Union Station, Kansas City
Sep. 1st, 2016 11:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dormouse1953I was in Kansas City last month attending Wordlcon. This was actually my second visit to Kansas City. In 1984, with a couple of friends, I travelled by train from New York to Los Angeles for that year's Worldcon. One of my friends travelled all the way with me from New York, but the other, Peter, had been visiting friends in Kansas City and joined the train there.
The train arrived in Kansas City about midnight. Therefore, until last month, all I'd really seen of the place had been the outside of the Amtrak station in the middle of the night.
I got into my hotel last month at about ten p.m. on a Sunday night and I was very jet-lagged so I didn't really notice anything as I went to my room and quickly went to sleep. The next morning I pulled back the curtains and saw this:
This is Union Station, Kansas City, and this is where the Amtrak train stopped in 1984.
There's a big display inside about the history of the station. It was opened in 1914 with huge celebrations but with the decline of rail travel in the fifties it fell into disrepair. Peter told me that when he boarded the train in 1984, the Amtrak area was a large plastic tent inside the station concourse. The display says this was because masonry was falling off the ceiling at the time, endangering passengers. Amtrak left the station shortly afterwards and the station remained unused.
In the nineties, there was a successful move to renovate the station. Amtrak moved back there in 2002. There are restaurants, a museum and a cinema (boasting the largest screen in the city). These are some shots of the station today:
Very conventiently, there is an aerial walkway all the way from my hotel to the station, and outside the station is the terminus for a free tram service that runs all the way up Main Street to the River Market (home of a museum dedicated to a riverboat found in a nearby field). This was convenient for getting to and from the convention.
One of the old photographs on display in the station is a panorama taken during the station's heyday. Behind the station you can see a large building which has a sign on the top saying "National Biscuit Company". (That company is now known as Nabisco.) The building is still there, but the sign has changed:
I wonder if anyone has told them.
The train arrived in Kansas City about midnight. Therefore, until last month, all I'd really seen of the place had been the outside of the Amtrak station in the middle of the night.
I got into my hotel last month at about ten p.m. on a Sunday night and I was very jet-lagged so I didn't really notice anything as I went to my room and quickly went to sleep. The next morning I pulled back the curtains and saw this:
This is Union Station, Kansas City, and this is where the Amtrak train stopped in 1984.
There's a big display inside about the history of the station. It was opened in 1914 with huge celebrations but with the decline of rail travel in the fifties it fell into disrepair. Peter told me that when he boarded the train in 1984, the Amtrak area was a large plastic tent inside the station concourse. The display says this was because masonry was falling off the ceiling at the time, endangering passengers. Amtrak left the station shortly afterwards and the station remained unused.
In the nineties, there was a successful move to renovate the station. Amtrak moved back there in 2002. There are restaurants, a museum and a cinema (boasting the largest screen in the city). These are some shots of the station today:
Very conventiently, there is an aerial walkway all the way from my hotel to the station, and outside the station is the terminus for a free tram service that runs all the way up Main Street to the River Market (home of a museum dedicated to a riverboat found in a nearby field). This was convenient for getting to and from the convention.
One of the old photographs on display in the station is a panorama taken during the station's heyday. Behind the station you can see a large building which has a sign on the top saying "National Biscuit Company". (That company is now known as Nabisco.) The building is still there, but the sign has changed:
I wonder if anyone has told them.
