1958 - Washington Square - 2012.

• Position: LOCAL NEWS

COLUMN: THEN AND NOW

The tower to the right of the 1958 picture from yesterday, top left, overlooked Washington Square from the old Union Station. The new Union Station opened in 1911, but the tower remained until 1959.

Like Newton Square, Washington Square is not a square, but it was until 1947, when a temporary traffic circle was tried out. It expanded in the 1950s as part of a group of traffic improvement plans that included another tough intersection, Lincoln Square.

It remained that way until the turn of the century, when plans were hatched to shrink it to its current roundabout status, bottom left, which it seems drivers are still getting used to. At one point in the planning for the current layout, the city had a proposal to turn the rotary back into an intersection.

Like the owls that moved from the old library to the new one in last week's "Then and Now," the lions that once held up the arches of the old Union Station now guard the entrance to Cristoforo Colombo Park on Shrewsbury Street. But...