Our History

West Plaza History

West Plaza is a vibrant neighborhood with a rich history. The neighborhood’s northern boundary, Westport Road, is the eastern end of the Santa Fe Trail, and parts of the original Town of West Port lie within our eastern boundaries. The deciding hours of the Battle of Westport were fought in and around West Plaza, as over 30,000 armed combatants engaged on both sides to determine whether we would continue to hold other human beings in the bondage of slavery, or whether we would yield to the “better angels of our nature,” as Mr. Lincoln put it, recognizing once and for all that “all men are created equal.” More than 3,000 men perished that weekend in October of 1864, as Union Army troops forced General Sterling Price’s ragged confederates back to Arkansas and out of Missouri.
Many of those Union reinforcements came from Fort Leavenworth, marching to battle down the military road, which is now State Line. One of those units was a regiment called the First Kansas Colored Volunteers, made up of escaped slaves, commanded by Lieutenant Patrick Henry Minor. The Battle of Westport was the very first time in U.S. military history that African-American soldiers were commanded in combat by an African-American officer. Those soldiers distinguished themselves that day.

Kansas City flourished in the aftermath of the War because our early business and civic leaders were the first to get a bridge built across the Missouri River. That old cantilevered iron bridge is long gone, but it was an engineering marvel in its day, and it allowed the transcontinental railroad to cross the river here, enabling Kansas City to become the vitally important transportation hub it remains today. The railroads brought cattle from the west back here to be processed in the meatpacking houses (with such familiar names as Armour, Cudahy, and Swift) that filled the West Bottoms. By the 1880s, Kansas City’s meatpacking industry was second only to Chicago’s and drew tens of thousands of immigrant workers to Kansas City. Some of those workers, many of them Swedes, found homes in West Plaza, while Russian, Croatian, and Slavic communities sprang up on Strawberry Hill in Kansas City, Kansas.
Running along both sides of 45th Street east from State Line for three blocks is a small neighborhood business district. Filled mostly with antique shops today, the handsome red brick buildings once housed a grocery, a drug store, a hardware store, a meat market, and at least one “watering hole” for the many workers who rode the electric “streetcars” home from the meat packing plants in Armourdale to their modest homes here in West Plaza. If you look at the asphalt pavement in the intersection of 45th and State Line, you may notice two curved parallel cracks. Buried under the pavement are the steel rails, as this was the point where the streetcar turned around to make its return journey.

West Plaza was strictly blue collar in those days, and most of the homes consisted of three rooms: a small entry “parlor,” a larger central room, and a small bedroom to one side. Dead center in the large room was a wood or coal burning cast-iron stove, which served both to cook the food and to heat the house. Initially, there was no need for basements in these small homes, as they had no furnaces, gas lines, or running water. Instead, the houses were raised a few feet off the ground and rested on brick pilings. Later, as the city brought water lines, gas lines, and sewers into the neighborhood, many of these small homes were raised several feet on hydraulic jacks, to allow a team of laborers to dig out the basements with pick and shovel and construct a stone foundation. This accounts for the low ceiling clearance in many of these older basements.
As West Plaza streets were excavated to bury the sewers and service lines, it was the opportune time to grade them and reduce some of the steeper slopes. Wherever the new street grade was lowered substantially, it became necessary to build a stone retaining wall to shore up the front yard. This explains the stone walls that surround the front yards of many of our homes.

A good number of these original old homes still dot the neighborhood. Although they may have been extensively remodeled and added onto over the years, you can still see the “bones” of the original structure in many of them.

In the years following World War II, supermarkets replaced the neighborhood stores. The meat-packing industry move to Omaha in the 50s and 60s. As more and more families owned their own cars and were less reliant on public transportation, the suburbs of Roeland Park, Prairie Village, and Overland Park blossomed. Fewer folks needed the streetcars, and they made their last run on June 23, 1957. The handsome brick buildings on 45th Street became mostly vacant through the late 60s and early 70s, until Art and June Dimsdle and other enterprising antique dealers brought them back to life by creating the 45th & State Line Antique District.
West Plaza has changed a lot over the years. In the early 70s, it was a sleepy, peaceful neighborhood, populated mostly by elderly residents. Today, many of our historic older homes have been lovingly restored, and new homes have sprung up in their midst. We are on a strong growth curve, with new construction going on all around. Property values have not only stabilized since the economic meltdown of 2008, but West Plaza values are appreciating at a significantly faster rate than the rest of the metro. Thirty years ago, your neighbors might say they lived at 46th and Fairmount, or 44th and Genessee, but nobody said, “I live in West Plaza.” Today, West Plaza is a vibrant neighborhood with a strong sense of community identity, and neighbors proudly say they live in West Plaza. We’re on a roll!
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