Looking for answers to Kansas City’s nagging questions rattling around our brains

One of the joys — and frustrations — of living in a major American city is that we never know everything about it. Knowledge holes linger no matter how many times we drive the streets or use the civic furniture. We’re going to try to fill in those gaps.

In 2012, we answered several questions in our introductory “Answering Machine.” So now we know why Missouri was called “the Puke State”; how much it costs to operate the fountains every year; and what Western Auto was before it was a fixture of KC’s skyline. Our second “Answering Machine” issue is here to provide more KC trivia answers. Mountains on the Kansas flag? A kangaroo for a mascot? (Really, UMKC?) And what exactly was Electric Park? As we keep finding out, there’s always more to learn no matter how well we think we know our city.

Why are there mountains in the Kansas state seal?

Sure, Kansas has one famous hill: Mount Oread, home to the University of Kansas. But three geographers made international news in 2003 when they published a study saying the Sunflower State (or, “that place you have to drive through on your way to Denver”) is flatter than a pancake. How flat is it? If 1.0 represents perfect flatness, Kansas is .997, edging flapjacks that register a .957 flatness. So why do mountains make a cameo in the background of the state’s seal along with a buffalo and a farmer? The reason likely dates back to the original boundaries of the Kansas Territory, which stretched deep into what is now Colorado and included the Rocky Mountains. The state’s official description of the seal hedges a bit: “Perhaps the mountain-like hills on the seal were inspired by the Rocky Mountains.” Science doesn’t lie; the state is flat. So we’re inclined to believe this theory.

Why are flags of other countries on lampposts along Grand downtown?

Spend enough time downtown, and there’s a decent chance you’ll become well-versed in the national flags of North and South America. You might be able to instantly recognize the 16-armed sun in the center of the Argentinian flag, or the two stars representing the two islands of St. Kitts and Nevis on that federation’s red, black and green flag. But why is one of our downtown arteries a tribute to the Americas’ other 34 nations? They represent the voting members of the Organization of American States, a regional solidarity group formed in the 1940s. Originally, the OAS’s purpose was to support the countries’ economic interests. In 2008, the Pan American Association of Kansas City, a group that promotes Kansas City to other parts of the Americas and educates Kansas City about Central and South American nations, convinced the City Council to shell out $45,000 for the flags. They run between Second and 28th streets, and the Downtown Council is responsible for maintaining them.

Seriously, how did UMKC end up with a kangaroo mascot?

University athletic programs around the country have a long history of strange and quirky mascots. Syracuse University’s is a big anthropomorphic orange named Otto. Stanford has a friggin’ tree (although, technically, it’s unofficial) running around the sidelines at games. And the University of Missouri–Kansas City has … a kangaroo. According to UMKC’s athletics department, the marsupial became a symbol of UMKC in 1936, when the school was called Kansas City University. KCU didn’t even have sports teams at the time, but editors of the student newspaper decided that the university’s debate team needed a mascot. Around the same time, the Kansas City Zoo bought two baby kangaroos, which garnered a lot of local press. Then, in 1937, a student political party used a logo with a kangaroo named Kasey, and Walt Disney later drew Kasey for a university comedy magazine called The Kangaroo (including a cover illustration with Mickey Mouse). Years later, The Kangaroo became the school’s yearbook, and the animal became a permanent part of KCU’s culture. The current, modern-looking and aggressive logos were adopted in 2004. How rare are the schools using kangaroos as mascots? According to the UMKC athletics department, only two other universities — State University of New York at Canton and Austin College in Sherman, Texas — call themselves the Kangaroos.

Why isn’t Kansas City the county seat of Jackson County?

It seems counterintuitive that Jackson County’s biggest city isn’t the county seat. But this one is pretty simple. Independence was founded before Kansas City and was the most important city in Jackson County in the county’s early days. Independence, established in 1827, was the launching point for the Oregon, Santa Fe and California trails. Kansas City wasn’t founded until 1838. Fun fact about the county seat: A tiny part of it is in Cass County. What a world!

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In neighborhoods around Kansas City, there seems to be a tattoo parlor on nearly every other corner. Does the city have a higher than normal number of ink shops?

If you search for “tattoo parlors in Kansas City” on Yelp — this century’s semi-trustworthy source for all service-industry info — more than 20 results show up. Some are in the burbs, but most are within city limits. Is that an abnormal amount? An unscientific study done by totalbeauty.com found that Kansas City is into ink, with the ninth-most tattoo businesses per capita and six tattooists for every 100,000 residents.

Mike Martin, president of the Kansas City–based Alliance of Professional Tattooists, knows that we are fond of tats around here, but there aren’t any statistics about the industry. “It would be impossible to keep track,” he says. But Kansas Citians wouldn’t be wrong to wonder if parlors are proliferating locally. “It’s growing everywhere,” he says.

What was Electric Park?

Long before Kansas Citians made annual pilgrimages to Worlds of Fun, there was Electric Park. The amusement park opened in 1907 at 47th Street and the Paseo (after moving from an original location in the East Bottoms, where it opened in 1899). Built by Joseph Heim, then president of Heim Brewery, the park marketed itself as Kansas City’s Coney Island and was known for lighting displays that were reported to contain 100,000 light bulbs. The park featured a lagoon, swimming pools, a flume ride, a train running around the perimeter, and an arcade. It also hosted concerts. According to the book Walt Disney’s Missouri, Walt Disney visited the park as a child and later incorporated several of these amenities into his theme parks. The book notes that one of Electric Park’s most popular shows was called the Living Sanctuary: “Every hour after 9 p.m., young women appeared on a platform rising out of a fountain, posing while being washed in multi-colored lights.” The park burned to the ground in 1925 and wasn’t rebuilt.

What’s up with the swastikas in the tiles on the Plaza?

In 1997, legendary advice columnist Anne Landers vowed to never answer another question about how toilet-paper rolls should hang — over or under — on the wall. But, in 2002, in her last column, she reminded readers that civilized humans put it over. In Kansas City, ugh, our epic TP question is whether Nazi propaganda appears on walls in our beloved Country Club Plaza. We’ve addressed this issue in the past, and we’re tired of hearing about it. Yes, Plaza designer J.C. Nichols was a baldheaded, bespectacled, avowed anti-Semite. Really. Don’t let Kansas City revisionist history cloud your view. J.C. Nichols designed neighborhoods, including those around the Plaza, that were famous for banning Jews and African-Americans from buying homes. It took a U.S. Supreme Court ruling to outlaw Nichols’ famed real-estate covenants. (Shelley v. Kraemer. Look it up.) Like Landers, we’re vowing that this is the last time we’re spilling ink on the so-called Plaza swastikas. Once and for all: There are no Nazi-inspired swastikas on the Plaza. People often point to tiles in front of the district’s P.F. Chang’s as proof that Nichols’ hate was built into the Plaza infrastructure. It’s not. In 2007, we reported correctly and definitively that the design of the swastika-like tiles on the Plaza is steeped in Southwest history. Historians say the logo originated in India and Hinduism thousands of years ago, and not with Nazis. Albuquerque, New Mexico, is so sick of answering questions about the swastikas (identical to those on the Plaza) appearing around that city that it has dedicated a Web page to explain the symbol’s 6,000-year history. Please, Pitch readers, drop this one. We beg you. Nichols hated Jews, but the Plaza and P.F. Chang’s do not.

P.S. Hang TP over, not under.

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Is it true that a phone booth is the only commercial enterprise in Mission Hills, Kansas?

Just for the pure hilarious absurdity of this question, we wish it were true. Like, so, so bad. If we could have verified this, we would have been just tickled that this tony, gilded suburb was devoid of businesses. It’s close to true, though. A couple of outposts of commerce are in this posh, 2-square-mile community designed by J.C. Nichols. Specifically, there are Indian Hills Country Club and Kansas City Country Club. Otherwise, we found three home-based businesses. The Northeast Johnson County Chamber of Commerce, which includes Mission Hills in its coverage area, lists only two members within the city: the city offices and state Rep. Barbara Bollier. So it’s more than a phone booth but just barely.

Who are these people we’ve named so many of our streets — and short parts of streets — after?

In Kansas City, we have named streets after people whom most residents know nothing about. Or, at least, stretches of streets. Who the hell are these people? A few examples:

Troost

The avenue long considered to be Kansas City’s racial dividing line is named for Dutchman Benoist Troost. (Don’t ask us how to pronounce Benoist, please. We couldn’t find an answer to that question.) Troost (1786-1859) lived a pretty cool life. He was born in Bois-le-Duc, a walled city in the Duchy of Brabant in the Netherlands. He did a spell of medical stuff with Napoleon’s army, then moved to Kansas City in its formative years, becoming an important founding-father type. Find his grave at Mount St. Mary Cemetery and his oil-on-canvas portrait by George Caleb Bingham at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Worth the trip.

Strang Line Road

Strang Line Road was named after railroad magnate William B. Strang Jr., one of Overland Park’s most important founders. Strang came to town after Mission and Prairie Village had been founded, and he laid the groundwork for Overland Park with subdivisions in 1905. Strang wanted rail transit between the burgeoning outlying towns and subdivisions and the big city. His rail enterprise was called the Strang Line. It disappeared in 1940, according to historical groups.

Wornall

This long, commercially vibrant stretch of road is named for John Wornall, who had a hell of a successful farm near Westport. Wornall’s family moved to the Kansas City area from Kentucky in the 1820s. The John Wornall House is a privately maintained historic site and is known for being haunted by the ghosts of Civil War soldiers. It’s so famous that it has been on TV! Speaking of the Civil War, Wornall was a slaveholder and was known in Jackson County for being a founding member of the pro-slavery, pro-Confederacy Westport Minute Men. Dude did not like African-Americans or their rights.

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For the love of God, why are Missouri courts closed May 8?

Because Missourians are sappy sentimentalists. In the Show-Me State, May 8 is Truman Day, a state holiday in honor of former President Harry S. Truman’s birthday. Yes, just because the 33rd U.S. president was born here, all state and county business must grind to a halt on his birthday — or the closest business day if Truman Day lands on a weekend — even though Truman has been dead 42 years. And it’s a paid holiday for the state’s roughly 60,000 employees. Gov. Jay Nixon has been a vocal opponent of the silly holiday, and in 2010, the General Assembly considered repealing it but failed to do so. That year, the state spent $1.5 million in overtime for essential state services that need to be staffed during holidays. In other words: Truman defeats logic!

Are there any other state-holiday quirks?

Yep! Missouri (along with Connecticut and Illinois) celebrates Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays separately, rather than just Presidents Day like most self-respecting states. Yes, Missourians just love celebrating presidential holidays by not working.

What’s the story with the gigantic Hereford steer overlooking Interstate 35 near downtown?

It’s impossible to miss the giant brown-and-white steer gazing over Interstate 35 toward the city’s middling skyline. It’s the kind of kitschy, weirdo touch that reminds us why we love Kansas City. Alternatively, it’s a massive, illuminated testament to this burg’s cowtown past. We looked into the origins of the 19-foot-long steer, and it was worth the effort, gang! The faux beast used to be part of the American Hereford Association’s headquarters in Quality Hill. The Kansas City Parks and Recreation department says President Dwight Eisenhower attended the dedication of the headquarters and the unveiling of the huge bovine in 1953. But when HNTB Architects moved into the building in 1997, the firm decided that a 5,500-pound fiberglass behemoth (roughly twice the weight of a real Hereford bull) didn’t fit its décor. In 2002, HNTB handed the statue over to the city, and it was placed in Mulkey Square Park at 13th Street and Summit, where the city’s noble spirit animal now watches over us as we moove around town.

Where did runaway slaves slip out of Missouri and into free-state Kansas?

During Missouri’s period as a slave state, many in servitude fled to Kansas. Most of those slaves crossed at the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas rivers to settlements like Quindaro, near the riverbanks. To this day, Kansans like to slap themselves on the back for being on the right side of history in the 1800s. Slavery and Civil War history even permeate the MU-KU rivalry. But Kansans really don’t have much of a reason to feel so high and mighty. The Kansas Historical Foundation says most white Kansans opposed slavery out of economic concern rather than moral or religious reasons. In an article on the foundation’s website, it explains that white Kansans “did not want to compete with slaveholders for land, and feared slavery would drive down wages for everyone. Some even favored excluding Blacks from the territory entirely.” Keep that factoid in your back pocket the next time your Kansan friends start ranting about being a free state.

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What is the “quality” in Quality Hill?

This downtown neighborhood is the longest continuously occupied part of the metro. For most of Kansas City’s early days, Quality Hill was considered the swankiest part of town, with mansion-lined streets and upscale businesses. The story goes that the area was dubbed “Quality Hill” in the 1880s when developer Kersey Coates platted subdivisions in the area that became popular with wealthy people moving to town from the East. The neighborhood was a favorite of political boss Tom Pendergast, who placed a statue of his brother Jim in Case Park. It was also relatively diverse for the time, and the YMCA on Washington Street used to be a Jewish gentlemen’s club called the Progress Club. Quality Hill took a serious dive in the 1960s, and homeowners fled for trendy neighborhoods on the rise, like the Country Club Plaza. The neighborhood became lousy with abandoned mansions, burned-out structures and flophouses. That version of Quality Hill would be unrecognizable to new transplants to the city. In the late 1980s and early aughts, developers revitalized the area with apartments and condos built out of the neighborhood’s iconic reddish brick.

The worst fire in Kansas City history was … ?

In terms of deaths, the worst was the burning of the Coates House Hotel in Quality Hill on January 28, 1978. Over the course of a couple of decades, the hotel had shifted from one of the city’s most luxurious places to stay — it hosted a few presidents, according to some stories — to a flophouse with about 140 residents, most of whom paid cheap weekly rent. Twenty people died in the blaze that raged from 4 to 8 a.m. It was 5 degrees the morning of the fire, and fire-department ladder trucks froze while being raised. According to an Associated Press news story from that day: “At least four of the victims plunged to their deaths from upper stories of the six-floor building to the pavement below.” One witness of the fire told the AP, “People were hanging out the windows, screaming for help.” Now there are offices on the site of the hotel at 1005 Broadway.