Kansas City, Missouri

• 1. Introduction

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  Kansas City, Missouri sits at the exact point where the Kansas River meets the Missouri, a confluence that has drawn people to this bend in the land for centuries. At the 2020 census, the city counted 508,090 residents, making it the largest city in Missouri and the 38th most populous in the United States. The metropolitan area, which straddles the state line between Missouri and Kansas, holds about 2.25 million people. But population figures only hint at what makes this place distinct. Kansas City has fountains that outnumber those of every city on earth except Paris. It gave rise to a style of jazz that bridged the big band era and the bebop revolution. Its barbecue tradition traces back to a single pit run by one migrant from Memphis. And it sits closer to the geographic center of the contiguous United States than any other major city. How did a river landing incorporated in 1850 with 2,500 residents become a city of half a million with an international music designation, a nuclear weapons manufacturing plant, and four Super Bowl championships? The answers reach back to French fur traders, Mormon settlers, a political boss who aided a future president, and a walkway collapse that remains the deadliest structural failure in American history outside of the September 11 attacks.

• 2. River, Fur, and First Arrivals

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  Étienne de Veniard, Sieur de Bourgmont, was a man running from French authorities when he first documented the site that would become Kansas City. He had deserted his post as fort commander after being criticized for his response to a Native American attack on Fort Détroit, and was living illegally with a Native American wife in a village near Brunswick, Missouri, about 90 miles east of the confluence. To restore his reputation, he wrote two documents in 1713 and 1714 describing the junction of the Grande Rivière des Cansez and the Missouri River. Those descriptions, used by French cartographer Guillaume Delisle, produced the first reasonably accurate map of the area. Long before Bourgmont arrived, the land had been home to the Hopewell tradition, the Mississippian culture, and peoples including the Kansa, Osage, Otoe, and Missouri. Spain took formal control of the region under the Treaty of Paris in 1763, though the French continued their fur trade under Spanish license. The Chouteau family of St. Louis, operating under that license as early as 1765, reached the future Kansas City in 1821, when François Chouteau established Chouteau's Landing on the Missouri River. After the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, Lewis and Clark passed through the confluence and noted it as a good place to build a fort. A group of Mormons from New York led by Joseph Smith settled in the area in 1831 and built the first school within what became Kansas City, but mob violence drove them out by 1833. That same year, John McCoy, son of Baptist missionary Isaac McCoy, established West Port along the Santa Fe Trail, three miles south of the river. West Port and its landing became a critical waypoint on the Santa Fe, California, and Oregon Trails, all three of which passed through Jackson County, and the modest cluster of buildings around the Missouri River landing was on its way to becoming a city.

• 3. War, Railroad, and the Making of a City

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  On the 1st of June 1850, the landing area was incorporated as the town of Kansas, Missouri, with a population of 2,500 and an area of 0.70 square miles. William Samuel Gregory was elected its first mayor on the 22nd of February 1853, but a legal discovery that he lived outside the city boundaries soon handed the office to Johnston Lykins. The Civil War arrived violently. Union troops occupied Kansas City and held it too firmly for Confederate forces to assault despite victories at the First Battle of Independence in August 1862 and the Second Battle of Independence on October 21-22, 1864. Confederate General Sterling Price's expedition ended when he was decisively defeated at the Battle of Westport the day after the second Independence victory. General Thomas Ewing, responding to a raid on nearby Lawrence, Kansas, led by William Quantrill, issued General Order No. 11, forcing the eviction of residents in four western Missouri counties. The war's end opened a new chapter. The decisive event was the selection of Kansas City over Leavenworth, Kansas, for the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad bridge across the Missouri River. When Hannibal Bridge, designed by Octave Chanute, opened in 1869, population growth accelerated sharply. The boom prompted a formal name change to Kansas City in 1889, and the city limits expanded south and east. Westport, once independent, became part of Kansas City on the 2nd of December 1897. By 1900, the city ranked as the 22nd largest in the country, with 163,752 residents. Landscape architect George Kessler shaped its streets and parks into a leading example of the City Beautiful movement, building 132 miles of boulevards and parkways between 1893 and 1915. The system was recognized in 1974 by the American Society of Civil Engineers as a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark.

• 4. Tom Pendergast and the Wide-Open City

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  Political machines had taken hold in Kansas City by the early 20th century, and by 1925 the organization led by Tom Pendergast dominated the city entirely. During his reign, significant structures went up, including Kansas City City Hall and the Jackson County Courthouse. He also aided the political career of one of his nephew's friends, Harry S. Truman, who rose from local politics to the U.S. Senate, then to the vice presidency, then to the presidency. Pendergast's biographers described him as bigger than life: his open alliance with hardened criminals, his cynical manipulation of democratic processes, his gambling habit, his ambition for a business empire, and his promotion of Kansas City as a wide-open town with every kind of vice imaginable all coexisted with what they called a professed compassion for the poor and a genuine role as city builder. He attracted musicians, gamblers, and organized crime figures who together shaped the city's reputation and its sound. Johnny Lazia led the Kansas City mob under Pendergast's protection. The machine fell in 1939, when Pendergast, in poor health and under long federal investigation, pleaded guilty to tax evasion. The non-elective office of city manager was later created as a structural response to the excess of the Pendergast years. Pendergast's legacy remained complicated: the same political environment that nurtured vice also produced the conditions for Kansas City jazz to flourish, and it sent to Washington a president who would serve from 1945 to 1953.

• 5. Jazz, Barbecue, and Culture

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  Kansas City jazz in the 1930s marked the transition from big bands to the bebop influence that would define the 1940s. The 1979 documentary The Last of the Blue Devils captured this era through interviews and performances by local jazz figures. The 18th and Vine neighborhood was its spiritual center, and in the 1970s, an attempt to revive jazz culture in the River Quay area ended in a gang war that destroyed three clubs and ended Kansas City mob influence in Las Vegas casinos. In 2018, UNESCO designated Kansas City its first City of Music in the United States, citing the city's investment in music, arts, and creativity as a driver of urban economic development, and specifically acknowledging the budget for improving the 18th and Vine Jazz District in 2016. Musicians who came out of Kansas City include Janelle Monáe and Tech N9ne, among many others. The city's barbecue tradition has roots equally specific. Henry Perry, a migrant from Memphis, is generally credited with opening Kansas City's first barbecue stand in 1921, in the 18th and Vine neighborhood. Arthur Bryant's took over Perry's restaurant and added sugar to the sauce. In 1946, one of Perry's cooks, George W. Gates, opened Gates Bar-B-Q; when his son Ollie joined the business, it became Gates and Sons Bar-B-Q. Kansas City native and essayist Calvin Trillin famously called Bryant's the single best restaurant in the world in a piece he wrote for Playboy in the 1960s. In 1977, psychiatrist Rich Davis test-marketed a sauce he called K.C. Soul Style Barbecue Sauce, renamed it KC Masterpiece, and sold the recipe to the Kingsford division of Clorox in 1986, popularizing the use of molasses as a sweetener in Kansas City-style sauces. More than 90 barbecue restaurants now operate in the metropolitan area.

• 6. Redlining and Urban Change

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  Troost Avenue was once called Millionaire Row, the eastern edge of a prosperous residential corridor. During the civil rights era, the city blocked people of color from moving west of Troost, confining them to the areas east of the avenue and driving what the source describes as one of the worst murder rates in the country. By 1950, African Americans represented 12.2% of Kansas City's population. The non-Hispanic white share of the city fell from 89.5% in 1930 to 54.9% in 2010. Between 1940 and 1960, the city more than doubled its physical size through aggressive annexation while increasing its population by only about 75,000. By 1970, the city covered approximately 316 square miles, more than five times its 1940 size. That annexation strategy spared Kansas City from the severe population collapse that took St. Louis and Detroit, both of which lost over 50% of their residents in the postwar era. But in neglected neighborhoods east of Troost, the same pattern of vacancy and abandonment took hold. The 17th of July 1981, collapse of a walkway at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Crown Center killed 114 people and injured more than 200 during a tea dance in the 45-story building. It remains the deadliest structural collapse in United States history other than the September 11 attacks. In 2015, a memorial called Skywalk Memorial Plaza was built across the street from the hotel, now a Sheraton. In the 21st century, more than $6 billion in improvements have been directed at the downtown Missouri side, and the downtown residential population quadrupled between 2007 and 2017, growing from about 4,000 residents in the early 2000s to nearly 30,000, ranking Kansas City's downtown sixth-fastest-growing in America.

• 7. Sports and World Stage

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  The Kansas City Chiefs began play in 1960 as the Dallas Texans of the American Football League before moving to Kansas City in 1963. They lost Super Bowl I to the Green Bay Packers 35-10, then won Super Bowl IV in 1969 as the last AFL champion. Since 2020, they have won Super Bowl LIV, Super Bowl LVII, and Super Bowl LVIII. The Kansas City Royals entered Major League Baseball in 1969 and became the first American League expansion team to reach the playoffs (in 1976), the first to reach the World Series (in 1980), and the first to win it (in 1985). They returned to the World Series in 2014 and won again in 2015. Kansas City's organized crime history wound through the city's sports calendar in an unexpected way: mob boss Nick Civella was recorded discussing gambling on Super Bowl IV, in which the Chiefs defeated the Minnesota Vikings, and that police investigation ultimately ended mob control of the Stardust Casino and provided the basis for the 1995 film Casino. Sporting Kansas City, a charter member of Major League Soccer in 1996, won the MLS Cup twice and the US Open Cup four times. The Kansas City Current broke ground on CPKC Stadium on the 6th of October 2022, a purpose-built 11,500-seat soccer stadium on the Berkley Riverfront that opened by March 2024. On the 16th of June 2022, Kansas City was selected as one of eleven US host cities for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, a designation that extends the city's trajectory as a venue for international competition.