First stop to last, from Union Station north to the River Market, a ride on one of Kansas City’s sleek new streetcars takes 13½ minutes.
It’s a quick roll through nearly 150 years of downtown history.
Catch a car at, say, the Crossroads Arts District. See that unassuming, yellow brick building near 19th and Main? It wasn’t so innocuous in the 1920s and ’30s, when Tom Pendergast conducted business from a second-floor office that housed the Jackson County Democratic Club. The notorious political boss had a hole cut in the wall to the next-door Monroe Hotel, offering discreet entry and exit to politicians and businessmen.
A couple of stops up, at 14th and Main, is the Mainstreet Theater, first opened in 1921 and a remnant of the era of grand movie palaces. Cab Calloway, Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers played there, and a tunnel to the nearby President Hotel — designed to give actors access to dressing rooms — also happened to lend bootleggers escape from police during Prohibition.
Ease through the River Market and past some of the oldest surviving structures in the city. At Fifth and Delaware is the first Kansas City Board of Trade Building, dating to 1877. The old Pacific House Hotel went up some nine years earlier at Fourth Street. The five-story, Chateauesque-style Ebenezer Building, which originally housed the William W. Kendall Boot and Shoe Company, has graced the area of Third and Delaware since 1890.
Staffers at the Kansas City Public Library hit on that rich, colorful history as they brainstormed ways of joining a citywide celebration of the streetcars’ launch in early May. The Library’s Missouri Valley Special Collections is chock full of photographs, documents, clippings and other materials chronicling the city’s past, including its first, highly successful foray into light rail transportation. The old system stretched as far as St. Joseph, Leavenworth and Lawrence and averaged 136 million riders a year at its peak in the 1940s, but succumbed in 1957 to the public’s growing preference for cars and buses.
The Library spotlighted that bygone era — for the streetcar, for downtown — in an informative guide complete with vintage images and their locations along the new starter line.
“It’s taking history from the archives to the streets,” says Andy Dandino, the Library’s art director and crack public affairs strategist. He hatched the idea of the foldout guide and worked with Library historians including Michael Wells of the special collections department and digital specialist Jason Roe.
Wells, who grew up in the area and holds a degree in history from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, focuses on local history and genealogy research. For him, there was a bittersweet element to the project.
“I think there’s a large percentage of people out there — I’d hesitate to put an exact number to it — who maybe don’t quite comprehend the vastness of the streetcar network that we once had or understand the urban renewal policies and legislation and things of that nature that saw it dismantled in the 1950s,” he says.
“You can look at some of the maps from the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s, when the network was at its peak, and see how easy it was for people to not only get around downtown and the immediate areas but to far-flung locations, to Independence or to Olathe via the (electric) Interurban lines. It was an impressive network. If anyone today traveled to another city or another country and found a similar network of transit lines, I think they would probably be a little envious.”
The Library-produced guide, Wells says, “is a good reminder that we actually had something very similar at one time and consciously chose to do away with it.”
The city also has plugged into its streetcar history, assigning numbers 801, 802, 803 and 804 to its first four new vehicles. That continues the numbering system of the old Kansas City Public Service Company.
If successful, it’s only a start. The streetcar system eventually could extend northward to the airport, and eastward and southward to the Country Club Plaza and UMKC.
Wells says the Library is prepared. “Kansas City is rich in history in all directions,” he says. “I see an opportunity to produce more material as the system expands.”
–Steve Weiberg
Vintage streetcar photos courtesy of the Kansas City Public Library’s Missouri Valley Special Collections.
