Union Station and Science City

Union Station opened in 1914, replacing an older, flood-prone depot, and it was built on a grand scale to match Kansas City's importance as a rail hub. Sitting near the geographic center of the country, the city was a place where east-west and north-south lines met, and the station handled enormous crowds, especially during the World Wars when soldiers passed through by the trainload.

The Grand Hall was designed to impress, with its towering ceiling, huge arched windows, and three great chandeliers, a fitting portal for a city at the crossroads of America. In its heyday the station was among the busiest in the nation, a place of arrivals, departures, and the constant motion of a country on the rails.

The station was the scene of one of the most notorious crimes of the gangster era. On the morning of June 17, 1933, in front of the depot, gunmen opened fire in an attempt to spring a captured criminal being transported by lawmen. The shooting, which became known as the Kansas City Massacre or the Union Station Massacre, left several lawmen and the prisoner dead.

The violence shocked the nation and helped galvanize support for a stronger federal law-enforcement response, feeding the rise of the modern FBI. Bullet marks from the shootout were long visible on the station's stonework, a grim reminder of the day gunfire echoed across the plaza of this grand public building.

After the Second World War, as Americans turned to cars and airplanes, rail travel dwindled and the great station emptied out. By the late twentieth century Union Station stood mostly vacant and decaying, its future in doubt, and demolition was a real possibility for the enormous, costly-to-maintain building.

In a rare show of regional cooperation, voters across the Kansas City area approved a tax to fund the station's restoration, and it reopened around the turn of the millennium reborn as a public destination. The Grand Hall was polished back to its former glory, and the sprawling building filled with new life, proof that a beloved landmark could be saved when a community chose to save it.

The heart of the new Union Station is Science City, a large hands-on science center where visitors of all ages explore experiments, exhibits, and interactive galleries. Alongside it are theaters, a planetarium, traveling exhibitions, restaurants, and event spaces, so the old depot hums again with visitors, though now they come for discovery rather than departures.

Just across a broad lawn to the south rises the National WWI Museum and Memorial, its tall stone pylon a landmark of the Kansas City skyline. The two sites face each other across Pershing Road, and together with the nearby Crown Center and downtown, they anchor one of the most rewarding corners of the city to explore on foot.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.