Union Station and me

To talk about the restoration of Union Station Kansas City without mentioning Andy Scott is like speaking of the 1960's without invoking the name of Bob Dylan.

Andy Scott was  part-time chief of staff for Kansas City Mayor (now congressman) Emanuel Cleaver in 1993. It was Scott who first suggested to Cleaver that the city back down on demands for a multi-million-dollar suit settlement with Trizek development corporation. Within a year of this decision, the rebirth of the station was, pardon the pun, on track. 

As head of the Union Station Assistance Corporation, Andy was not quite a czar I suppose, but in a more or less public project he was perhaps the closest thing to being one. Virtually all strategic decisions had to go through him, and many smaller ones as well. And he was the singular most important person responsible for saving many of the historic details of the station. During his watch, he gained weight, his hair thinned, and he became less and less patient with naysayers and obstructionists to the restoration. From where I was standing, this seemed a pretty natural response for someone under such pressure: pressure from the public, which had approved an "Historic bi-state tax initiative," a mantram adopted by all; pressure from lots of chiefs and lesser Indians in the form of architects, contractors, engineers; pressure from politicians who were scrambling to take credit for the fixing of the station; and pressure from the media, watching every move the USAC made with the $118 million raised in sales taxes to help pay for it. 

From the very first, I deeply appreciated that Andy gave me the opportunity to chronicle the amazing project which brought back from the near-dead this historic site, second-largest train station in America.

That is not to say we did not have our differences, Andy and I. But more about that later...

Oh, and just for the record, funding from corporations, foundations and individuals raised the restoration total to $260 million-a quarter of a billion dollars. Back then that was a lot of money...

There were, interestingly, a few photographers, all acquaintances, who were miffed at the fact that I was doing the documentation of the station, not them. 

One said that I had "Knocked him out of $50,000 worth of commercial work" by shooting for almost free. The president of the Kansas City Art Institute sneered that all of my Union Station photos at a gallery show after the restoration "Were well-printed, even the bad ones."  

She didn't get it.

The photos never were about me, and never were about photography, really. They were all about the Union Station. As I am fond of saying, photographs have a funny way of becoming awfully important later. It was, and remains, my philosophy that even though a given photograph was not necessarily the best in terms of creativity or composition, because it was an historic moment in the history of the station, it was an important image. I am, at heart, a photojournalist, a documentary photographer. Besides the fact that IMHO, this is the most valid form of photography, the fact that I was a graduate assistant to Cliff Edom, the man who showed Life Magazine how to do it, was a big factor in the way I see photographs.

From side comments the KCAI pres made, it indicated to me that she really wanted to do the restoration photography herself. How she could have spent the 14,000 hours that I did and still run the art institute I never could figure out...

The first two shots in this blog are of Andy the man himself in September, 1994. The blue window is a contemporary photo, and the guy with the saw was shot in early 1998 on C or Concourse Level, where the Bank of America exhibit gallery is now located.

Next time: The Big Two Lies and naive little me...