Seventy-Five years ago this month, Kansas City experienced its worst natural disaster when the swollen Kansas (Kaw) River topped the levees protecting industrial districts and communities on both sides of the state line.

North Kansas City bought the River Forest Park site in 1973. For a long time, though, it wasn’t developed as a neighborhood park and was mostly forgotten.

In 2023, the Starlight Theater donated 51 boxes of archival records to the Library’s Missouri Valley Special Collections, representing more than 70 years of its history.

It was 1:30 a.m. on Sunday, March 9, 1941, when 24-year-old Leila Welsh arrived at the door of the Brookside bungalow she shared with her mother and older brother. She and boyfriend Richard Funk — who had walked her home — kissed goodnight...

What’s Your KCQ? is a partnership between The Kansas City Star and the Kansas City Public Library. For this installment, exploring why two cities share the same name on either side of the state line, we invited the Kansas City, Kansas Public Library to collaborate.

On Jan. 28, 1922, Billboard magazine ran a brief ad announcing the expansion of Kansas City’s Afro-American Film Exhibitors Company, which had just closed a contract with Theresa “Tressie” Souders of Kansas City for the distribution of her film “A Woman’s Error,” called “the first of its kind to be produced by a young woman of our race.”

If you’ve lived in Kansas City long enough, you may have even heard the 1985 song "Christmas in Kansas City" by Brad Millison played on local radio stations. What you may not know is that this wasn’t the first Kansas City-themed Christmas song.

The morning of Saturday, Oct. 3, 2015, dawned cool and clear. The participants in Kansas City’s American Royal parade gathered with their horses, balloons, floats and marching bands as they had for decades. But that year, the parade, themed “A Star-Spangled Salute,” wouldn’t be making its way through the Crossroads and downtown

When a new Midtown resident asked about the name “Gillham” on the park and road near her apartment, a neighbor explained that he had something to do with the city’s early streetcar system. They asked KCQ to dig deeper into the story.

For almost a century, the Jenkins Music Company was a major force in the music retail industry. Starting as a one-room shop in Kansas City, it grew into a regional network of more than a dozen stores. At its peak, Jenkins Music Co. claimed to be the largest music retailer in the world.