Kansas City’s Historic Garment District Museum will close permanently later this month.
The museum’s 350-garment collection, in a 1,266-square-foot space in the historic Poindexter Building, will move into storage for now — the Poindexter Building sold earlier this year.
“Leaving this space is kind of sad,” Lisa Shockley, curator of collections at the Kansas City Museum, said of the impending close, slated for Aug. 30.
The Kansas City Museum acquired the collection nearly 10 years ago, and is making plans to display parts of it there, though staff estimate the process may take a couple years.
The Garment District museum was founded in 2002, and houses items made by well-known companies like Nelly Don, Lee Jeans Company and the Fashionbilt Garment Company. All of them once operated factories in a 5-block strip along Broadway Boulevard.
“To be able to exhibit it within the Garment District, just puts a little bit more meaning to the collection,” Shockley said. “There were so many companies here.”
“At any one time in the 1950s, there were between 70 and 80 manufacturers here,” she said.
Kansas City’s Garment District was once the second-largest in the country. The thriving industry started after World War I and grew steadily into the second-largest employer in the metro at its peak.
“They ranged in size from maybe 12 employees to something like Nelly Don that had a couple thousand employees,” Shockley said.
The industry boomed in Kansas City partly because of its location in the center of the country, and at a major railroad hub.
“Before Kansas City started its garment district, people in the Midwest ordered clothing from New York,” she said. “Shipping from New York to the little store in Russell, Kansas, was a lot more expensive.”
Through the 1950s to the 1980s, though, the boom went bust. Kansas City’s local garment industry declined and largely moved abroad.
The history might have been forgotten if not for the efforts of Ann Brownfield and Harvey Fried who worked in the district for more than 40 years — Brownfield as a clothing designer and Fried as salesman for the family-owned Fried-Siegel Company.
Shockley said, as businesses closed in the 1980s, artifacts from many factories ended up in the dumpster.
“In some cases they were throwing out sewing machines, finished garments, hundreds of buttons and buckles and fasteners,” Shockley said. “When they (Brownfield and Fried) started seeing what was being thrown away, they were able to rescue some of it.”
“We're just really lucky to have that many pieces that illustrate the history of this particular neighborhood,” she said.
The collection will remain available to researchers in storage at Union Station.
The Historic Garment District Museum is open from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays through Aug. 30 in the Poindexter Building, 801 Broadway Blvd., Kansas City, Missouri 64105. Admission is free, but a $5 donation is suggested.
