Many historic buildings around the Kansas City metro are sitting vacant, falling into disrepair or even facing the possibility of demolition.
On Monday, the nonprofit Historic KC released its Most Endangered Places List for the first time in five years, highlighting decaying buildings around the metro worth restoring. Historic KC has been releasing this list since the late 1980s to bring attention to “significant historic resources at risk of destruction or irreparable damage.”
Here are the buildings on Historic KC’s 2026 list:
- Former Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, 925 Grand Boulevard
- Palace Clothing Company Building, 1150 Grand Boulevard
- Southwell Building/Harlings Building, 3941 Main Street
- Carmen Building, 101 West Linwood Boulevard
- Belmont Hotel, 911 East Linwood Boulevard
- Bryant School, 319 Westover Road
- Park Concession Building/Lakeside Restaurant and Ranger/First Aid Station, Swope Park
- The Colonnade, 200 Benton Boulevard
- Mayor Jay Holcomb Neff Residence, 526 Benton Boulevard
- The Dorson Apartments, 912-918 Benton Boulevard
- Tuscawara Apartments, 1013-1019 Benton Boulevard
- North Indiana Avenue Apartments, 101-107 and 104-110 North Indiana Avenue
- North Lawn Apartments, 118-148 North Lawn Avenue
- Perky Brothers Transfer & Storage Building, 3212 Independence Avenue
- Kansas City Call Building, 1715 East 18th Street
- 1872 Merriam School, 5820 Merriam Drive, Merriam, Kan.
- Former Christian Science Church, 9224 West 57th Street, Merriam, Kan.
- Thematic listing: Colonnaded Apartment Buildings
- Thematic listing: Bungalow Neighborhoods
- Thematic listing: Historic Neighborhood Corner Stores/Groceries
Perhaps the most iconic structure is the former Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, located at 925 Grand Boulevard. At one point, the 21-story building constructed in 1921 was the tallest building in Missouri. Since 2008, it has sat vacant.
According to Historic KC, the current owner has been pursuing redevelopment for over a decade, but work has never begun in earnest.
There are significant incentives available at both the state and federal levels to restore historic buildings, Historic KC executive director Ethan Starr told KCUR’s Up To Date.
“The Missouri State Historic Tax Credit is 25% of your total expense, essentially, while the federal historic tax credit is another 20%,” he explained. “So that's a substantial, for lack of a better word, rebate that developers are able to get on their investments.”
Incentives like these mean that getting a building listed on the National Register of Historic Places is an important step for many developers to start the preservation process.
“A lot of owners and developers of these properties, they don’t know where to go, or what questions to ask, or what resources might be out there,” said Bryan Painter, the chair of Historic KC’s board. “Not only on the commercial side, but on the residential side and with smaller developers.”
The Historic Northeast is the most represented in Historic KC’s list of all of the neighborhoods and municipalities throughout the region.
“There are simply so many vacant and deteriorating apartment, multifamily developments, mostly from the 1920s, that we felt it really deserved some spotlighting,” Starr said. “Northeast neighborhoods agreed with that sentiment and submitted nominations en masse.”
Several apartment buildings from the Historic Northeast are represented, along with the old residence of Former Kansas City Mayor Jay Holcomb Neff, who served in that role from 1904-1905.
The Victorian-style residence was originally built in 1890.
In 2023, a fire inside injured a firefighter and caused “extensive roof damage,” causing Kansas City to place it on its Dangerous Buildings list in 2024.
The Most Endangered Places List also highlights “thematic” listings, focusing on building typologies that are distributed citywide that are worth preserving. Those include bungalows, neighborhood corner stores and groceries, and colonnaded apartment buildings.
In many of Kansas City’s neighborhoods, colonnaded apartment buildings are a prominent part of the residential architecture.
“(This is) a major, signature building typology of Kansas City that, in many ways, is found nowhere else,” Starr said. “We have this paradigmatic, triple-decker porch, double-loaded corridor to the extent that it's sixplexes, eightplexes, twelveplexes in a way that most other communities simply don't have.”
Historic KC was founded in 1974 with the goal of working with community partners to “preserve and promote” Kansas City’s architectural heritage, while trying to “influence decision makers to safeguard the future of historic buildings.”
On Nov. 12, the nonprofit will host its annual Preservation Awards at the National World War I Museum & Memorial. More information about that event and the Most Endangered Places List can be found at historickansascity.org.
- Ethan Starr, executive director of Historic KC and architectural historian
- Bryan Painter, chairman of the board of Historic KC
