On a day this hot a century ago, Midtowners would have hopped on the streetcar and headed south to 46th and the Paseo, where the popular Electric Park with its beach, roller coasters, and dancing awaited them.
At the turn of the century, the first Electric Park, a popular destination for Kansas Citians, was located in the East Bottoms and owned by J.J., Mike, and Ferdinand Heim, owners of the Heim Brewing Company. It offered bathing, boating, rides, vaudeville – and beer. As one pleased patron told the Kansas City Star in 1900, “It is a beautiful place, twelve acres in size, with an electric fountain that throws a big spray of Heim’s beer one hundred feet in the air, upon which are thrown beautifully colored lights and patriotic pictures.“ (No beer was sold when the second Electric Park opened…but you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for that story).
J.J. Heim said the park needed to move south because that’s where the Electric Park patrons had moved by 1906.
“Several circumstances brought about this move on our part. We have grown in the park business from a small beginning until we feel we are operating the highest class amusement resort in the country. At the same time people living out south complain that it is difficult for them to come to Electric park; that they stay at home rather than undertake the journey,” he told The Star.
So Heim bought the grounds of the Kansas City driving club, went to Europe to study the latest and greatest attractions, and opened his new “White City” in a blaze of 100,000 light bulbs in 1907. The park opened to a crowd of 53,000. They entered through a horseshoe-shaped arcade, and before them lay grassy lawns and flowerbeds, roller coasters, and a beach.
Key among attractions was the band shell, where the most popular bands played from the open-sided pavilion, with music wafting out into the park where swimmers frolicked. John Phillip Sousa said the band shell was unequaled in the world.
The highlight of the park, many thought, was the night spectacle of “living statuary” rising from the center of the lake. “Here, beautiful, shapely women on a pedestal emerged every hour in the evening (after 9), as if by magic from the fountain, and held the crowd spellbound with their graceful poses, flooded with changing lights,” Mrs. Sam Ray wrote in the Kansas City Times in 1982.
Much of the park burned in 1925 and was not rebuilt. In 1948 the Village Green Apartment and shopping center were built on the site.
(Tomorrow, find out why there was no Heim beer at the park when it opened in 1907).
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