Long before digital ads or the splashy billboards along I-70, companies often turned their largest assets—their buildings—into eye-catching promotional platforms.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, building signage was one of the most successful advertising tools a company had. A company’s name might have been painted across the side of a brick building for potential consumers to spot from half a mile away, mounted as a large sign or carved directly into its facade, permanently marking the building’s identity.
Nowhere in Kansas City was this more visible than in the garment industry, particularly in the Garment and Crossroads Districts. The Garment District—the stretch of warehouses and storefronts on Broadway Boulevard—was a thriving fashion manufacturing hub in the early- to mid-1900s. “The rapidly growing garment district, or wholesale district, soon became the largest wholesale distribution center in the world,” wrote David Jackson and Ann Brownfield in We Were Hanging by a Thread, a book on the district’s history. “The principal items sold were clothing, dry goods, shoes, pharmaceuticals, home furnishings, paper products, millinery, caps and wholesale printing services.”…