History

armour-postcard--with-mansions

Peeking out from almost every Midtown Kansas City building, apartment or home there are layers of history, built up like different styles of wallpaper and paint colors that change over the years.

  • Colonnade apartment buildings
  • Shirtwaist homes
  • Rock walls
  • The ghosts of lumber barons
  • Business districts that came to life in the 1920s
  • Architects making their statements
  • Homes built for people riding streetcars to promised lands in the suburbs

Its history makes Midtown Kansas City unique.  It has always drawn people and continues to draw people, who add new layers to its textured fabric.

Telling the big, complex, human story of Midtown is the long-range goal of the Midtown KC Post’s Midtown Uncovered project. 

We want to strip back the layers, to look underneath the places we live today at the mansions and bungalows, the dirt roads and grand boulevards, the greedy investors and dreamy architects whose dreams piled up to make Midtown the place it is today.

We’ve started the project and we need your help. We’ll do a lot of the work, but we hope you’ll bring us stories, relics, and details the historians may have missed.

Our part

  • Daily stories in the Midtown KC Post: we cover development and redevelopment, new ideas and occasionally dip into the history of the area
  • A Midtown Kansas City Neighborhoods book: is in the works. We’re gathering photos and rounding up the history of Midtown for a book that will be published within the next year. Keep an eye on our website for more details.

Your Part

  • Share the history you have with others: Do you have old photos, letters or other Midtown history items you’d like to share? We’d like to post them on our website and perhaps feature them in our book. Contact us if you have history to share.
  • Call or email Midtown KC Post editor Mary Jo Draper at 816-753-4429 or mjdraper@midtownkcpost.com to discuss your history
  • Watch this website or join our email list to find out when we’ll be at the library for a scanning day, when you can bring in your photos and other materials for us to scan.

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