Greyhound leaving downtown station after 50 years

YAKIMA, Wash. — One recent morning, six people lined up at a quiet downtown Yakima Greyhound bus depot for the 9:30 a.m. bus bound for Seattle.

Two spare rows of chairs sat empty on the large marble floor of the 1950s-era lobby inside the depot at the corner of East Yakima Avenue and South Sixth Street.

Bathroom doors equipped with locks that require tokens to open were propped open for free use. Three video arcade games -- circa 1980 with wooden consoles -- have been unplugged and turned to face the wall. An adjoining restaurant is closed.

These are the final days of the red-brick, block-glass depot with the iconic running dog logo, which will close for good Tuesday when Greyhound will move to the Arco ampm mini-mart at 3922 Fruitvale Blvd.

Greyhound officials said the move to the 24-hour mini-mart will improve service to customers. Plus, the freeway is nearby.

The move comes eight years after declining ridership forced the bus service to discontinue many stops in small towns across the country, including Washington.

Greyhound has been moving bus services to mini-marts nationwide, said spokesman Timothy Stokes in Cincinnati.

In Yakima, the move allows the company to shed an old building dating from the early 1950s that doesn't get much use, ending overhead and maintenance costs. The one employee left at the depot will lose his job. In exchange, the mini-mart gets a commission on ticket sales as well as increased foot traffic for its retail operation.

The Greyhound building will be put up for sale, Stokes said.

Though the old depot is now little more than a shell of its former bustling days, seeing it go will be hard for some.

"This has been here ever since I remember," said 57-year-old Jaque Reed. "It was a lot different (years ago). There was a lot more people around here."

Reed was waiting for the Seattle-bound bus, which she rides monthly to a medical appointment.

She lives within walking distance of the old depot. Its closure means she will have to find a ride home from the Fruitvale location because the Greyhound return trip doesn't arrive until after midnight, after Yakima Transit has stopped running.

"I guess I'll just have to have my sister stay up and come pick me up," she said. "I think this is going to affect a lot of people who don't have transportation. So I'm not happy about it."

But for 22-year-old Ben Moore, the move is "kind of cool."

A culinary arts student at Fort Simcoe Job Corps in White Swan, Moore was headed to his hometown of Seattle for a doctor's appointment.

"Oh wow, nice," he said. "I probably feel that it's going to be a good thing -- the convenience store thing combination."

The old Greyhound depot was once a hopping place, recalled Carol Klingele, who spent 16 years working in the adjoining restaurant when it was named Hammon's Cafe.

"That's where I learned to make homemade pie crust," Klingele said.

People came and went on a regular basis, and the restaurant always prepared food ahead of each bus' arrival in anticipation of hungry riders, the 73-year-old recalled.

"It was a blast -- we had quite a diversity of people who would come and go," she said. "Those were the good old days. You could talk to anyone and not worry about them chewing your head off. Everyone was friendly."

Some buses would stop for a half-hour while others only took a 15 minute break before hitting the road, she recalled. It was common to see five or six buses come through a day between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m.

And that kept the restaurant busy from breakfast to dinner, she said.

"We were multi-tasking," she said. "We'd throw eggs and pancakes on, go out and take their money, and go back in and throw more eggs and pancakes on. Hash browns were made a little ahead of time. We were fast at it."

Buses generally carried 42 people at that time and "most of the time they were fairly full," she said.

Most passengers sat down to eat in the restaurant. Others would bring in their sack lunch to sit and eat with others. "They'd order a cup of coffee for a soda or something to have with their lunch," she said.

During holidays, many people rode the bus just to be around others, to blunt the loneliness, she said.

"That always amazed me, how many people would travel just so they wouldn't be alone," she said. "It was a very busy station, with all the little stops the bus made."

But that was well before Greyhound did away with many of the stops in smaller towns. In a cost-saving measure in 2004, more than 20 stops were discontinued throughout the state.

In the Yakima Valley alone, canceled were stops in Toppenish, Wapato, Grandview, Prosser and Goldendale.

Greyhound, based in Dallas, closed a total of 260 stops in small towns between Chicago and Seattle to cut costs and focus more on profitable lines. The closures left only 99 stops in its 13-state northern region.

Now comes the end of the Yakima depot.

"It's another part of history gone," Klingele said. "Gosh."

* Phil Ferolito can be reached at 509-577-7749, or pferolito@yakimaherald.com.