Local History

As Kansas City International Airport breaks ground on a new terminal on March 25, 2019,  the Library's Missouri Valley Special Collections provides a window seat to the city's aviation past.  

Street signs along Kansas City's Paseo Boulevard began coming down in late February, replaced with new ones proclaiming the street’s new name: Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Following a long period of local debate, a mayoral task force, and a measure passed by the city council in Oc...

Each year, the Library partners with the Local Investment Commission (LINC) and the Black Archives of Mid-America to produce a series of Black History Month materials celebrating the legacies and accomplishments of notable African-Americans from the Kansas City area. T...

The excitement at Arrowhead Stadium during the divisional playoff game against the Indianapolis Colts got Tom Solon to wondering how the stadium got its name. “I’ve always thought it was an awesome name for a stadium,” Solon writes to KCQ, a recurring feature in which The Kansas City Sta...

UPDATED Question: What happened to all the Christmas decorations that used to be downtown, particularly the crowns strung across the streets with garland? In our first response to this question, I reported that the Merchants Association began displaying crowns at busy downtown intersections in 19...

Question: What happened to all the Christmas decorations that used to be downtown, particularly the crowns strung across the streets with garland? A timely question as we enter holiday light season in the Kansas City area. Short of digging through the attic at City Hall, my first thought was to cons...

The KCTV broadcast tower at 31st Street and Grand Avenue once served as a 1,042-foot tall beacon at night, visible for miles around with more than 1,300 white lights tracing its four legs. But the tower has been unlit for more than a decade. Kansas City native Todd Hembree wonders why — and if — the lights will ev...

The Library is currently migrating its large collection of digital historic images to a new software platform. An unfortunate consequence of our data migration is that we need to take the entire collection offline for about two months while the work is completed.

It sure seems like Kansas City ought to be named Missouri City, doesn’t it? Although, our neighbors to the north in Clay County where the actual Missouri City is located might have something to say about that. To better understand why Kansas City was given its name, we must first gain an understanding of why a city was...