The Hubbell Law Firm has proudly called Union Station Kansas City its home since May 2003. There could be no better home.

“Historic” is one word commonly used to describe Union Station Kansas City. And historic it is, as you will discover in the coming paragraphs. But it is more than historic. Much more. We invite you to take a printed and picture tour of the place we call home. Then choose your own words to describe Union Station Kansas City.

Background – The Era

In 1869, less than two months after the golden spike was driven at Promontory, Utah, symbolically joining east and west tracks in the first transcontinental railroad, Kansas City celebrated completion of the Hannibal Bridge, a railroad bridge joining north and south tracks across the Missouri River. With the opening of this new span, several additional railroads laid tracks to Kansas City to cross the “Mighty MO” and the threshold to places west. With the increased volume of rail traffic, Kansas City’s four small depots were stretched more and more to their limits. By 1877 construction of a new depot in Kansas City’s west bottoms was underway. Completion of Union Depot in 1878 gave Kansas City what was hailed as the “Handsomest and Largest Depot west of New York.”

Less than 10 years after Union Depot opened, it was apparent that the combination of increasing numbers of trains and increasing numbers of people would soon be too much for Union Depot. Such remained true even after a renovation and expansion of Union Depot in 1898. But small size was not the only problem to haunt Union Depot, as the area around the depot slipped more and more into social decay. The Kansas City Star described the area as a “jungle of saloons, auction houses, saloons, ticket scalpers offices, second-hand clothing stores, saloons, penny arcades, saloons and about any other operation one could imagine for separating the unwary traveler from his valuables.”

In 1901, railroad companies began secretly negotiating with Chicago architect Jarvis Hunt to draw plans for a new train station. In May 1903, area railroads formed a committee to study two possible new sites for the station, one in the west bottoms and one north of downtown near the Missouri River. The month of May had not yet passed when the Missouri and Kaw Rivers overran their banks, flooding the bottoms into a huge lake. Water in Union Depot rose to within feet of the chandeliers, but what happened inside was not as significant as what happened outside. With the rivers cresting at 38 feet above flood level, the railroad tracks crumpled like matchsticks and worse yet, 16 of the 17 railroad bridge crossings were washed away. The one bridge to survive–the Missouri Pacific bridge–did so because of the railroad superintendent’s order to park eight locomotives across the entire length of the bridge to weight it down and keep it from being swept away. The massive flooding, what was termed the “Great Flood of 1903,” prompted a shift in site selection away from the floodplain of the West Bottoms to an area known as the “belt line,” a set of tracks south of the downtown business district along O.K. Creek, as the site of Union Station.

The Birth of Union Station

The year 1906 was pivotal in the birth of Union Station, with twelve railroad lines joining together that year to form the Kansas City Terminal Railway Company, a move that would establish one unified station for the city. More importantly, Jarvis Hunt was officially and openly chosen over two competing architects to design the new depot. The choice was a good one. Hunt was a proponent of the “City Beautiful” movement, a progressive social reform movement that sought to improve cities esthetically, socially and morally through beautification. The thinking was that the beauty of the city would inspire civil loyalty and moral rectitude in the impoverished and that American cities would be brought to cultural parity with European cities by use of the Beaux Arts (pronounced “/bO-zar/,” a French term meaning fine arts) idiom in design of large city buildings. Hunt designed Union Station to be colossal and beautiful in the finest tradition of Beaux Arts, highly and magnificently ornamented with a profusion of columns, pilasters, balustrades and window balconies, with majesty and grandeur down to the most finite detail. He also designed it to be functional, to have - in Hunt’s words - the “ability to care in every way for the comfort and convenience of those whom it serves.” He designed into the station a vast 3-sublevel tunnel system that would organize the usual chaos of passenger flow to and from the trains, and the movement of baggage, mail and freight, and that would allow “through” trains to pass under the station. Train sheds extending out from each side of the depot were designed to protect passengers from the elements. Plans provided for all the necessities and amenities of railroad offices, a post office, a small jail, emergency hospital space, and retail spaces for restaurants, the city's largest barbershop, drug store, shoeshine and news stands. It would be lit, heated and cooled by its own power plant.

In the summer of 1911, two years after the citizens of Kansas City approved Hunt’s plans, excavation of the 44-acre terminal and yards complex began. Construction of the massive 900-room building and the adjacent complex took three years. Clearly the largest single construction in the Midwest to that time, the cost of Union Station was between $5.7 and $6.3 million for the station and $40 to $50 million for infrastructure and the surrounding railroad tracks. The project relied heavily on manual labor, requiring extra laborers to be brought in from outside the region. Construction wages for unskilled laborers amounted to 30 cents an hour. Five men lost their lives in the course of the construction project.

Union Station

The challenge to Jarvis Hunt by railroad financier E. H. Harriman had been to “build a monument,” and a monument it truly was, as Union Station opened its doors to thunderous acclaim on October 30, 1914, the third largest train station in the country. The Kansas City Star’s headline that day read:

And come they did. The ticket window opened at 11:00 p.m. the day of Union Station’s Grand Opening, and trains started running in and out of the station at midnight. Kansas City’s central location and its new magnificent station made it “…the most important gateway between the West and the East,” and travelers and trains passed through the station in masses year after year thereafter. Indeed, in Union Station’s prime, a train rolled through every eight minutes. A rail traffic record was set in 1917 with 79,368 trains rumbling through, including 271 trains in just one day. Many U.S. military men and women passed in and out of Union Station each year, particularly in the war years of World War I and World War II. It is said that half of all military personnel passed through the station in WWII. The annual passenger traffic peaked in 1945 at 678,363 passengers.

But the offerings and wonders of Union Station were not enjoyed by travelers only. A veritable city within a city, it became, and remained for decades, a place where Kansas Citians and others from the area swarmed to shop for exotic things not available elsewhere in the city, or to visit the beauty parlor or barbershop, or to eat in one of the many Fred Harvey restaurants, whether it was the Fred Harvey Lunch Room, the Fred Harvey Ice Cream and Soda Fountain, or the luxurious and very formal Westport Room, which was considered the best restaurant in the city. The splendor of the great station made it particularly inviting as a place to celebrate. People thronged to the station at Christmas when decorations flourished and carolers sang, and at New Year’s, when partygoers and revelers celebrated by the thousands, inside and out. Union Station became a part of many traditions for individuals, for families, for the city.

The Fade from Glory

With the rise of airlines and automobiles in the 1950s and 60s came the fall of train travel. Passenger numbers first took a rather steep downturn with the close of WWII and the numbers then dwindled steadily through the 50s. Losing business, railroads downgraded their services probably causing further loss of business. Meanwhile, though designed and constructed to last 200 years, Union Station was starting to show a little of her age. An extensive renovation was undertaken in 1957 to update the interior of the station, but the effort succeeded only in taking Union Station from opulent to ordinary. The same year of the renovation, one of the twelve railroads serving Union Station cut its Kansas City line. One by one, over the next ten years or so, seven more railroads followed suit. In 1968, the Fred Harvey Company ceased operations at Union Station. Five years later, only six passenger trains a day passed through Union Station and passenger traffic averaged less than 100 a day. Within another ten years, Union Station was closed to passenger service aside from one tenant, Amtrak, which operated its ticket office and waiting area inside an inflated bubble situated in the Grand Hall. In 1988 Amtrak removed its operation from Union Station to a smaller facility. The last signs of life left the station in 1989 when the Lobster Pot Restaurant moved to another location. The grand Union Station fell silent.

Return to Glory

Even as life seemed to be ebbing from Union Station, many Kansas Citians, who had known and loved the station in the past, worked to save her for the future. In 1971 when a plan to redevelop the area threatened the mammoth depot with a wrecking ball, caring people succeeded in having the station placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Status as a National Landmark, while not affording total protection for the station, made destruction much more difficult for those not valuing such magnificence as Union Station.

In 1974 Kansas City contracted with a firm to redevelop the surrounding area and renovate Union Station. The effort proved futile, as the Canadian firm, while constructing two office buildings, left Union Station untouched. The city sued in 1989, the litigation ending in settlement in 1994. That same year, a not-for-profit corporation was established to breathe life into the 80-year-old monument, which with gaping holes in its roof, no upkeep or care, and no heating or cooling, had decayed horribly. A landmark proposal was made to save a landmark depot, with metro voters on both sides of the state line being asked to approve a one-eighth of a cent bi-state sales tax to renovate and redevelop Union Station. Metro citizens spoke with their votes, passing the bi-state sales tax, and then with their hearts and wallets, contributing personal and corporate dollars and acquiring federal monies, to provide funds in excess of $250 million for renovation of the beloved Union Station.

The magnificent structure that had taken three years to bring to glory would take two years to bring back to glory. A first order of business was replacing the leaky roof, which had allowed water damage during the station’s vacant years. The damage was extensive, with rusting and rotting of steel support beams, disintegration of concrete from freezing and thawing of the water, staining of the limestone walls, destruction of wooden floors in some areas of the building, and decay and destruction of a myriad of other structures and fixtures in the building. All 8,000 of the original tiles were replaced with tiles of the exact shape and color, except that each new tile was lighter by 50 pounds than the old tiles that had weighed 250 pounds each. Suffering the worst of the damage from the leaky roof were the massive plaster ceilings of the North Waiting Room and the Grand Hall. Wondrously ornate, the ceiling of the Grand Hall, with its plaster swirls, ribbons, eggs, oak leaves, acorns and rosette medallions, towered with the ceiling of the North Waiting Room some 95 feet above the marble floors of the two great rooms. Scaffolding was erected as artisans and ornamental plasterers worked to remove over half of the original ceiling, replicate the elaborate designs and restore the ceilings to their original beauty in every detail. So high were the scaffoldings that portable toilets were lofted to the top so workers would not have to descend to the floor once at work. The three chandeliers lighting the Grand Hall from above, each 12-feet in diameter with 155 bulbs and a weight of 3,500 pounds and requiring half a mile of wiring and 11,400 watts of electricity, were disassembled, cleaned, re-wired and painted, as were the original sconces adorning the walls of the station. More than 300 different types of light fixtures were used in renovation of the station. Every wire in the building was replaced with new wire. Union Station’s clock, known to many as “Big Ben of the Plains,” with its double face, each 6-feet in diameter, was cleaned, restored and returned to the archway between the Grand Hall and North Waiting Room to give future generations the opportunity to “Meet under the Clock” as it had to generations past. For a top-to-bottom cleaning, a power washing of the station’s marble floors and exterior and interior limestone walls was done to remove the black residue of soot from the coal-burning steam engines of the past. In the course of the renovation project, some ten million pounds of debris were removed from the station.

On November 10, 1999, some 85 years after its first opening, Union Station again opened its doors to applause and acclaim. Truly, this was glory revisited, as proud Kansas Citians and the world viewed the completed restoration of Union Station to its original radiant beauty – a monument from the past, a monument for the future.

With train travel still at or near the bottom as a travel choice, no longer would the depot be able to earn its keep as a railroad depot. Other attractions would be necessary to truly bring Union Station back to life and sustain that life. Recognizing that need, the opening of Union Station went hand-in-hand with the grand opening of Union Station Science City, an interactive science center and planetarium for fun and education. Other attractions included fine restaurants and unique shops, as well as a Theater District featuring giant-screen movies and live theater. In 2002, Amtrak returned its Kansas City operations to Union Station, giving the station new life as a depot and more revenue for upkeep. In 2003, the Hubbell Law Firm was honored with the opportunity to move its offices from the historic Power and Light Building to historic Union Station’s East Wing, Third Level. Union Station became home to the Firm on April 28, 2003. In 2005, the U.S. Postal Service moved its retail operation from the Main Post Office to Union Station, taking over the baggage room area just west of the Grand Hall from days gone by. A late 2005 opening of a permanent exhibit, the Kansas City Rail Experience, put railroading back into the air at Union Station and brought even more history to the historic depot. The exhibit gives visitors a hands-on journey back in time to the golden age of travel via vintage railcars open for touring and exploring, countless historical artifacts from Union Station’s exclusive collection, locomotive simulators and model trains.

Even with these many additions, much of Union Station remains public space and thus, open and available to the general public to roam the splendor of the Station. The station, which is a two-block long limestone structure from the outside, is five-stories high and has an overall capacity of 850,000 square feet. It originally had 900 rooms. Entering the station from its front entrance, one steps into the Grand Hall measuring 242 feet long, 103 feet wide, with a ceiling more than 90 feet high that is more ornate than words can describe. At its middle is an archway, with the Station’s clock, which leads in T-shape fashion to the North Waiting Room, which was capable of holding 10,000 people when used as a rail passenger waiting room. Now its beauty and size of 334 feet long, 86 feet wide takes visitors to Science City and a gallery which hosts traveling cultural and historic attractions. Throughout Union Station Kansas City are located a bevy of restaurants and small shops, as well as an impressive number of other attractions that are described well in a “welcome message” (with links) on the website of USKC:

Welcome to Union Station Kansas City!

“This fully restored 1914 landmark is Kansas City's most prominent destination for entertainment and cultural activities. The Station is home to a permanent rail exhibit with vintage rail cars, an interactive science center, a vibrant Theater District featuring giant-screen movies and live theater, fine restaurants, unique shops, and much more. Of course, you can still catch the train at Union Station, once again among Amtrak's busiest stops.”

All things at Union Station Kansas City are done well, as evidenced by the fact that Union Station Kansas City is a Smithsonian Affiliate and a partner with Kansas City Museum.

The offices of the Hubbell Law Firm are located on the third-floor in a wing extending to the east from the Grand Hall. Visitors to the firm – clients, prospective clients, former clients, union officials and members, and just plain friends - are encouraged to plan extra time into their schedule to browse the public areas and savor any of the wonderful attractions. Union Station Kansas City is linked by air-conditioned, well-lit and secure skywalks to the Westin Crown Center Hotel, the Hyatt Regency Hotel, the Crown Center Shops and many activities and exhibits associated with Hallmark, Inc. A short walk across from Union Station Kansas City takes visitors to the Liberty Memorial, which is the only national monument in the United States dedicated to those who fought and died in World War I. The Memorial has a 217-foot high tower, with an “eternal flame of freedom,” and two halls, one of which is a museum on World War I. There is no shortage of things to do or sights to see for our clients and their families when they visit our offices.

Visitors to Union Station Kansas City walk away in awe at the marvel of the place the attorneys and staff of the Hubbell Law Firm are delighted to call home. Come see us!

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