations to be "prestige projects". Around the time construction began on the new Bonaventure Station, the competing Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) started work just two blocks away on Windsor Station, an imposing Richardsonian structure opened in 1889. As the CPR began work on expanding Windsor Station in 1900, the GTR, not to be outdone, seriously considered building a replacement for Bonaventure Station. A design for a new station was commissioned from Chicago architects Charles S. Frost and Albert Hoyt Granger. In the end, however, the new station was never built as the GTR began to focus on its Grand Trunk Pacific transcontinental railway project.

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