If you live in an older neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri, you might have a black-and-white photograph of your house with a hat-wearing man displaying a numbered signboard.
The images date back to a federal project in 1940 to clean up property records in Jackson County. And more than 50,000 of these photos still exist.
Now, a new Kansas City Public Library site called KC-1940 is making the collection even more accessible.
“It’s just such a complete vision of what life was like in 1940 in these neighborhoods, on these streets,” said digital history collections librarian Katie Eschbacher, who started creating an inventory of the materials more than a decade ago.
The original purpose of this “scientific assessment,” as the Kansas City Star described it at the time, was to clean up property records in the wake of the 1920s and ‘30s political machine of Tom Pendergast.
To do that, a dozen two-man teams of Works Progress Administration workers – one with a 35 mm camera, the other with a numbered signboard – traversed the county block-by-block to document all structures for tax evaluation purposes.
Factories, schools, government buildings, residences and businesses, gas stations, hamburger stands, office buildings and union halls all were captured on film.
But what still resonates about the images, Eschbacher said, are glimpses of daily life in 1940, like what’s captured by Google Street View today:
Two women, one holding a toddler, chat on either side of a shared fence. Movie marquees display the names of popular films like Laurel and Hardy’s “Flying Deuces.” And there are lots of children – pulling wagons, picking up pets, playing dress-up in high-heeled shoes.
“It was a very bureaucratic collection,” Eschbacher said.
“And what they have also created, sort of unwittingly, is this very egalitarian picture of Kansas City,” she said. “They didn't wait for streets to be cleared when they took photos, they took a picture of whatever was going on.”
The new KC-1940 website also helps illustrate a contrast between the past and present.
For example, a search for “shoe stores” leads to a listing at 811 E. 31st St. and side-by-side images of a Square Deal Shoe Store in 1940 and the 2024 Google Street View of the building as it stands.
Other searches reveal what’s been lost over the last eight decades.
Type in the word “barbecue,” and a commercial building at 1325 E. 18th St. is shown to house a restaurant called Nick’s Buffet and a barbershop. Today, the location is a parking lot.
A circuitous route
When special collections manager Jeremy Drouin and his wife, Amy, bought a house in Waldo in the early 2000s, he went looking for an archival photo.
Drouin, a history buff, wanted to see the house and the Rockhill Gardens neighborhood as it used to be — and get a print as a Christmas gift.
At the time, the 1940 Jackson County tax assessment photo collection was tucked into folders in file cabinets in the Landmarks Commission office (later renamed the Historic Preservation Commission) in City Hall, in downtown Kansas City. The images, each about the size of a postage stamp, were pasted on cards and organized by block.
“That’s really the strength of the collection is its comprehensiveness, in photographing houses and buildings that would not be photographed otherwise,” said Drouin.
Preservation commission employees “would kind of guide you through the process,” he remembered. “They’d help you identify your house, bringing out the folders.”
Not only was the system a bit unwieldy, but it was also a drain on resources.
“People were constantly reaching out to them and kept stopping by. It was a lot of reference on their end,” Drouin said. “They looked at it as: ‘Well, the library can do that.’”
So, Drouin mentioned to his then-supervisor the idea to relocate the photographic survey to the Kansas City Public Library. The set was donated to the Missouri Valley Special Collections in 2011.
But the collection had taken a circuitous route to the library — from the Jackson County tax assessor’s office in the ‘40s, to a dumpster in the ‘70s when the photos were no longer needed, then the Landmarks Commission for the next four decades.
That’s when Katie Eschbacher traveled to City Hall to assess the materials.
“A lot of loose photos, old scotch tape, and things like that,” she remembered.
“There were staples in them where pictures had fallen out,” Eschbacher said. “And you don’t want staples in archival material because they can rust over time and cause problems.”
Some photos were misplaced through the years, including entire city blocks and individual properties.
“Obviously, we wish every single photo, and every folder was still available so everybody could find these easily,” Eschbacher said. “It was a working collection for decades, and so things go missing, things fall out, things like that. They were not being kept with a mind to historic preservation and archiving forever.”
She spent several months carefully removing old yellow tape and staples, reattaching hundreds of loose photos, and counting folders so they could be digitized and moved in 2012 to Missouri Valley Special Collections at the Central Library.
The photos have been available online since then, but with limited search capabilities. The new KC-1940 site allows users to navigate by district, block, or identified building, and they can select particular streets or cross streets, neighborhoods, buildings or subjects.
“Before, if you wanted to search the collection, you had to sort of work top-down with these maps,” said Eschbacher. “And so, one of the things we wanted to do with the website was make this collection as easy as possible to browse.”
The KC-1940 site, she said, provides the opportunity for the photos to continue on as a “working collection” with the help of crowdsourcing. As photos are linked to addresses, a past image can be paired with the present location to see how streets, buildings and neighborhoods have changed over the years.
“We were not able to index them house by house, property by property, (but) we have a great number of them identified,” Eschbacher said. “We would love people to continue helping us to identify all of these individual properties.”
If that happens, the new site could help expand the collection’s usefulness to more than just the historically-minded homeowner.
“I think people know this collection for house photos — it's fun to find your personal house photo and see how it's changed from 1940 to 2024,” Eschbacher said. “But it (the site) has so much more.”
This story was produced with the Kansas City Public Library. To see the full collection of Kansas City images from 1940, go to KC1940.org.
