40,000 crystals: Here’s the story behind those blingy Christmas crowns at Union Station
The brides have already noticed them, suspended high over Union Station’s indoor holiday experience — two enormous crystal chandeliers shaped like crowns.
They are very regal and very, very blingy. As blingy as 40,000 crystals can be.
People are already asking if they’ll still be there after Christmas. Because wouldn’t they look great in wedding portraits?
But Kansas Citians of a certain age might recognize them as the spirit of Christmas past in Kansas City, homage to the 1960s and ‘70s when giant crowns hung over downtown intersections during the holidays.
Those downtown crowns are long gone — does anyone even know where they are today? — but Union Station has rekindled the memory.
The crown-shaped chandeliers are a centerpiece of “Holiday Reflections,” the city’s largest indoor holiday experience that will draw thousands of people to the historic train station on Pershing Road this month.
This year’s event, featuring a stroll-through replica of Kansas City’s historic Petticoat Lane, recreates the charm of how Kansas City used to celebrate the holidays downtown.
Union Station’s keepers are in a particularly nostalgic frame of mind this year as they mark 25 years since the landmark’s grand reopening after its massive restoration.
“History in our community and the preservation of the history for future generations has been paramount to us,” said George Guastello, president and CEO of Union Station Kansas City since 2008.
Each year Union Station officials brainstorm ways to reimagine their annual holiday experience for the public.
This year, Guastello pulled inspiration from a 2001 book published by The Kansas City Star, “Christmastime Kansas City, The Story of the Season,” written by former longtime Star editor and reporter Monroe Dodd.
The illustrated tome details Kansas City’s Christmas celebrations dating back to the early 19th century. Some of the photos struck a sentimental chord for Guastello, who grew up in Kansas City and remembers visiting downtown at Christmas with his family.
He remembers the crowns.
Borrowed from the Brits
A couple of years ago a reader of What’s Your KCQ? wondered what ever happened to the downtown crowns. “KCQ,” a collaboration of The Star and the Kansas City Public Library, answers questions about local history.
In the 1960s, the Downtown Merchants Association wanted to bring back holiday shoppers who had moved to the suburbs. So the group worked with two local retail display firms to create something unique for Christmas.
George Purucker, owner of George Purucker Displays, Inc., had been to England during one Christmas where he saw large, decorative crowns suspended above intersections in the Regent Street shopping area in London’s West End.
At the same time, crowns had become an important icon for Kansas City, partly because of the American Royal. Purucker thought crown decorations were a perfect fit for Kansas City; the merchants agreed.
Frank Mann of the Mannequin Company, later renamed Manneco, Inc., got involved, not only in making the giant crowns but maintaining them over the years. By most accounts, the original nine crowns went up in 1962 and were displayed each Christmas until 1976.
Each crown, shaped out of aluminum frames wrapped with gold foil, was about 13 feet tall and 14 feet in diameter and weighed nearly a ton. Each had 1,621 bulbs and needed its own dedicated electrical transformer.
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Eventually, harsh winters and lack of funding as downtown retail declined during the ‘70s brought them down. At one point the large crowns were put in storage.. But smaller ones used on streetlights stayed up until they were eventually sold to the city of Kansas City, Kansas, which used them on downtown streets through the early 1990s.
As What’s Your KCQ reported, the crowns are now “lost to time.” But replicas remain around town in a couple of places outside of Union Station.
A modern-day version with LED lights hangs inside the Commerce Bank building at 1000 Walnut Street.
And in 2004, Zona Rosa shopping district in the Northland installed four crowns, modeled after the 1960s crowns, above key intersections there. The ones you see there today are the same ones installed when the district opened, said a Zona Rosa spokesperson.
Union Station’s crowns
Like George Purucker all those years ago, Guastello also found himself in Europe a couple of years ago, seeing the London streetscapes that inspired the original Kansas City crowns.
So he asked his Union Station team: How can we recreate that feeling here?
“It was one of those big ideas. ‘We gotta bring the crowns back,’” he said. “’We need that majestic, iconic Kansas City history.’”
They knew the size of the crowns at Zona Rosa — too big to hang inside the station.
They knew they wanted something befitting the grandeur and beauty of the building, not “just kind of plasticky,” he said. “So we said chandeliers.”
And, after being inspired by a trip to Swarovski crystal headquarters in Austria and seeing the passion it takes to create such sparkle, he wanted crystals, even though Swarovskis were too pricey for this project.
They got help finding an overseas company that makes crystal chandeliers for commercial installations and began deep-dive discussions about lumens and warm white light versus cool white light.
The fixtures ended up bring “a little brighter than what I thought we were going to get,” Guastello said. “But it worked out perfectly because it’s just enough to make them glisten.”
When California port strikes in October threatened to hold up delivery of the chandeliers from the Pacific Rim, Guastello recalled, his team was ready to drive to Long Beach to get them.
The two chandeliers arrived in Kansas City disassembled, too big to get through any door leading into the station’s grand hall. So each fixture, 10-feet tall, had to be built on site, a project that took about a week.
Each chandelier has 300 strands of crystals; 20,000 crystals on each.
Each cost $10,000, Guastello said.
He doesn’t have an answer for the people asking how long they’re going to remain there. If the decision is made to take them down, time will be tight to lower and disassemble them before the station hosts Martin Luther King Jr. festivities in mid-January.
The “Holiday Reflections” event runs through Jan. 1.
He’s going back and forth on partially disassembling them to make them look less Christmas-like, or ordering two more. But nonprofit Union Station will need a huge turnout to its Christmas event to bring more bling.
So, Guastello said, “stay tuned.”
This story was originally published December 11, 2024 at 6:15 AM.
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