Union Station is one of those buildings that makes you feel slightly guilty for the times you've walked past a train station without looking up. Commissioned in 1903 and completed eleven years later, this limestone monument in Kansas City was built to last a century and has managed, just barely, to do exactly that.

Chicago architect Jarvis Hunt persuaded a consortium of twelve railway companies to think bigger than they'd intended. They'd asked for a monument; he gave them a Roman basilica with 115-foot ceilings, a 3,500-pound chandelier and arched windows so generous the room seems to breathe. At its WWII peak, eight million passengers passed through annually.

VoiceMap's audio tour traces the station's full arc: from the 1903 flood that drowned its predecessor and the labour strikes that halted construction, to the golden interwar years and the long, slow decline before a city-wide sales tax finally brought it back.