Oakland's Central Station was once the western terminus of the Transcontinental Railway, and the Beaux Arts train station that still stands at the end of 16th Street near the 980 freeway has seen better days. Various plans for renovating and preserving the structure have been proposed and scrapped -- including a museum honoring the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a first of its kind African American labor union which had its start here -- and it now sits amid multiple new residential developments. Bridge Housing, a non-profit developer of affordable housing, now owns the building and the property it sits on, and they're renewing efforts to figure out a cheap way to reuse the building after HBO recently used it for a set for their film Hemingway & Gellhorn, starring Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen. In order to get it ready for filming, HBO invested about $200,000 into replacing windows, patching the roof, and painting the place.

New ideas for using the 1912 space -- which incurred damage in Loma Prieta and has been closed to the public ever since -- include hosting movie nights, food events, and using it as a community event space. A study commissioned to figure out what it would cost $40 million to renovate the place fully as an event space with a restaurant and kitchen facilities. But Bridge is now hoping to do something smaller scale, with about $2.6 million in hand after a grant from the City of Oakland.