Seattle, Washington King Street Station

This guide to King Street Station in Seattle opens with a strange bargain: in two thousand eight, the city bought this Gilded Age depot and its Venetian-style clock tower from the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway for ten dollars. It traces how, back in nineteen sixty-seven, a railway architect had crews punch through the ornate vaulted ceiling above the waiting hall to hide it behind cheap suspended tile and fluorescent lights. You'll hear why a once-grand depot had stopped paying for itself, and what that had to do with the price tag decades later. Look up at the plasterwork before you go, and imagine it hidden for decades under a false ceiling.