Head house

A head house or headhouse may be an enclosed building attached to an open-sided shed, including the piers extending into a waterway, or the aboveground part of a subway station.

The head house at Philadelphia's Reading Terminal, which fronts a two level shed with tracks and platforms placed above a covered market, combined both the older and newer meanings of the word.

During the design and construction of the city's original subway line opened by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) in 1904, control houses were treated as integral architectural features of the system.

In 1901, William Barclay Parsons, chief engineer for the Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners, had traveled to Boston with architect Christopher LaFarge, where he was apparently inspired by the ornamental houses he saw used as entrances to the Tremont Street subway.

[2] In response, architects Heins & LaFarge designed each IRT control house to be an attractive exterior feature of the transit network system that was in keeping with its location.

The Reading Terminal in Philadelphia , showing a nine-story brick head house to the right and arched train shed (with market below) to the left.
New York's Chelsea Piers complex, showing the shore-side head house running perpendicular to, and connecting, Piers 62 to 59 (from left to right), which extend into the Hudson River .
A station building of Siuntio railway station in Siuntio, Finland
The head house to Bowling Green subway station in New York City