DT Archive: KC Street Names

By request, we return once again to the dusty, shallow confines of the Daytripper archives. The following column demonstrates that you can indeed spend four-plus hours poking around aimlessly in the library's local history collection and still have something to show for it. Photo at right: Petticoat Lane circa 1990 (by LI).

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It's all in a name (or was)
Kansas City View - November 1990

A breeze of controversy buffeted Kansas City in 1966 when the City Council announced its intention to officially rename the section of 11th Street between Main and Grand Petticoat Lane. All the change amounted to was making a customary title legal. Nevertheless, Hartzfeld's, a local clothier who operated on the street in question, objected. Hartzfeld's made a line of clothing called Petticoat Lane and claimed that its trademark rights would be diluted.

The name change went through, but as years passed and shoppers went elsewhere, the two blocks eventually went back to plain old 11th Street. These days, Petticoat lane, like Hartzfeld's, exists only in Kansas City's memory. Not a comforting thought since Kansas City has the collective memory of a flea.

Memory, though, is an odd thing. Take for example the 1988 controversy over naming a section of Maple Street in Independence Higashimurayama Avenue. Higashimurayama, a suburb of Tokyo, is Independence's sister city in Japan. The good folks of Higashimurayama had already renamed a major street in their town Truman Boulevard as part of the tenth anniversary of the sisterhood and the good folks in Independence were trying to do their part.

A group of about 50 veterans showed up at a council meeting to protest the change and, to read the Times account of it (May 3, 1988), the debate centered on whether Harry Truman was rolling over in his grave for or against the change.

"I believe Harry Truman would turn over in his grave if he knew something like this was going on behind his back," said former VFW Post 1000 Commander Buck Stodtman, mixing a sweet metaphor against the change.

The Times apparently couldn't reach the former president for comment. Suffice it to say, the forces of love and world harmony won out over xenophobia, and Higashimurayama is still in the family.

Most of the street name changes in Kansas City's history have been for the benefit of mail carriers and street car conductors. East-west streets were changed to numbers in 1869, which resulted in the loss of many feminine street names: Emily (6th street), Gertrude (17th), Catherine (18th), Amelia (l9th) and Adeline (20th), among others, were banished in one fell bureaucratic swoop, their long hair whipping in the wind.

In 1910, the Post Office, in a fit of excessive practicality, asked that all street names in Kansas City be changed to numbers. City Hall ignored the Post Office until the issue went away.

As the city continued to grow through annexation and other kinds of expansion, street names had to be changed. Many streets in town have had several names. 11th Street, for instance, was first called Chestnut east of Main. West of Main, it was Chouteau. Main Street used to be Eleanore. Grand used to be Market Street. Walnut Street, named for a walnut grove which stood at its north end, has always been Walnut.

A re-survey in 1931 eliminated many duplications in Street names, but was only a warm-up for the nomenclatural lalapolooza the city pulled of in 1947. As part of the Ten Year plan, 149 street names were changed overnight. City Hall explained that this was being done to avoid confusion.

Many streets which had names before became numbered terraces. Hence such names as Loma Linda Road, Bel Airy Place, Reservoir Place and Steptoe Street were gone, taking their music and rhythm with them.

The City Planning Department's escapades continued north of the river in the 1950s, but not without incident. The same system was adopted as south of the river: east-west streets numbered, with eight streets to a mile. A problem cropped up in 1951 when a two-block stretch of pavement was named Crane street because it fell between 45th Terrace and 46th Street. L.D. Klein, who lived at 608 Crane, took exception. The name didn't mean a thing to him. As it turns out, it didn't mean much to anyone else.

As an unnamed Kansas City Star reporter explained (Feb. 18, l95l): "Crane is a small town in Stone County down on the Arkansas line. The city employee that chose the name never lived there, has no friends or relatives there and no love for the place. It was just a short name so he put it on the city map."

So what's in a name? Plenty, if it's where you live.

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Postscript: A companion to this column dealt with Petticoat Lane more extensively and elicited my only written response. I quoted from local history writer Mrs. Sam Ray, who wrote for the Star for many years, and a week or so later got a letter from some Poindexter there asking me not to quote from the late Mrs. Ray in the future, as her heirs found some of the advertising in the View unseemly. Massage parlor ads positively give some folks the vapors.

Concerted efforts on my part to find something else of Mrs. R's to incorporate ended in sad defeat.

DT Archive: A Trolley Barn Requiem

Time for another trip to the Daytripper Archive. This time the sad tale of the Kansas City Trolley Barn neighborhood. Never heard of it? Read on...

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A Trolley Barn Requiem
(originally published in the KC View January 11, 1991)

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving I was walking from the Plaza library to the View's offices at 48th and Troost. I passed the Theis Fountain, it's base dry and unseemly for the winter. My shoes picked up clods of mud from the field east of Theis Park, where UMKC students play flag football. After I crossed Rockhill Road and started down 48th Street, I began to stomp and stagger and drag my foot sideways through the grass to get the stuff off. There, it occurred to me that I had crossed over the western boundary of the Trolley Barn neighborhood. But boundaries are irrelevant in a neighborhood without houses.

In the distance, I saw a man weeping a metal detector over the torn up ground on the west side of Campbell Street, ground that used to be someone's front yard. I went over to talk with him.

He looked a little nervous as I approached. Nabokov wrote that "in an American suburban street a lone pedestrian is more conspicuous than a lone motorist." And in a vacant, decimated inner city neighborhood, you could probably add "threatening" to conspicuous.

I hailed him a half block off and smiled, thinking that might put him at ease.

"Finding anything?" I asked when I got close enough to be heard without shouting. .

"Nah," he said, taking off his earphones, "a couple pennies."

He glanced around, probably looking for something to hit me with if he needed to. Telling him I was a writer on my way to the office seemed to calm him a little but not much. I tried a little cajoling which I'm not very good at. He told me reluctantly that he was from Illinois that he was visiting relatives of his wife's whom he'd met while he was attending Central Technological Institute here in the early 1950s.

"I loved Kansas City then," he said after a pause. His sudden sad wistfulness surprised me. "I thought I was the greatest place. But it's not much of a city anymore.

I said that it certainly was a shame the city couldn't seem to maintain the neighborhoods in the older parts of town. Like the one we were standing in.

"I'm not racist or anything," he said, his voice dropping although we were the only two people in sight, "but the blacks have ruined that part of town. He gestured generally to the east. He told me about driving down the Paseo back then and how beautiful it was.

"The Paseo looks like the London Blitz now," he said.

When I suggested that there might be other culpable parties besides African-Americans, he said that he had to get back to his in-laws' place. He said he'd told them he'd be right back and that was an hour ago. I asked for his name as he headed for his car, in case I decided to write about the neighborhood, but he said he'd rather not give it. I wished him a good day and turned my face toward Troost.

It occurred a to me, facing that direction, that the African-American community is in no way responsible for the most prominent Blitz-esque remnant on the east side: Paseo High. And neither is it responsible for the wreck of the Trolley Barn neighborhood.

[Note: The original Missouri-limestone Paseo High School (picture right from paseo52.com)was torn down and replaced in the 1990s. At the time this piece was written, it was still a hollow shell awaiting the wrecking ball.]

The Trolley Barn neighborhood got its name from the Kansas City streetcar barn (formerly at 48th and Harrison) where the trolley cars were parked at night. Many streetcar employees had homes in the neighborhood, which remained placidly upper-middle class until the streetcars stopped running in 1957.

This wasn't a fatal blow to the neighborhood. Some residents moved out but some remained to mix with the new, younger neighbors who moved in. University employees moved there throughout the 1960s, as did artists and writers. Two literary magazines -- The Harrison Street Review and Chouteau Review began publishing in the neighborhood in the 70s.

The fatal blow came with the Brush Creek flood of September 12, 1977. Many homes were damaged and while private homeowners began to make repairs, houses owned by the University of Kansas City Trustees fell into disrepair less than a month after the flood, tenants of the trustees were given eviction notices and told vacate by the end of the year.

Protests were made, suits were filed and a few houses were spared but the battle was lost. The Trustees wanted the land. In 1978, the Trolley Barn, a red brick building built in 1910, came under the wrecking ball before it could be declared a historic site. There is a large parking lot in its place now. As surrounding houses in the neighborhood were bulldozed, what do you suppose happened to property values?

Watching this neighborhood die for several years was like watching an elderly neighbor on the decline. The neighborhood was already wizened when I first encountered it, but there still seemed to be signs of normal life in its buildings, businesses and people. There was Joe's Fantasy Island Barber Shop, the fabled Kaye's Rockhill Bar, and even a masque for Islamic students at UMKC. The bulldozers blade has removed them all.

The long awaited, much touted, highly contested University Park research development is on its way. Whether we'll be all that thrilled when it arrives is a story for another day. To borrow the terminology of the Star's real estate writer, the first building should be "coming out of the ground" this year.

For now, the neighborhood is a grid of empty streets and sidewalks, sparsely populated by trees, which actually do come out of the ground. On their own, the trees would stay, putting out leaves every spring, dropping them in the fall, all the while changing carbon dioxide into oxygen. But the bulldozers will find them, and then the neighborhood will really be dead.

Postscript - 2007
Looking back, things haven't turned out so badly for the Trolley Barn Neighborhood. Yes, the houses are all gone and so are the bars. But the area now houses the headquarters of the Kauffman Foundation and the Anita B. Gorman Conservation Discovery Center, an urban conservation campus run by the Missouri Department of Conservation and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. And a fair chunk of it is still a large open field, frequented by geese, which some people detest. I pass it everyday going back and forth to work.

The aforementioned University Park died a sputtering death overseen by keen lawyers about nine months after I wrote this column. More on that next time.