The Coates Hotel

Pause here a moment. That’s the hotel across the street.

Coates colluded with his friend and newspaperman Robert Van Horn at the outset of hostilities, and Van Horn returned from Union stronghold St. Louis with a remit to garrison Union troops here in town until the end of the war. Their barracks became the unfinished foundation of the Coates house, and they never left. They couldn’t. Plenty of Dixie flags were flying in town the morning Union troops got off the boat at the river landing, and it’s fair to surmise they might have flown again had the Union garrison ever been abandoned. 

One could say Kansas City did the right thing during the Civil War. But it did so at the point of a gun. 

Head to the corner, and take a right. We’ll head north along Broadway for about two blocks. When you come to 9th street, cross safely. If you have to wait a while for a light, there will probably be some silence while I wait for you to safely reach the next spot. If that happens, just keep going on the sidewalk. 

The devastation that followed the Civil War hit Confederate strongholds the hardest, and some historians argue that the worst-hit regions of the country never really recovered, even today. But Kansas City rebounded fast, thanks in no small part to the aforementioned Van Horn, who used his newspaper and victorious Union clout to woo western investors to bring... the railroad here. 

If you look up the road, you can see where the tall buildings stop and the horizon opens up. 

Just past there, off to the right, is where the Hannibal Bridge is. You can’t quite see it, and that’s because it bends west, but most Kansas Citians don’t really see it anymore either. It’s not even the original Hannibal Bridge! That’s version 2.0. But the bridge was the spark that made Kansas City Kansas City. The railroad made this town. 

Waterways, railways, roads and highways. That was always this city’s destiny, a way station in this big American experiment. And just as the river had brought commerce to the region in the days of the French exploration, and the wagon trains had brought business decades later, the rails created a concentration of commerce that drew people inward and kept them here.

The industrial revolution in the United States was never evenly distributed, but what it distributed to Kansas City was the industry of cattle, stockyards, slaughterhouses and beef. Look ahead at the brick DST building on the east side of 8th street. It’s a relatively new building, but it hides an old secret: the eighth street tunnel. 

All of that cow-town industry took place in the West Bottoms, an enormous sea of stockyards and factories and soot and filth and every other byproduct of premodern industry one could imagine. What connected the mercantile downtown to its capital investments in the west bottoms was the 8th street tunnel. At the time, it was quite a fete. 

Engineers bored a hole through the West Side hill of Kansas City connecting the West Bottoms to the downtown, right under your feet. And for more than 50 years it provided downtown with direct access to the West Bottoms by streetcar. Back then, Kansas City had one of the most extensive light rail networks in the country, extending as far south and west as Olathe. Before it was bought up and destroyed, to make way for car-culture. No longer a cow-town, KC became a modern metropolis.

Follow the sidewalk until you reach the first crosswalk near 8th street.