What’s Your KCQ is a collaboration between The Star and the Kansas City Public Library series that answers your questions about the history, people, places and culture that make Kansas City unique. Have a suggestion for a future story? Share it with us here, or email our journalists at [email protected].
Between 1950 and 1980, the population of Kansas City’s West Side community dropped from more than 14,000 to just 5,500. In 1972, the Department of Housing and Urban Development declared the neighborhood no longer viable as a residential community. For many, the cause was clear: the highways.
Ahead of the next Reconnecting the West Side community summit on Saturday, Aug. 2, at the Tony Aguirre Community Center, the KCQ team at the Kansas City Public Library took a look at the history of the West Side — and the highways that came to divide it.
Like many urban neighborhoods, the West Side began as a fashionable residential suburb. By the 1920s, it had become a solidly working-class and ethnically diverse community. While wealthier residents were moving south to new developments like Hyde Park and the Country Club District, thousands of Mexican migrants, fleeing the violence of the Mexican Revolution, settled primarily in the West Bottoms and the West Side, the latter of which has remained the heart of the city’s Hispanic community.
Hunger for a KC thoroughfare
Not coincidentally, as wealthier Kansas Citians moved southward, the idea for a “southwest trafficway” gained momentum. City officials embraced a plan to run a wide traffic artery directly through Penn Valley Park, extending south to Brush Creek and connecting to the Country Club District and expanding suburbs of Johnson County…