Best Remnant of Kansas City's Glory Days

It's hard to look at City Hall and not think of square-jawed cops and mob-friendly pols in black fedoras. The concrete art-deco-style building seems to have materialized right out of a 1930s gangster movie. After all, the building's concrete skin was provided by Kansas City's corrupt overlord of yesteryear, "Boss" Tom Pendergast. But there's more to City Hall than old-school graft. The towering structure is a symbol of KC's former prominence on the national map, when the city was slated as a main hub in the nation's recovery from the Great Depression. Millions of dollars flowed into the metro area during the '30s and '40s so people could find work beefing up the federal infrastructure. The new City Hall, completed in 1937 (two years after Harry S. Truman was sworn in as a U.S. senator), got a whopping chunk of that money. It's the tallest municipal office in the country. By placing this beacon on one of the highest hills in the city, its designers seemed to declare, "Kansas City is America's future!" And for a while, they were right.