Union Station: When Kansas City Was the Center of the Country

When Union Station opened on October thirtieth, nineteen fourteen, it was the third-largest train station in the country, after Grand Central in New York and Union Station in Washington. The architect Jarvis Hunt designed it in the Beaux-Arts style, with a main waiting room that stretched two hundred forty feet long and ninety-five feet high, lit by three chandeliers that were among the largest in the country. The ceiling was barrel-vaulted, the floors marble, and the whole of it was built to accommodate the volume of traffic that moved through Kansas City when the railroads still ran through it.

And they ran through it in enormous numbers. Kansas City had become, by the early twentieth century, the most important railroad hub between Chicago and the Pacific Coast. More than one hundred eighty trains a day passed through the station in its peak years. Soldiers in World War One and World War Two passed through in hundreds of thousands. People from every part of the country who were going from the east to the west, or from the north to the south, or between any two American cities that required crossing the continent, were likely to have a layover in Kansas City.

The decline came in stages. Airplane travel took the long-distance passengers. Interstate highways took the shorter trips. Passenger rail traffic in the United States fell by more than ninety percent between nineteen forty-five and nineteen eighty. Union Station went from processing millions of passengers a year to virtual closure. By the nineteen eighties it sat nearly empty, one of the grandest abandoned buildings in the country.

A public-private renovation effort completed in nineteen ninety-nine restored the station and reopened it as a science museum, restaurant complex, and event space. It is still the largest station building in Kansas City, and on any given morning, the light that comes through its windows falls on the same marble floors it fell on when the trains were running.