On July 13, 1951, the Black Friday Flood poured millions of gallons of toxic stew through neighborhoods and into the heart of the region’s industrial area.
The flood 75 years ago was a major turning point. Thousands of residents lost their homes, their jobs, and almost all their possessions. The city lost much of its most iconic industry.
Not many signs of the catastrophe remain, but careful observers can still find a high-water mark in the old Livestock Exchange Building, the tallest edifice in what used to be the Central Industrial District and is now known as the West Bottoms.
The brass plaque has a line pointing in opposite directions, and sits about knee-high on the second floor. Looking out the windows, almost 20 feet above the street, you can start to imagine water stretching out almost 10 miles across the vast flat floodplain like an enormous lake, swamping homes, rail yards, and factories.
Jeremy Drouin, who’s in charge of Missouri Valley Special Collections at the Kansas City Public Library, put together a huge exhibit on the flood.
”They were talking about a kind of biblical rain, 40 straight days of rain,” he said. “More than that.”
The rains started two months earlier and 300 miles west — upstream — of Kansas City when 11 inches hit the high plains.
Flooding killed five people in Hays. It kept raining, and floods surged down the Kaw River basin.
John Galloway, a Kansas City landscape architect originally from WaKeeney, Kansas, said his family lost their farm in the 1951 flood.
“It wasn't just Hays,” said Galloway. “Salina. Manhattan, the whole way down the line, Topeka hammered.”
"A hellish landscape"
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers thought Kansas City would weather the storm thanks to its big, tall, freshly upgraded levees, but the Kaw ran right over them and ripped huge gaps, flooding first Argentine, then Armourdale, and then the Central Industrial District in Kansas City, Kansas.
“The first wave splashed over the dike, then it looked like the whole river was coming at us,” Kansas City Star correspondent Jim Clark told legendary Kansas City broadcaster Walt Bodine live on the air as the flood unfolded. “Several buildings as large as an ordinary theater floated away like matchboxes. Thousands of squealing hogs were swept out of stockyards, most of them drowned.”
Everyone was scrambling to get out of the way. Evelyn Rojas Reyes was just a kid.
“I remember hearing this big roar, I mean a big old roar,” Reyes recalled in an oral history recorded for the Kansas City Library. “I see these cars and houses, roosters, chickens and everything. And it’s like SSHHHHHHHH, and it went into the river.”
There was an urgent evacuation. A National Guard truck pulled up to Hortencia Moreno Rodriguez’s house and ordered her whole family to get in and go.
“So we left, we just grabbed a pillow or blanket, we didn’t think about clothes or photographs or anything important,” recalled Rodriguez on a library recording.
The water came up so fast, many had to swim for their lives through a putrid, toxic soup full of dead pigs and cows from the city’s meatpacking district.
“You're talking about thousands and thousands of animal carcasses,” said Drouin. “Cars, equipment, sewage, trees, houses, any number of chemical concoctions.”
All the dangerous debris flowed from the business district’s meatpacking and soap plants and farm equipment and car factories. The next day, huge fuel tanks at local oil companies started blowing up on Southwest Boulevard, shooting flames and smoke thousands of feet into the air and spraying burning oil across the flood surface. The black and white photographs look almost like they could have been taken during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
“It was a hellish landscape,” said Drouin.
The aftermath, recovery and change
Many people sustained injuries, but amazingly, only five people died in Greater Kansas City, and 24 across the entire flood. It’s not clear how many succumbed later to toxic exposure or depression.
National news broadcasts called it the worst flooding ever to hit the Midwest.
The physical damage totaled up to about $12 billion, adjusted for inflation, and 750,000 people were displaced or made homeless.
The cleanup took months and was plagued by rats, stench, and, of course, flies. It was the hottest part of the summer.
“The smell had to be horrible,” said Drouin. “They hired a lot of out-of-work stockyards workers, people that worked in the slaughterhouses to remove those animals, and because not everyone had the stomach to handle that kind of work.”
When people got back to their homes, many found that nothing remained.
“We lost everything. We had to start over from scratch,” said Kansas City resident Joseph P. Parra in a library interview. “All we took was what clothes we had on our back.”
The Mexican-American communities of Argentine and Armourdale never got back to their pre-flood vitality, nor did the Kansas City Stock Yards or the Central Industrial District factories where so many people had worked.
The flood triggered a huge push to build reservoirs across Kansas, like Clinton Lake in Lawrence, designed to help contain future floods.
The recovery hatched a rebuilding boom in Kansas City and a surge of civic pride.
Two of the era’s best-known painters, Norman Rockwell and Thomas Hart Benton, captured different aspects of the flood.
Rockwell’s “Kansas City Spirit,” of a determined-looking man in khaki pants holding blueprints, is more famous.
“Rockwell focuses more on the resilient side of Kansas City, you know, let's roll up our sleeves and get to work,” said Drouin, the library exhibit’s curator. “Benton's sketch really accurately kind of showed the despair and what people had to come back to.”
In Benton’s painting, a family returns to a skeletal house on the verge of collapse, all heaving mud and spooky wrecked possessions.
The last 75 years have healed the physical damage from the flood. The old Central Industrial District has transformed from the nation’s second-largest livestock depot and meatpacking center into a neighborhood full of art and nightlife, where developers are busy filling old factory buildings with condos for well-heeled hipsters.
But John O’Brien, a Kansas City restaurant designer, says he has run into vestiges of 1951 flood while remodeling West Bottoms businesses, like the former Daily Drovers Telegram Newspaper building.
“There was still mud underneath the stairways, crusted,” he said. “It almost looked like a moonscape of inches of just silt mud.”
The Kansas City Public Library's exhibit on the 1951 flood, "Hell and High Water," runs through Jan. 3, 2027.
