Quality Hill: How the Stockyards Destroyed a Neighborhood

From the bluff above downtown Kansas City, on a ridge two hundred feet above the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers, the view to the west and south is still remarkable. This is Quality Hill, and for half a century it was the most desirable address in the city.

Kersey Coates, one of Kansas City's founding entrepreneurs, platted Quality Hill as a fashionable residential neighborhood in eighteen fifty-seven. Railroad tycoons built their mansions here. Meatpacking magnates and land barons competed to erect the most imposing houses on the bluff. For decades it was the most fashionable and expensive neighborhood in Kansas City. It was the city's social summit in every sense, a place of carved stone facades, carriage houses, and parlors where business deals that shaped the territory were made over brandy.

The fall was as swift as the rise. Below the bluff, the West Bottoms held the stockyards and the rail yards that Kansas City's economy depended on, and over time the city's wealthy moved away. By shortly after World War One the hill was no longer the fashionable address. The grand houses were subdivided into rooming houses, then into worse things, and the neighborhood collapsed into poverty and blight.

The Kansas City that grew up in the early twentieth century grew up elsewhere. The Gilded Age mansions mostly came down. A few survived. The hill itself remains, and the view from Quality Hill Overlook still shows you exactly what Kersey Coates saw when he decided this was where Kansas City's best people should live. What the view can't show you is how quickly the neighborhood's fortunes turned.