Author: James R. Shortridge
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700618821
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
Think of Kansas City and you'll probably think of barbecue, jazz, or the Chiefs. But for James Shortridge, this heartland city is more than the sum of its cultural beacons. In Kansas City and How It Grew, 1822-2011, a prize-winning geographer traces the historical geography of a place that has developed over 200 years from a cowtown on the bend of the Missouri River into a metropolis straddling two states. He explores the changing character of the community and its component neighborhoods, showing how the city has come to look and function the way it does—and how it has come to be perceived the way it has. Proximity to Great Plains ranches and farms encouraged early and sustained success for Kansas City meatpackers and millers, and Shortridge shows how local responses to economic realities have molded the city's urban structure. He explores the parallel processes of suburbanization and the restructuring of older areas, and tells what happens when transportation shifts from rivers to railroads, then to superhighways and international airports. He also reveals what historians have missed by tending to focus attention only on one side or the other of the state boundary. The book is a virtual who's who of KC progress: without selective law enforcement under political boss Thomas Pendergast, Kansas City would not enjoy its legacy of jazz; without the gift of Thomas Swope's namesake park, upscale residential expansion likely would have gone east instead of south; and without J. C. Nichols, Johnson County suburbs would have developed in a less spectacular manner. Its insight into important molders of the city includes nearly forgotten names such as William Dalton, Charles Morse, and Willard Winner, plus important figures from more recent years including Kay Barnes, Charles Garney, and Bonnie Poteet. With more than 50 photos and dozens of maps specially created for this book, Kansas City and How It Grew is unique in treating the entire metropolitan area instead of just one portion. With coverage ranging from ethnic neighborhoods to development strategies, it's an indispensable touchstone for those who want to try to understand Kansas City as both a city and a place.
Author: William S. Worley
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826273092
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
Born and reared on the outskirts of Kansas City in Olathe, Kansas, Jesse Clyde Nichols (1880-1950) was a creative genius in land development. He grew up witnessing the cycles of development and decline characteristics of Kansas City and other American cities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These early memories contributed to his interest in real estate and led him to pursue his goal of neighborhoods in Kansas City, an idea unfamiliar to that city and a rarity across the United States. J.C. Nichols was one of the first developers in the country to lure buyers with a combination of such attractions as paved streets, sidewalks, landscaped areas, and access to water and sewers. He also initiated restrictive covenants and to control the use of structures built in and around his neighborhoods. In addition, Nichols was involved in the placement of services such as schools, churches, and recreation and shopping areas, all of which were essential to the success of his developments. In 1923, Nichols and his company developed the Country Club Plaza, the first of many regional shopping centers built in anticipation of the increased use of automobiles. Known throughout the United States, the Plaza is a lasting tribute to the creativity of J.C. Nichols and his legacy to the United States. With single-mindedness of purpose and unwavering devotion to achievement, J.C. Nichols left an indelible imprint on the Kansas City metropolitan area, and thereby influenced the design and development of major residential and commercial areas throughout the United States as well. Based on extensive research, J.C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City is a valuable study of one of the most influential entrepreneurs in American land development.
Author: Sherry Lamb Schirmer
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826263631
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
A City Divided traces the development of white Kansas Citians’ perceptions of race and examines the ways in which those perceptions shaped both the physical landscape of the city and the manner in which Kansas City was policed and governed. Because of rapid changes in land use and difficulties in suppressing crime and vice in Kansas City, the control of urban spaces became an acute concern, particularly for the white middle class, before race became a problematic issue in Kansas City. As the African American population grew in size and assertiveness, whites increasingly identified blacks with those factors that most deprived a given space of its middle-class character. Consequently, African Americans came to represent the antithesis of middle-class values, and the white middle class established its identity by excluding blacks from the urban spaces it occupied. By 1930, racial discrimination rested firmly on gender and family values as well as class. Inequitable law enforcement in the ghetto increased criminal activity, both real and perceived, within the African American community. White Kansas Citians maintained this system of racial exclusion and denigration in part by “misdirection,” either by denying that exclusion existed or by claiming that segregation was necessary to prevent racial violence. Consequently, African American organizations sought to counter misdirection tactics. The most effective of these efforts followed World War II, when local black activists devised demonstration strategies that targeted misdirection specifically. At the same time, a new perception emerged among white liberals about the role of race in shaping society. Whites in the local civil rights movement acted upon the belief that integration would produce a better society by transforming human character. Successful in laying the foundation for desegregating public accommodations in Kansas City, black and white activists nonetheless failed to dismantle the systems of spatial exclusion and inequitable law enforcement or to eradicate the racial ideologies that underlay those systems. These racial perceptions continue to shape race relations in Kansas City and elsewhere. This study demystifies these perceptions by exploring their historical context. While there have been many studies of the emergence of ghettos in northern and border cities, and others of race, gender, segregation, and the origins of white ideologies, A City Divided is the first to address these topics in the context of a dynamic, urban society in the Midwest.
Author: Andrea L. Broomfield
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442232897
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
While some cities owe their existence to lumber or oil, turpentine or steel, Kansas City owes its existence to food. From its earliest days, Kansas City was in the business of provisioning pioneers and traders headed west, and later with provisioning the nation with meat and wheat. Throughout its history, thousands of Kansas Citians have also made their living providing meals and hospitality to travelers passing through on their way elsewhere, be it by way of a steamboat, Conestoga wagon, train, automobile, or airplane. As Kansas City’s adopted son, Fred Harvey sagely noted, “Travel follows good food routes,” and Kansas City’s identity as a food city is largely based on that fact. Kansas City: A Food Biography explores in fascinating detail how a frontier town on the edge of wilderness grew into a major metropolis, one famous for not only great cuisine but for a crossroads hospitality that continues to define it. Kansas City: A Food Biography also explores how politics, race, culture, gender, immigration, and art have forged the city’s most iconic dishes, from chili and steak to fried chicken and barbecue. In lively detail, Andrea Broomfield brings the Kansas City food scene to life.
Author: Justin Martin
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 0306818817
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 494
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Book Description
This definitive, first full-scale biography of Olmsted--famed designer of New York's Central Park--reveals him also as a brilliant political and social reformer.
Author: John L. Rury
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501748416
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
Creating the Suburban School Advantage explains how American suburban school districts gained a competitive edge over their urban counterparts. John L. Rury provides a national overview of the process, focusing on the period between 1950 and 1980, and presents a detailed study of metropolitan Kansas City, a region representative of trends elsewhere. While big-city districts once were widely seen as superior and attracted families seeking the best educational opportunities for their children, suburban school systems grew rapidly in the post–World War II era as middle-class and more affluent families moved to those communities. As Rury relates, at the same time, economically dislocated African Americans migrated from the South to center-city neighborhoods, testing the capacity of urban institutions. As demographic trends drove this urban-suburban divide, a suburban ethos of localism contributed to the socioeconomic exclusion that became a hallmark of outlying school systems. School districts located wholly or partly within the municipal boundaries of Kansas City, Missouri, make for revealing cases that illuminate our understanding of these national patterns. As Rury demonstrates, struggles to achieve greater educational equity and desegregation in urban centers contributed to so-called white flight and what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan considered to be a crisis of urban education in 1965. Despite the often valiant efforts made to serve inner city children and bolster urban school districts, this exodus, Rury cogently argues, created a new metropolitan educational hierarchy—a mirror image of the urban-centric model that had prevailed before World War II. The stubborn perception that suburban schools are superior, based on test scores and budgets, has persisted into the twenty-first century and instantiates today's metropolitan landscape of social, economic, and educational inequality.
Author: Margie Carr
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700634673
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
A few blocks southeast of the famed intersection of 18th and Vine in Kansas City, Missouri, just a stone’s throw from Charlie Parker’s old stomping grounds and the current home of the vaulted American Jazz Museum and Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, sits Montgall Avenue. This single block was home to some of the most important and influential leaders the city has ever known. Margie Carr’s Kansas City’s Montgall Avenue: Black Leaders and the Street They Called Home is the extraordinary, century-old history of one city block whose residents shaped the changing status of Black people in Kansas City and built the social and economic institutions that supported the city’s Black community during the first half of the twentieth century. The community included, among others, Chester Franklin, founder of the city’s Black newspaper, The Call; Lucile Bluford, a University of Kansas alumna who worked at The Call for sixty-nine years; and Dr. John Edward Perry, founder of Wheatley-Provident Hospital, Kansas City’s first hospital for Black people. The principal and four teachers from Lincoln High School, Kanas City’s only high school for African American students, also lived on the block. While introducing the reader to the remarkable individuals who lived on Montgall Avenue, Carr also uses this neighborhood as a microcosm of the changing nature of discrimination in twentieth-century America. The city’s white leadership had little interest in supporting the Black community and instead used its resources to separate and isolate them. The state of Missouri enforced segregation statues until the 1960s and the federal government created housing policies that erased any assets Black homeowners accumulated, robbing them of their ability to transfer that wealth to the next generation. Today, the 2400 block of Montgall Avenue is situated in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Kansas City. The attitudes and policies that contributed to the neighborhood’s changing environment paint a more complete—and disturbing—picture of the role that race continues to play in America’s story.
Author: Pete Dulin
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1439658250
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 149
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Book Description
Westbound immigrants, pioneers and entrepreneurs alike arrived in Kansas City with a thirst for progress and beer. Breweries both small and mighty seized opportunity in a climate of ceaseless social change and fierce regional competition. Muehlebach Brewing Company commanded the market, operating in Kansas City for more than eighty years. Built in 1902, the iconic brick warehouse of Imperial Brewing still stands today. Prohibition made times tough for brewers and citizens in the Paris of the Plains, but political "Boss" Tom Pendergast kept the taps running. In 1989, Boulevard Brewing kicked off the local craft beer renaissance, and a bevy of breweries soon formed a flourishing community. Food and beer writer Pete Dulin explores Kansas City's hop-infused history and more than sixty breweries from the frontier era to the twenty-first century.
Author: R. Eli Paul
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496233131
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 371
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Book Description
Skywalks is the story of the 1981 Hyatt Regency Kansas City hotel disaster that killed 114 people, as told through the actions of Kansas City attorney Robert Gordon.
Author: James C. O'Connell
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262018756
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 341
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Book Description
The evolution of the Boston metropolitan area, from country villages and streetcar suburbs to exurban sprawl and “smart growth.” Boston's metropolitan landscape has been two hundred years in the making. From its proto-suburban village centers of 1800 to its far-flung, automobile-centric exurbs of today, Boston has been a national pacesetter for suburbanization. In The Hub's Metropolis, James O'Connell charts the evolution of Boston's suburban development. The city of Boston is compact and consolidated—famously, “the Hub.” Greater Boston, however, stretches over 1,736 square miles and ranks as the world's sixth largest metropolitan area. Boston suburbs began to develop after 1820, when wealthy city dwellers built country estates that were just a short carriage ride away from their homes in the city. Then, as transportation became more efficient and affordable, the map of the suburbs expanded. The Metropolitan Park Commission's park-and-parkway system, developed in the 1890s, created a template for suburbanization that represents the country's first example of regional planning. O'Connell identifies nine layers of Boston's suburban development, each of which has left its imprint on the landscape: traditional villages; country retreats; railroad suburbs; streetcar suburbs (the first electric streetcar boulevard, Beacon Street in Brookline, was designed by Frederic Law Olmsted); parkway suburbs, which emphasized public greenspace but also encouraged commuting by automobile; mill towns, with housing for workers; upscale and middle-class suburbs accessible by outer-belt highways like Route 128; exurban, McMansion-dotted sprawl; and smart growth. Still a pacesetter, Greater Boston has pioneered antisprawl initiatives that encourage compact, mixed-use development in existing neighborhoods near railroad and transit stations. O'Connell reminds us that these nine layers of suburban infrastructure are still woven into the fabric of the metropolis. Each chapter suggests sites to visit, from Waltham country estates to Cambridge triple-deckers.
