Ingram's May 2024

Then &Now

CIRCA 1930

In a lot of ways, it looks the same—but it’s not. The contours of Kansas City’s skyline were first etched nearly a century ago, with WPA projects that gave us a new, towering City Hall and an accompanying Jackson County Courthouse nearby. Over the next 100 years, two significant construction bursts trans formed the outline of a city’s commercial center. The government office buildings stood as the most prominent Downtown features for nearly half a century, when a decade-long office-tower boom that began in the late 1970s gave us City Center Square—later rebranded as the Light well KC, One Kansas City Place, Town Pavilion (another rebrand, now known as Eleven Eleven Main) and, in short order, the 1201 Walnut Building. It’s hard to overstate the impact that such a building boom had on the central business district: Nearly 140 floors of new office space with floor plates that had a combined 2.8 million square feet. The second boom began with work on the H&R Block headquarters building, which would become an anchor for the revitalization of Down town. In quick step came the Power & Light entertainment and dining district and what we now know as the T-Mobile Center (originally the Sprint Center), a facility that corrected the flawed judgment which led to the construction of our signature arena in the West Bottoms back in 1974. With ample office space and shiny new amenities to attract people Downtown after hours, the missing ingredient was residential. That vacuum has been filled, with great zeal, by the Cordish Cos. and it’s One Light, Two Light, and Three Light apartment towers surrounding the entertainment district. And they weren’t alone. Projects like the Com merce Tower office-to-residential conversion, the 126-unit Arterra in the Crossroads (soon to be topped in scale by the 193-unit Tracks Apart ments a block to the south), and thousands of other units in smaller ground-up and conversions have helped Downtown amass a resident population approaching 40,000: The minimum critical mass, civic plan ners say, for a sustainable ecosystem of places to work, live and play, with more to come in the years ahead.

CIRCA 1953

CIRCA 1962