The images spill across the screen, some in vintage autochrome, most in black and white, revealing faces, styles and scenes from an earlier era.
A young man wearing a beret sits jauntily atop one of the stone lions at the Thomas H. Swope Memorial in Kansas City’s Swope Park. It’s Walt Disney. Count Basie leans back from a piano at the old Street’s Blue Room, one hand holding a cigarette, the other working the keys.
A succession of robbers, murderers and other open-town miscreants stare out from mug shots and prison photos, among them an aging Thomas J. Pendergast at the start of his 15-month stay in the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. It was 1939. Pendergast’s long political rule in KC had come to an inglorious end.
Click, and you’ll find them — with thousands of other photos, letters and related documents — at the Kansas City Public Library’s recently launched historical website “The Pendergast Years: Kansas City in the Jazz Age & Great Depression” (pendergastkc.org). Also boasting an array of scholarly essays on topics of the day, from race relations to the paradox of developer J.C. Nichols, it underscores the scope of digital history resources available through the Library and its research-oriented Missouri Valley Special Collections.
The MVSC’s online home, KCHistory.org, is a portal to more than 200 of the Library’s special collections, including 20,000-plus digitalized photos ranging from stunning shots of the city’s Great Flood of 1951 to thousands of images from the MVSC’s Stockyards Collection and hundreds more spotlighting festivals and fairs, athletic teams and family and other activities in the Guadalupe Center collection.
Notable, too, are 700 images of vintage postcards collected and donated to the Library by Mrs. Sam (Mildred) Ray, who featured them in a column she wrote for 23 years for The Kansas City Times and Star. Some 40,000 photos of local residences and businesses amassed during the 1940 Tax Assessment Collection, also housed in the Library’s special collections, are accessible through the Missouri Digital Heritage website (sos.mo.gov/mdh).
The Kansas City Public Library redesigned KCHistory.org a year ago, upgrading the viewing experience and making it more mobile friendly. The site also features a local history blog and updates on the Library’s monthly Missouri Valley Sundays programs, at which historians and others delve into some corner of Kansas City’s or the surrounding region’s past. A presentation late last year on Pendergast-era mob activity drew a crowd of 320 people to the downtown Central Library.
The Pendergast Years website follows in the footsteps of the Library’s highly successful Civil War website, civilwaronthewesternborder.org, which has drawn more than half a million visits since it launched in August 2013 and won a raft of major awards including the Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History from the American Historical Association.
“I think it’s somewhat unusual for a public library to have a robust, professional department devoted to special collections and making all of these resources available online,” says Jason Roe, KCPL’s digital history specialist. “There are a few others doing comparable things but, really, they’re major urban libraries — the New York Public Library, (the Free Library of) Philadelphia.
“Universities, when they put out digital resources, sometimes gear them to smaller, scholarly audiences. I think when a public library puts something like this together, we have a sense for what the broader public might be interested in and how to contextualize digital collections with articles that are accessible. It’s still scholarly, but it’s . . . easy to understand.”
The new Pendergast site seemed to strike an immediate chord. It quietly went live in the middle of December — no announcement, no promotion — and attracted 1,000 online visitors by the end of the month. Roe, its editor, points to the success of Tom’s Town Distilling Co., which opened in Kansas City’s Crossroads District roughly a year earlier and harkens back to the same unruly period, and says, “I think there’s a lot of pent-up demand” for remembering that era of jazz clubs, speakeasies, bootleggers . . . and yes, political corruption.
Already, the Library’s leadership is kicking around a new and even more ambitious project: creating what essentially would be an online encyclopedia of Kansas City history.
Entries would be organized by topic and cover multiple time periods. If the city’s voters were weighing a new airport, for example, they could research its air travel history by sifting through essays, photos and images of relevant documents.
“It’s exciting,” says Roe, who holds a doctorate in history from the University of Kansas, “to think about an online portal that Kansas Citians could use to research the history of contentious topics such as race relations and public transportation. Few American cities are able to provide easy access to meaningful, unbiased documentation and analysis, on a broad range of subjects, that engaged citizens (then) can use to inform contemporary debates.”
It’s what libraries do — in Kansas City anyway.
–Steve Wieberg
