These days, you might step into a Greyhound station without any intention of catching a bus. Most of Greyhound’s legacy properties, including its remaining historic depots, were sold in 2022, and in some cases bus stops have been moved to curbside. Many of the company’s historic stations had already been demolished over the years, but some have been resurrected through adaptive reuse. For example, well-known former Greyhound stations in Georgia and Indiana have been restaurants—The Grey in Savannah and BRU Burger Bar in Evansville—since the mid-2010s.

The Bus Stop cafe in the city of Dyersburg, Tennessee, is another addition to the former-Greyhound food scene. Greyhound bus service ceased at the modest Art Deco station in the 1980s, and multiple tenants cycled through it afterward. When Dyersburg advocates John and Martha Lannom bought the property in 2014, the striking little blue-and-white station was vacant, but they saw its potential as a downtown anchor. The Lannoms completely updated the dilapidated and already heavily altered interior, and they committed to preserving the 1930 facade. They kept the original door and window openings and marquees, and they cleaned and still maintain its original bands of blue-and-white-glazed brick, vertical sign, and other historic details. The Bus Stop is now a popular diner.

An abandoned bus station in Tyler, Texas, now home to the Greyhound Inn (pictured at the top of this story) also benefited from the efforts of a local advocate for downtown revitalization. Real estate developer Andy Bergfeld knew Tyler could use a distinctive local hotel downtown. Bergfeld was looking for a historic property, but he initially overlooked the old Greyhound station, which was covered in 1980s sheet metal and stucco. (A “terrible-looking building,” he says.) After he was tipped off to the presence of upstairs apartments—a good start for a hotel—and saw historic photos of the Art Deco and Moderne exterior, he was intrigued. Peeking out a broken upstairs window, Bergfeld realized that the unfortunate cladding was removable.

With the help of both state and federal historic tax credits, the 1930s apartment building-turned-1940s bus station has been transformed into a nine-room boutique hotel. Bergfeld and his team returned the exterior to its Art Deco and Moderne glory, right down to the salvaged door hardware and handmade replacement tiles where needed. The Greyhound Inn opened to guests in late 2023.

At the Freedom Rides Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, the vestiges of a segregated past—“the architecture of segregation,” says director Dorothy Walker—are preserved as part of the story told by the museum. On May 20, 1961, Freedom Riders—including a 21-year-old John Lewis, the future Civil Rights icon and member of Congress—arrived at the station and were attacked by a waiting white mob. The event brought national attention to the Freedom Riders’ mission to desegregate interstate travel and to the larger movement to expand civil rights in the South.

The exterior of the 1951 Moderne station, which is listed on the National Register because of its connection to Civil Rights history, has been largely restored to the way it looked in 1961. The museum opted to keep the original segregated entrance bricked up and to not re-install a previously removed sign reading “colored entrance,” but it left the holes where the letters were attached and the contours of the opening intact and visible to visitors. The original decision to design the building for segregation was carefully thought out, says Walker, and the museum is just as careful to explicitly address this history. The Freedom Rides Museum, which opened in 2011 and is owned by the Alabama Historical Commission, also maintains a fully restored Greyhound bus on site. The commission is currently adapting a historic property across the street, in part to gain more square footage for the museum.

Expansion is also the watchword at SquashWise in Baltimore. The growing youth-development nonprofit brings together athletic and educational opportunities through squash and after-school programs, and it had been searching for a larger home. It recently began renovating an old Greyhound station in the city. While bus service was long gone and the interior was “kind of a tired 1990s-era office building,” says SquashWise cofounder and Executive Director Abby Markoe, the 1941 Streamline Moderne exterior is largely intact and ready for restoration. (The original architect was William S. Arrasmith, who designed around 60 Greyhound stations, including the ones in Evansville and Montgomery.)

Working with historic building consultants and with the help of historic tax credits, SquashWise will add a new sign to the historic Greyhound pylon, clean the limestone and terra cotta, and replace deteriorated windows with historically appropriate ones. Inside, drop ceilings have been removed, and the once-again expansive waiting room area will house squash courts. Between the courts, the original terrazzo floor will be restored. Markoe says that the building’s history as a bus station lines up with SquashWise’s mission—both are about people’s life journeys. “We’re trying to bring people together through this space,” she says.

Unlike the others, a bus complex located in Memphis, Tennessee, was never a terminal. Rather, it served as the offices and massive bus barn of Dixie Greyhound, a former regional division of Greyhound. The company vacated the building in the mid-1990s, and the space has been used as storage since then. The $28.6 million Greyhound Yards redevelopment project, which is set to break ground this fall, will link the neighborhood to other areas of Memphis. The mixed-use complex will include apartments, artist studios, retail shops, and amenities such as a coffee shop and yoga studio.

Partially funded by federal historic tax credits and a Tennessee historic development grant, the project will entail removing freestanding storage units blocking the facade and restoring existing decorative brick, windows, and the historic Greyhound sign. The large bus barn skylight will be repaired and refinished. Together with exposed trusses, it will provide an “unexpected, beautiful open volume” in the interior, says Katie Hunt, an architect with LRK, the firm designing the redevelopment. (LRK also consulted on the Bus Stop cafe rehabilitation in Dyersburg.) One lucky apartment dweller will live in a unit with original Streamline Moderne woodwork and chrome detailing, a vestige of the old corporate offices.