Scores of schoolchildren, judges and bishops visited this Southmoreland home

This house that once stood at the northeast corner of Warwick and 40th Street hosted some famous parties celebrating its well-known and well-loved resident in the 1930s. Schoolchildren with ties to him, lawyers, judges and bishops visited “gentleman ...

North Hyde Park block was home to early Kansas City police officer

  In 1920, Irish-born immigrant Dennis Malloy, who had worked as a bobby in London and then served in the Confederate army, lived with his family in this North Hyde Park home at 3335 Charlotte. He was credited as being the last survivor of ...

Corner drugstore at 39th and Genessee served the neighborhood

Small corner stores with living quarters above are a feature of many neighborhood corners in Midtown, including the southeast corner of 39th and Bell in the Volker neighborhood. This corner shop housed several different drug stores in the early ...

On Southmoreland’s Oak Street, grocers, railroad men, salesmen raised their families

Families moved into homes on the 4100 block of Oak beginning in the late 1800s and the area blossomed in the early 1900s. A 1909-1950 Sanborn map of the block. Note that Oak and McGee run north to south so the map is flipped on its side. A well-known ...

Valentine’s Waverly Way has disappeared

A 1905 newspaper ad touts the choice homes on Waverly Way, just made ready for occupancy. This row of residences stood on the north side of the street (now known as West 34th Terrace), between Pennsylvania and Washington Streets. All of Waverly ...

Plaza homes replaced by “modern” apartments as Plaza developed

While families came and went and homes were replaced with apartment buildings, the Charles McCallum family lived on this Plaza Westport block from at least the 1920s to the 1940s. McCallum was a Scottish-born carpenter and his widowed son, also ...

Valentine Road history: mansions, churches – and a plus-sized dress shop

As Midtown was developing, there was tension along Valentine Road east of Summit between developers and those who wanted the area to remain single-family. Valentine Road between Broadway and Southwest Trafficway has been home to Kansas City ...

Long-forgotten L.A. Allen home stood at Valentine and Broadway

The L.A. Allen home at the southwest corner of Valentine and Broadway as it looked in 1900. The site, now the location of the Uptown Theater, housed the large pioneer Allen family only for a short time. Then, savvy real estate investors foresaw ...

From the archives: Armour Boulevard history

Drugstore at the corner of Armour and Troost The same block today The businesses that once lined the southeast corner of Armour and Troost are mostly gone now, with the remaining ones boarded up. But in earlier days, the block from Armour south ...

Valentine block was home of school board president

In the 1930s in Valentine, most households were made up of single families headed by a working father, but it was not uncommon for homes to be owned by widows or for families to rent out rooms to one or several boarders. Midtown households in ...