Central Library

This is the first proposed master plan for residential areas in Kansas City generated in 1946. The gridded map indicates needed redevelopment, rehabilitation, conservation, and protection along with proposed neighborhood and community boundaries. Each element is color or pattern coordinated and corresponds to a legend...

This map lays out the ninth Proposed Master Plan of the Downtown Area and was generated in 1946. The plan's primary feature is the expressway loop surrounding the gridded area. Existing and proposed parking arrangements, public spaces, street improvements, freeways, and tunnels are indicated in the legend with correspo...

This image documents the immensity of debris left by the Great Flood of 1951. The vantage point appears to come from a western area looking eastward toward the West Bottoms as the original John Deere building located at 13th and Hickory Street can vaguely be seen in the distance. Taking up roughly three-quarters of the...

Kansas City's Union Station was built in 1914 as a product of the City Beautiful movement, an urban planning initiative in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to introduce grandeur to cityscapes. The new structure would replace the original Union Depot in the West Bottoms and be moved out of the...

This enlarged map of Kansas City with a scale of 1:500,000 (1 centimeter to 5 kilometers) including a regional breadth of about 150 miles in any direction. The map is in Russian and focuses on infrastructural features in the region including road and railways, oil, gas, and airfields, gas and power lines, and dams and...

George Lawrence was a commercial photographer that invented the "captive airship" a panoramic camera suspended in air by seventeen Conyne kites that enabled him to take stunning aerial panoramic photographs. Lawrence took pictures of cities across the United States and captured this one of Kansas City in 1907 from one...

This pen and ink caricature features Charles Clemens Orthwein, a St. Louis native that dominated the Midwest grain export industry in the early 20th century. The satirical didactic that accompanies this illustration mentions Orthwein to have occupied "about as many positions of trust as any man in the middle West" refe...

Arthur E. Stilwell was a prominent real estate and railroad developer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. With an understanding that railroads increased surrounding property values, Stilwell moved to Kansas City in 1887 to establish a real estate company in tandem with the southbound Pittsburg & Gulf railway. I...

Dancer and choreographer Theodore Kosloff (1882-1956) trained from a young age at the Imperial School of Dance in Moscow. His fame came when he began dancing in England and France before moving on to the United States. There, he started a nationally renowned school of dance in Los Angeles and performed in several Cecil...

Photographed by Orval Hixon in a period of America's history when cultural appropriation was not a concern, this portrait of Ruth St. Denis in costume certainly presents opportunities for deeper conversations around unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, and ideas of one people or society b...