The 1970s: Building Kansas City

PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 2024

By late 1974, as the first edition of Outlook magazine was coming together, one could forgive the construction, development and civic players in the region if they paused to take their collective breath.

After all, over a span of the previous 36 months, the city had opened its new international airport, teed up the NFL at Arrowhead Stadium and Major League Baseball at Royals Stadium, unveiled a game-changing retail and hospitality venue in Crown Center, and took the wrappings off a new multipurpose arena in the West Bottoms.

But pause for breath? That wasn’t in the cards. 

Nearly 50 years later, key parts of the city’s skyline are filled by construction that took place in the latter half of the 1970s. That included soon-to-be iconic business addresses like City Center Square in 1977 (we know it today under the Lightwell Building rebrand) a 30-story tower at 11th and Main. To the southeast came 2435 Grand Boulevard, a 28-story tower that continues to stand strong in the commercial real estate space. 

On the other side of the emerging Crown Center complex, the San Francisco Tower was completed in 1976, infusing Downtown with 315 residential units in a 32-story tower. Another addition from that era was the Wallstreet Tower, formerly the Mercantile Bank and Trust Building at 11th and Walnut, which opened in 1974. That 23-story structure has since taken on new life after conversion from office space to residential condos.

Things were moving in the suburbs, as well. The region’s enduring monuments to the covered shopping center trend of that era both opened in 1974—Oak Park Mall in Overland Park on the Kansas side and its opposite number east of the state line, Independence Center. It hasn’t been easy, but both have defied consumer shopping trends and the onslaught of online retail sales. Meanwhile, notable venues like Metcalf South, Blue Ridge Mall, Indian Springs, Bannister Mall, Mission Center Mall, and Metro North Mall have all surrendered to the wrecking ball and redevelopment.

On the office scene, 1975 was a year of profound change. The opening of Corporate Woods Office Park in Overland Park was a major development in the evolution of Kansas City from an employment dynamic of commuting from the suburbs to Downtown. To put that sprawling development of today into a 50-year-old context, consider that when construction started there, the pavement on Antioch Road ended at 103rd Street—it was a dirt road going south from there. College Boulevard wasn’t much of an upgrade; much of it was still a gravel road in that era. That intersection today handles more than 16,000 vehicles a day.

An Expanding Metro

Much of the asphalt loop that encircles us, Interstate 435, came online in the mid-1970s, providing the spark for a development explosion—retail, office, and residential—that continues to reverberate today. 

It wasn’t just a feat of engineering and construction: It literally changed the face of this region, and when the biggest pieces were finally in place, Kansas City was able to boast having  more freeway lane miles per capita than any other major U.S. metropolitan area.

The impact of that unparalleled access can’t be overstated, and the figures jump out at anyone doing a Then-and-Now comparison. Start with the growth of population nodes around the region:

• Johnson County on the Kansas side stood at a respectable 232,000 in 1974. But things were just warming up. It tacked on another 32,000 by the end of the decade, on its way to a massive 613,219 today. Within that came various cells that have since fused into a sea of suburbia: Overland Park went from 82,365 to nearly 200,000 today, while Olathe, the county seat, exploded from roughly 28,000 to more than 141,000 today. They were not isolated examples: Shawnee, Lenexa, and Leawood have all tacked on tens of thousands of new residents each during the county’s rapid expansion.

• Suburban Jackson County. Two pillars of suburban growth, Lee’s Summit, and Blue Springs, have been magnets for growth—often at the expense of neighboring Kansas City proper. Lee’s Summit was the clear winner, going from about 22,000 in population in the mid-‘70s to more than 102,000 today. Just to its north, Blue Springs has gone from a comparatively sleepy 7,000 or so to just shy of 60,000 today.

• Northland. Clay County, across the Missouri River from Downtown, has roughly doubled its population since the mid-‘70s, from 132,000 to 256,000, while neighboring Platte County, fueled by developmental growth after it won the international airport lottery a decade earlier, has gone from less than 40,000 to nearly 109,000.   

• Wyandotte County. KCMO’s counterpart city, KCK, has had its own share of urban pathologies over the decades, and that contributed significantly to a decline that began in the mid-‘70s until its economic fortunes reversed around the turn of the century with significant development in the western part of the county. It’s the only metro area county to see population fall since the ‘70s, from a peak of about 168,000 in the early part of that decade, bottoming out at 145,000 in 2010 before recovering to 156,600 most recently.

Overall, the metro area’s population has more than doubled over the past 50 years to 2.2 million. 

And our cultural embrace of entrepreneurship inspires three Arthur Andersen executives to strike out on their own with a health-care informatics enterprise they could come to call Cerner Corp.—destined to become both the region’s biggest private-sector employer over the next four decades, then a fading memory just a few years later after it was sold to Oracle Corp.

Dealing with Disaster

Calamities—natural and man-made—also made headlines during the latter half of the decade. One that spoke volumes about the darker side of business in Kansas City—illicit activity, anyway—came on May 27, 1977. In the early morning hours, a massive explosion rocked what was then known as the River Quay area, known these days as River Market. Poor Freddy’s and Pat O’Brien’s, two bars whose success was cutting into opportunities for a reputed crime family, vanished in a massive roar, but remarkably, no one was killed. No one that authorities knew of, anyway.

The blast, investigators said, was produced with 10 times the amount of explosives needed to do the job. If that was meant as a signal to legitimate entrepreneurs, the message was delivered. The bombing snuffed out a blossoming redevelopment of the neighborhood that would leave it sitting idle for years. 

That same fall, on Sept. 12, a powerful rainstorm settled over the Country Club Plaza, forcing Brush Creek out of its banks with deadly consequences. At least 25 people were killed, including motorists swept away by the rising tide. In its wake: Damage estimated at $100 million, more than half a billion of today’s dollars. The one good thing to come from it was the complete redesign of the creek channel, though even that wasn’t enough to stave off a repeat flood in 1998 that killed seven more.

Less than two years later, on June 4, 1979, the region’s engineering community was stunned by the collapse of the Kemper Arena roof during a ferocious windstorm compounded by 3-1/2 inches of rain. The city was blessed that no events were taking place that night. 

When it opened in 1973, the arena boasted an award-winning design that was hailed for its innovation, with a large flat roof suspended on hangers from three large cantilever trusses above. The problem? To reduce the stormwater runoff, designers turned the roof into a temporary reservoir, with eight 5-inch drains, a fraction of the 40 required by local code, investigators said.

Social Issues

While the physical transformation of Kansas City was taking place, change of another sort began to set in, one that might have started with the best of intentions. 

It came in 1977, with the original filing of a federal lawsuit alleging institutional discrimination as the culprit behind a rapidly crumbling Kansas City School District. The case would take on national repercussions as it wound its way through the legal system over the following 25 years. 

That same year, a milestone of sorts in racial relations was reached with the closing of Fairyland Amusement Park. Occupying ground that has since become the site of Alphapointe, a non-profit organization serving the visually impaired, the park had lingered past the civil rights era as a source of civic shame—for decades after it opened in 1923, it was off-limits to non-whites, save for a few special circumstances, as recently as 1964. Declining attendance, the emergence of the more modern World of Fun in the Northland and a powerful windstorm late that year spelled the end.

Also of note, the decade ended with the election of the last Republican mayor of Kansas City, Richard Berkley. The transition from his administration to the next would be more than symbolic politically; Berkley served in that role throughout the subsequent decade before turning the reins over to the city’s first black mayor, Emanuel Cleaver. 

Kansas City also made international headlines in 1976, when the Republican National Convention came to Kemper Arena to nominate President Gerald R. Ford for a full term, two years after he’d stepped in for the disgraced Richard Nixon. The convention would go down in history as a watershed moment in American politics after former California Gov. Ronald Reagan’s failed attempt to secure the nomination using a more conservative platform. Though he came up short, historians generally agree that the convention planted the seeds for the Reagan Revolution that swept Jimmy Carter out of office four years later.

Major-League Sports

And on a social scale, Kansas City was transforming from a football town into a hotbed of baseball fandom as the Royals rose to prominence in the American League, challenging the supremacy of the New York Yankees. It was the heyday of professional sports in this region, as we also became home to NBA and NHL franchises, thrusting us into the profile of a comparative handful of four-sport towns. The Scouts started in 1974, two years after the Kings took to the floor and brought the NBA to Kansas City.

The Royals, though, were the toast of the town in the late ’70s. One of the sports great rivalries was born when they crashed the American League playoff scene in 1976 after being shut out in their first seven seasons as an expansion team. In titanic matches against the New York Yankees in three consecutive post-seasons, the Royals lost their chances at the pennant in a series that went five games, four games, then five again from 1976-78.

Football fans, by comparison, were about to enter the Dark Ages. Just a few years after Hank Stram introduced The Offense of the ’70s with the Super Bowl IV upset of the Minnesota Vikings, the Chiefs had fallen into disrepair as a team. A 5-9 record in 1974, Stram’s 15th season as head coach, marked the end of his tenure in Kansas City. Those fans would wander in the wilderness for more than a decade before seeing another playoff opportunity—one and done against the New York Jets in 1986.

Some of that must have rubbed off on the Scouts, who endured two tough seasons on the ice at Kemper Arena before the ownership decided to go prospecting in Denver (and later, New Jersey, as the Devils). As for the Kings, the six seasons from ’74 to ’79 saw just three playoff years, with quick exits in each best-of-seven series: 4-2 to the Chicago Bulls in ’74, then 4-1 to the Phoenix Suns in ’79. They hung around the West Bottoms through the ’84-85 season but never made it to the NBA finals before relocating to Sacramento that fall.

What Didn’t Happen

Perhaps as noteworthy about what Kansas City accomplished in the 1970s are some of the visionary projects that never came to life:

• KCI Transitway. Did you know that, at one point, a monorail system was envisioned for taking passengers and employees to the new Kansas City International Airport in the Northland? The vision was bold and big—but so were the costs. Unable to secure federal funding, the city eventually pulled the plug and decided to let Interstate 29 do the heavy lifting on airport traffic.

• Crosstown Center. AMC Theatres’ CEO Stan Durwood had a long-held vision for a revitalized Downtown, and he called it Crosstown Center, a multipurpose development anchored by an enclosed shopping center of up to 1 million square feet. He had targeted a 1976 completion date. But civic foot-dragging, coupled with rising costs for land acquisition and construction, prompted him to offer a revised plan in 1978, which also went … nowhere. Though he didn’t live long enough to see it, many aspects of his vision would come to fruition with the Power & Light District four decades later.

• The Enid Kemper Performing Arts Center. This new venue was proposed near Thies Park and UMKC, driven by banker and philanthropist R. Crosby Kemper Jr. But unable to secure other private investment by 1978, he withdrew the initial $5 million pledge he had made for the project.