Kansas City

In 1821 the French Chouteau fur-trading family of St. Louis set up a trading post, Chouteau's Landing, at the meeting of the Kansas and Missouri rivers. In the 1830s John Calvin McCoy, son of the missionary Isaac McCoy, founded Westport a few miles inland and Westport Landing on the Missouri, and the area became an outfitting point for traders on the Santa Fe Trail and for emigrants and gold seekers heading west. The landing was incorporated as the town of Kansas, named after the nearby Native people, in 1850, became the City of Kansas in 1853 and took the name Kansas City in 1889. The Battle of Westport in 1864 effectively ended Confederate efforts to regain Missouri.

Railways and the stockyards, second only to Chicago's in size, made the city a centre of transport, cattle and meatpacking. The landscape architect George Kessler gave it a network of boulevards and parks in the City Beautiful style, Union Station opened in 1914 and the Liberty Memorial in 1926, and J. C. Nichols opened the Country Club Plaza in 1923. Tom Pendergast's political machine dominated the city by 1925 and fell only in 1939, when he pleaded guilty to tax evasion.

The stockyards never recovered from the Great Flood of 1951 and eventually closed. On 17 July 1981 the collapse of hotel walkways at Crown Center killed 114 people. Since the 2000s the Power & Light District, a downtown arena, the Kauffman Center and the streetcar have revived the centre, a new airport terminal opened in 2023, and the city was one of the host cities of the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

Kansas City jazz of the 1930s, centred on the 18th and Vine district, marked the transition from the big bands to the bebop of the 1940s; Count Basie and Charlie Parker are among the names linked with it. The district, a centre of Black business and culture in the first half of the 20th century, now holds the American Jazz Museum and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and live music is also concentrated in Westport. The Kansas City Symphony, Ballet and Lyric Opera perform at the Kauffman Center.

The city calls itself the City of Fountains, with more than 200 working fountains, and it has more boulevards than any city except Paris, earning the name Paris of the Plains. Walt Disney lived here after returning from the First World War, and Hallmark Cards has its headquarters at Crown Center.

Sport is central to local identity. The Chiefs won Super Bowls in 2020, 2023 and 2024; the Royals won the World Series in 1985 and 2015; and the Kansas City Current play in a riverfront stadium built for the team, opened in 2024. The American Royal's barbecue contest and the city's many barbecue restaurants make food a shared passion, and the Irish community's festival at Crown Center draws large crowds over Labor Day weekend.

Kansas City had about 508,000 residents at the 2020 census, making it the largest city in Missouri, and its metropolitan area, which straddles the state line, has about 2.25 million. The city covers about 319 square miles across four counties, so much of it is suburban, while Kansas City, Kansas, is a separate city across the state line.

Major employers and institutions include Hallmark Cards, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, which opened a new building near Union Station in 2008, and one of the largest drug manufacturing plants in the country, in the south of the city. Downtown has filled with flats in converted office buildings and new apartment towers. Homelessness, put at about 3,000 people in 2022, is a recognised problem.

The Hispanic population, largely Mexican and Central American, is spread across the metropolitan area, with concentrations in the north-east and south-west of downtown, and Southeast Asian residents live around Columbus Park, a historically Italian neighbourhood. Life follows the seasons and the sporting calendar, from baseball in summer to the Chiefs in autumn and winter.

Kansas City is one of the world's barbecue capitals, with more than 90 barbecue restaurants in the metropolitan area. The local style grew from the pit of Henry Perry, a migrant from Memphis credited with opening the city's first barbecue stand in 1921; the style blossomed in the 18th and Vine area. Arthur Bryant took over Perry's business and sweetened the sauce; Bryant's and Gates are the two definitive Kansas City barbecue restaurants, and Fiorella's Jack Stack is also well regarded.

The style uses a range of slow-smoked meats under a thick, sweet tomato-based sauce, with molasses popularised as a sweetener. Burnt ends, the charred pieces from the point of a smoked brisket, are credited to Arthur Bryant's and were made famous by the essayist Calvin Trillin. The American Royal hosts what it claims is the world's biggest barbecue contest each autumn.

Steak is the other tradition: in the days of the stockyards the city gave its name to the Kansas City strip steak. Most of the city's award-winning restaurants are in the Crossroads, downtown and Westport, and the Crossroads has a cluster of craft breweries.