Bytes: PLACES: KANSAS CITY

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Continuing a look at the hometowns of some regular overseas contributors.

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Next batter up: Ron of Kansas City . . .

It's another lengthy one, readers.

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Kansas City, Missouri

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About:

Kansas City, Missouri is the largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri by population and area. It is the central city of the Kansas City metropolitan area, which straddles the Missouri–Kansas state line and has a population of 2,392,035.As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 508,090, making it the 37th most-populous city in the United States, as well as the sixth-most populous city in the Midwest.

Sitting on Missouri's western boundary with Kansas, with Downtown near the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers, the city encompasses about 319.03 square miles (826.3 km2), making it the 25th largest city by total area in the United States.

Downtown Kansas City skyline

Kauffman Stadium

Courtyard near entrance of Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Kauffman Center for Performing Arts at daytime in Kansas City, MO.

Opened in 2011, it houses two venues: the 1,800-seat Muriel Kauffman Theatre, home of the Kansas City Ballet and Lyric Opera of Kansas City; and the 1,600-seat Helzberg Hall, home of the Kansas City Symphony Orchestra.

Does anyone else think this resembles an armadillo:

The Kansas City Symphony prepares to begin their annual performance of Handel's Messiah in Helzberg Hall.

Aerial photo of the National WWI Museum and Memorial with the Kansas City skyline.

That one above doesn’t look like an armadillo but . . .

Kansas City Union Station

Opened in 1914 as the second largest train station in America at the time. Now served by 6 Amtrak trains each day. Its primary use today is to house the Science Center, restaurants, and museums.

Downtown Kansas City looking over Union Station from the Liberty Memorial

Country Club Plaza (view from J.C. Nichols Parway at 47th Street), Kansas City, Missouri

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History:

The town of Kansas, Missouri was incorporated on June 1, 1850, reincorporated and renamed City of Kansas on March 28, 1853, and renamed Kansas City in 1889.

The area straddles the border between Missouri and Kansas at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers, and was considered a good place settle.

In past centuries, the area's tribal inhabitants include the Hopewell tradition, Mississippian culture, Kansa, Osage, Otoe, and Missouri.

The first documented European visitor to the eventual site of Kansas City was Étienne de Veniard, Sieur de Bourgmont, who was also the first European to explore the lower Missouri River. Criticized for his response to the Native American attack on Fort Détroit, he had deserted his post as fort commander and was avoiding French authorities. Bourgmont lived with a Native American wife in a village about 90 miles (140 km) east near Brunswick, Missouri, where he illegally traded furs.

To clear his name, he wrote Exact Description of Louisiana, of Its Harbors, Lands and Rivers, and Names of the Indian Tribes That Occupy It, and the Commerce and Advantages to Be Derived Therefrom for the Establishment of a Colony in 1713 and The Route to Be Taken to Ascend the Missouri River in 1714. In the documents, he describes the junction of the "Grande Riv[ière] des Cansez" and Missouri River, as the first adoption of those names. French cartographer Guillaume Delisle used the descriptions to make the area's first reasonably accurate map.

The Spanish took over the region in the Treaty of Paris in 1763, but were not to play a major role other than taxing and licensing Missouri River ship traffic. The French continued their fur trade under Spanish license. The Chouteau family operated under Spanish license at St. Louis, in the lower Missouri Valley as early as 1765 and in 1821 the Chouteaus reached Kansas City, where François Chouteau established Chouteau's Landing.

In 1831, Gabriel Prudhomme Sr., a Canadian trapper and partner of François Chouteau, purchased 257 acres (104 ha) fronting the Missouri River. He established a home for his wife, Josephine, and six children. He operated a ferry on the river.

In 1833, John McCoy, son of Baptist missionary Isaac McCoy and brother-in-law of Johnston Lykins, established West Port along the Santa Fe Trail, 3 miles (4.8 kilometres) south of the river. In 1834, McCoy established Westport Landing on a bend in the Missouri to serve as a landing point for West Port, with Lykins as the first postmaster. He found it more convenient to have his goods offloaded at the Prudhomme landing next to Chouteau's landing than in Independence. Several years after Gabriel Prudhomme's death, a group of fourteen investors purchased his land at auction on November 14, 1838. By 1839, the investors divided the property and the first lots were sold in 1846 after legal complications were settled. The remaining lots were sold by February 1850.

The Kansas City Pioneer Square monument in Westport features Pony Express founder Alexander Majors, Westport and Kansas City founder John Calvin McCoy, and mountain man Jim Bridger who owned Chouteau's Store.

After the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, Lewis and Clark visited the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers, noting it was a good place to build a fort. In 1831, a group of Mormons from New York state led by Joseph Smith settled in the area. They built the first school within what became Kansas City, but were forced out by mob violence in 1833.

In 1850, the landing area was incorporated as the town of Kansas, Missouri. By that time, the towns of Kansas, Westport, and nearby Independence, had become critical points in the westward expansion of the United States. Three major trails – the Santa Fe, California, and Oregon – all passed through Jackson County.

During the Civil War, the city and its immediate surroundings were the focus of intense military activity. Although the First Battle of Independence in August 1862 resulted in a Confederate States Army victory, the Confederates were unable to leverage their win in any significant fashion, as Kansas City was occupied by Union troops and proved too heavily fortified to assault. The Second Battle of Independence, which occurred on October 21–22, 1864, as part of Sterling Price's Missouri expedition of 1864, also resulted in a Confederate triumph. Once again their victory proved hollow, as Price was decisively defeated in the pivotal Battle of Westport the next day, effectively ending Confederate efforts to regain Missouri.

General Thomas Ewing, in response to a successful raid on nearby Lawrence, Kansas, led by William Quantrill, issued General Order No. 11, forcing the eviction of residents in four western Missouri counties – including Jackson – except those living in the city and nearby communities and those whose allegiance to the Union was certified by Ewing.

William Clarke Quantrill (1837 – 1865) was a Confederate guerrilla leader during the American Civil War. Quantrill experienced a turbulent childhood, became a schoolteacher, and joined a group of bandits who roamed the Missouri and Kansas countryside to apprehend escaped slaves. The group became irregular pro-Confederate soldiers called Quantrill's Raiders, a partisan ranger outfit best known for its often brutal guerrilla tactics, and including the young Jesse James and his older brother Frank James. Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses Grant on April 9, 1865. On May 10, the US Army caught up to Quantrill and his band in an ambush in Wakefield, Kentucky. While attempting to flee on a skittish horse, Quantrill was shot in the back and paralysed from the chest down. Quantrill was brought by wagon to Louisville, Kentucky, and taken to the military prison hospital. He died from his wounds on June 6, 1865, at the age of 27.

After the Civil War, Kansas City grew rapidly, the population exploding after 1869, when Hannibal Bridge, designed by Octave Chanute, opened. The boom prompted a name change to Kansas City in 1889, and the city limits to be extended south and east. Westport became part of Kansas City on December 2, 1897.

Landscape architect George Kessler shaped Kansas City into a leading example of the City Beautiful movement, with a network of boulevards and parks.

The Hyatt Regency walkway collapse (below) was a major disaster. Two overhead walkways in the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, collapsed on July 17, 1981, killing 114 people and injuring 216. Loaded with partygoers, the concrete and glass platforms crashed onto a tea dance in the lobby. Kansas City society was affected for years, with the collapse resulting in billions of dollars of insurance claims, legal investigations, and city government reforms.

In the 21st century, the Kansas City area has undergone extensive redevelopment, with more than $6 billion in improvements to the downtown area on the Missouri side. One of the main goals is to attract convention and tourist dollars, office workers, and residents to downtown Kansas City, Missouri.

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Kansas City is located in Tornado Alley, a broad region where cold air from Canada collides with warm air from the Gulf of Mexico, leading to the formation of powerful storms, especially during the spring. The Kansas City metropolitan area has experienced several significant outbreaks of tornadoes in the past, including the Ruskin Heights tornado in 1957 and the May 2003 tornado outbreak sequence (363 tornadoes overall, of which 62 were significant). The region can also experience ice storms during the winter, such as the 2002 ice storm in which hundreds of thousands of residents lost power for days or weeks. Kansas City and its outlying areas are also subject to flooding, including the Great Floods of 1844, 1951, and 1993.

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Gallery:

The Junction, Kansas City, 1890

1903: The second great Kansas City flood consumes the railroad station (Union Depot) in the city’s West Bottoms district. Rail executives decide to build a new train station on higher ground and in a more central location.

Construction begins on the massive building. Union Station is designed in the beaux-arts architectural style popular in the United States and France in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Kansas City city market 1906

Stockyards at Kansas City, Missouri, 1890s. The facility established in 1871 along the Kansas River and the Kansas Pacific and Missouri Pacific Railroad tracks, became one of the leading livestock markets in the United States. The stockyards closed for business in October of 1999.

Main Street, Kansas City Mo, 1864

Main Street, looking north from 6th Street. Horses and wagons line up where parked cars and scooters currently reside. Bullene Dry Goods is visible from this view. The department store would eventually become a part of the Emery, Bird, Thayer Dry Goods Company that was established in 1889. It was the same year as the Battle of Westport, which is sometimes known as “The Gettysburg of the Midwest.”

Coates Homestead, 1868

The Coates Homestead stands tall over recently planted trees on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 10th Street. The home belonged to Kersey Coates, a businessman who was well known in Kansas City in the late 1800s. Coates was a colonel in the Missouri Militia during the Civil War. In 1871 he organized the first Kansas City agriculture and industrial fair. He was also a founding member of the Chamber of Commerce, and a member of the first Board of Trade. He died on April 24, 1887.

Public Square, 1871

The public square included what is now known as the River Market today. It got that name from the open-air farmers market that was located in the public square. Here, people gathered and seemingly lined up their horses and wagons like it was a parking lot. The River Market was designated as a historic district in 1978.

Kansas City and Westport Streetcar 1870

This mule-drawn streetcar is taking Kansas City residents from downtown to Westport. The fare at the time was 25 cents. The city has an interesting history with streetcars. In the mid-1880s, cable lines began to replace horse- and mule-drawn streetcars, which we reported on back in June. The Southwest Boulevard line was the first to become powered by electricity in 1896. By 1948, seven streetcar lines had been replaced by trolley bus lines. By 1959, there were no more streetcar lines – until the new downtown streetcar line opened 2016.

Steamboats 1880

At the foot of Main Street, people gather to get on a steamboat traversing the Missouri River. Steamboats first appeared on Western rivers in 1807. Before steamboats, flatboats were the main source of transportation by water. They could only be carried by the flow of water. Steamboats made water travel much more efficient, with the newfound ability to travel upstream.