Map of Kansas City Showing Parks, Boulevards & Park Districts

Scarce city plan showing Kansas City, Missouri at the turn of the century.

This finely detailed overview of Kansas City, Missouri was published locally by the civil engineering firm of Tuttle & Pike in 1900. Kansas City, Kansas, can also be seen just over the Kansas River.

The image labels streets, railroads, geographic features, suburban neighborhoods, and cemeteries. Black lines reflect the robust system of streetcars in operation. Red overprinting notes the five separate park districts while green color, probably applied by hand, highlights parks, terraces, boulevards, and other outdoor public spaces. A large advertisement for the Whipple-Woods Realty Co. can be seen in blue in the lower right.

Also of interest are the penciled manuscript annotations in the center of the map. One note, near the Missouri River, identifies the current location of a Pabst Brewing Property, while a second spot immediately below presents a large circle around a new ‘proposed location.’

The map was acquired secondhand from a collector who purchased it as part of a larger lot from the Pabst Brewery archives in the late 1980s. The company built and leased hundreds of taverns across the country in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and maps such as this were instrumental in the development of Captain Pabst’s real estate empire.

Tuttle & Pike operated in the Kansas City area from approximately 1900 through the First World War. In addition to street plans, the firm created city and county atlases of western Missouri. I’ve been unable to identify a publication predating this one and there are no examples of the 1900 map in WorldCat. Harvard Map Library notes an example from 1901.

Sources: Pabst History; Historic Kansas City; Havard Map Library;