The 1990s: A Transformation Begins …

PUBLISHED APRIL 2024

In the mid 19th century, an obscure French writer penned this gem: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr never made it to Kansas City, but had he been here a generation after authoring that declaration, he would have indeed witnessed change that really was change: the first transactions in a five-acre plot of the West Bottoms that would eventually become the Kansas City Stockyards.

One could argue that 120 years later when the 1990s arrived, things reverted to the norm: The stockyards themselves conducted their last cattle sales in October 1991. For a city that had staked much of its reputation on steak, it was a powerful bit of symbolism: Kansas City strips were no longer originating in Kansas City.

It was also a signal moment for a new decade that would produce sweeping change across this region. Cities build identities, nurture them and see them remade as buildings rise and fall, personalities move into power and fade away, highways disrupt long-standing rhythms of life, and companies come and go—often creating jobs, then sending them away.

If you look back 30 years, the sweep of that change becomes evident, not only for what might have been lost, but for what those transformations have done to the character of this metropolitan area and our shared identity.

Ahead of The Curve

Here’s a socially relevant for-instance: While the nation today buzzes about the hierarchy of power and who retains it, Kansas City was at the vanguard of change in the 1990s: On the front end, voters selected Emanuel Cleaver as the city’s first black mayor; after two terms, he passed the gavel to Kay Barnes, the voters’ choice for their first woman in that office. Save for the four-year run of Mark Funkhouser in that role from 2007-2011, no other white male has occupied the office.

Here’s an example from the world of commerce: During the 1990s, on its rise to become the region’s largest private-sector employer and one of telecom’s Big Three, Sprint Corp. changed the very face of the regional commercial realty market for office space by opening the first in a series of buildings that would eventually span 3.9 million square feet. 

Sprint, of course, has become a victim of famous change with its formal acquisition by T-Mobile in 2020. Yet we continue to live today with the consequences of Sprint’s construction spree as Wichita-based Occidental Management breathes new life—and even more construction—into the Overland Park campus.

How about some weather-related change? Twice in this decade, first in 1993, then again five years later, Mother Nature unloaded on the Kansas City region in ways that would prove transformative for its stormwater management and public safety. Just as the city had experienced the Flood of ’77 on the Country Club Plaza, the intensity of each deluge proved deadly. In addition to lives surrendered, the two storms in the ‘90s inflicted an estimated $150 million in property losses. In response, federal, state and local governments have spent tens of millions of dollars on improvements to alleviate the threat of cloud-borne calamity.

The decade gave us massive transformations delivered at the hands of voters. In 1996, voters from across the region approved a bistate tax that would finance the restoration of the long-languishing Union Station south of Downtown’s central business district. With a big chunk of the $250 million restoration provided by that 1/8-cent sales tax, work began a year later and was completed just ahead of the new millennium, returning to the region a crown jewel that had been lost to decades of disuse and neglect.

An equally transformational vote took place the following year when voters in Wyandotte County agreed to merge its three municipalities and county government into a unified structure. That was the first domino to fall in a series that would lead to an unparalleled level of development in a county that had long been considered the metro area’s economic backwater.

Almost immediately, the Unified Government secured rights to build the Kansas Speedway, followed in short order by the Village West entertainment and retail district, what is now Children’s Mercy Park, and thousands of luxury apartments. So great was the critical mass that Cerner Corp., on its rise to supplant Sprint as the largest private employer, chose that neighborhood to construct a pair of towering office buildings—with, as it turns out, mixed results.

The health-care front produced changes that can correctly be described as “seismic,” for the reverberations from them are still with us today.

Easily the most impactful of them was the 1998 deal that severed state control of the financial train wreck that was The University of Kansas Hospital. In its place came a stand-alone public-health authority that quickly refocused on quality of care, patient satisfaction, improved finances, research functions, top-notch talent across the board and more. From the brink of insolvency as a hospital, it has become The University of Kansas Health System, with campuses across the state, far more patient admissions than any other facility in the region, and a staggering $15 billion in gross revenues.

Nominally, that was a win for Wyandotte County, on whose acreage the medical center and adjacent KU School of Medicine sits. As a practical matter, it has been a win for Midtown (the hospital property abuts the state line) and the broader region, with the medical center’s 960 licensed beds at the main campus and hundreds more with last year’s acquisition of Olathe Health System on the Kansas side, and a looming partnership with Liberty Hospital on the Missouri side.

Two entities that dominated the hospital market in the 1990s—the former Health Midwest and Saint Luke’s Health System—also produced deep and lasting changes during the 1990s. As it happened, both came to Johnson County. There, Saint Luke’s Health System expanded its Kansas-side footprint in 1998 by assuming operational control of Shawnee Mission Medical Center, a marriage that lasted only five years before Advent Health, which had retained ownership of the assets, resumed full control.

That came two years after Health Midwest had relocated Menorah Medical Center from its longtime home adjacent to UMKC, in favor of Overland Park. 

That opened the door to a new life for the facility near the Country Club Plaza, and business icon James Stowers filled that void by financing the transformation of that site into the Stowers Institute for Medical Research. The vast majority of the $2 billion personal fortune Jim and Virginia Stowers had amassed over the life of American Century Investments changed the region’s national profile as a center of life-sciences research, triggering additional investments from companies, non-profits and start-ups that continue to benefit the region with improved health care delivery, research breakthroughs, and high-paying jobs.

Other healthcare moves during the decade included Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth’s acquisition of Bethany Medical Center in Wyandotte County in 1998, a move that kept the facility on life support, but only for a few more years before 21st-century health-care economics wrote its final chapter. 

Connecting With Business 

On the higher education front, demand from regional businesses to fill the labor pipeline with a new kind of employee was taking hold. Recall that in 1991, a company making a name for itself with a new communications platform—the Internet—rebranded itself as America Online, and by the middle of the decade, 5 million Americans had loaded discs with its software to begin communicating with one another through electronic mail.

On a national level, things would never be the same, especially with the 1998 founding of an enterprise that would eventually become an everyday verb: Google. Recognizing the changing nature of commerce, public post-secondary institutions moved to fill the gaps. 

In 1993, the University of Kansas established an Overland Park campus along the expanding Quivira Road corridor south of College Boulevard. By adding a facility that could accommodate more than 1,500 students in Johnson County, KU strengthened its presence in the metro area well beyond the Lawrence campus and the medical school in Wyandotte County.

At the associate’s degree level—where academic programming historically has been more aligned with immediate business employment needs than four-year schools can provide—Metropolitan Community College added a fourth campus in 1997. The addition to the Blue River site in Independence gave MCC a broad reach across the Missouri side, joining the main Penn Valley campus in Midtown, the Longview campus in southeast Kansas City, and Maple Woods north of the river.

The business scene here witnessed plenty of action during the ’90s. One of the decade’s biggest business deals was the 1996 acquisition of Marion Merrell Dow by Hoescht AG. That came just seven years after Ewing Kauffman had sold his Marion Labs to Dow Chemical, a deal that reportedly made millionaires of 300 of Mr. K’s employees.

Sprint Corp., still on its rise to becoming the region’s biggest private-sector employer, took another step in that direction in 1993 with the acquisition of Centel Corp. in a deal valued at $4.7 billion. 

On the logistics front, Kansas City Southern Railway acquired MidSouth Corp., a regional rail line from Jackson, Miss., with 1,200 track miles. The deal boosted KCS’ track mileage by nearly 50 percent.

The 1990s also produced significant merger activity, as three of the area’s top five banks—Boatmen’s, Mercantile and Mark Twain Bank—merged with or were acquired by other banks. Boatmen’s, in fact, was the oldest bank west of the Mississippi and the largest commercial bank in Missouri when NationsBank (eventually part of Bank of America) acquired it in 1996. 

Mercantile, on its way to becoming the state’s largest bank-holding company, acquired Mark Twain in 1996, then was itself acquired by Firstar Corp. of Milwaukee in 1999 before eventually being absorbed by U.S. Bank.

One merger that didn’t go through—but set the stage for another 20 years down the road—came when KCP&L failed to take over Utilicorp United (later known as Aquila) in 1996. Topeka-based Western Resources had been making a play of its own for KCP&L and broke up the Utilicorp deal by advising shareholders of the Kansas City company, Great Plains Energy, not to approve it. So, it was not without some rancor when those efforts failed to produce the region’s dominant utility. All’s well that ends well, though: KCP&L’s parent eventually absorbed some aspects of the failing Aquila a decade later, then worked out a marriage with Western in 2018.

The decade wasn’t all work and no play: With the November 1992 vote to legalize what was ostensibly known as “riverboat” gambling in Missouri, Kansas soon joined the fray, and the nation’s biggest players quickly sprung into action to establish a market presence. That kicked off in 1994 with Harrah’s Kansas City and Argosy, followed in quick succession by Ameristar Casino & Hotel (1997) and, closer to Topeka, the Prairie Band Casino & Hotel (1998).

Additional entertainment and hospitality moves in the decade included the opening of the H. Roe Bartle Convention Center in 1994, plus a number of hotels, including the Hilton Country Club Plaza (1991), what is now the Hotel Topeka at City Center (1998), and Hampton Inn Country Club Plaza (1999).

Saying Good-Bye

The Kansas City region sadly bade farewell to some true titans of commerce whose entrepreneurial vision did indeed change the character of this place. The most iconic? It’s hard to imagine a bigger loss than Ewing Kauffman, who left us in 1993 after building a pharmaceutical empire, then acquiring the Kansas City Royals and gifting the team to the region upon his death. His legacy continues today with the work of the foundation that bears his name, and his widow Muriel, who died two years later, also left an indelible impression on the region with her passion for the arts and the world-class performing arts center named in her honor.

The business community also lost such iconic names as Stan Durwood, the former AMC chief executive who transformed the way America went to the movies by implementing multi-screen theaters. He was also the visionary whose biggest civic dream didn’t emerge before he exited this world, but it lives on with the Power & Light District in Downtown Kansas City. Others included fashion designer Nell Donnelly Reed (1991), former Hallmark executive William Harsh (1995), Russell Stover owner Lewis Ward (1996), Sprint CEO Paul Henson, Sprint (1997), Topeka hotelier Robert Brock (1998), and on a public-safety level, former police chief Clarence Kelly (1997).

Less of a household name, but certainly not without influence, was Mary Hudson of Mission Hills, who started with ownership of a single gas station and built an oil industry empire worth $325 million. She was one of just three women on the Forbes list of richest Americans at the time of her death in 1999.

The world of sports mourned the losses of Buck Buchanan, who anchored the defensive line on the Chiefs’ first Super Bowl team (1992), teammate and line colleague Aaron Brown (1997), and one-time ace reliever Dan Quisenberry of the Royals, who succumbed to a brain tumor in 1998, just 13 seasons after he’d helped bring a World Series title to town. Baseball fans, being a gracious lot, also marked the passage of former Kansas City A’s owner Charles O. Finley, long remembered (albeit less fondly) for taking his team to Oakland nearly 30 years earlier.

On the social front, the decade brought—at long last—the end of the school-desegregation litigation known as Jenkins v. Missouri. In 1997, after more than 20 years of legal challenge, federal district judge Russell Clark issued his final order in the case that the Supreme Court would declare the “most ambitious and expensive remedial program in the history of school desegregation.” Clark had ordered the school district, as well as the state, to pump roughly $2 billion into the system, a hoped-for cure for the ails that followed desegregation: higher teachers’ salaries, new schools, over-the-top amenities that included an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, TV studios, a robotics lab, a zoo and wildlife sanctuary, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal.

More than 25 years later, the Kansas City School District is reduced to celebrating reaccreditation by the state, and academic performance continues to lag.

In at least one respect, then, the more things change …