Bumper Cars and Polar Bears

"The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened."
-Peter Berger

I am curious about Kansas City 124 years ago.
Kansas City in 1884.
Our House was built in 1884.
Our house is 124 years old.
Intrigued, I headed to the Library.

The downtown Kansas City Library has a special room on the Fifth floor. The Missouri Valley Special Collections room. (M.V.S.C. to it's friends.) This exceptional room boasts an enclosed, climate-controlled, archival records space behind 5 inch thick glass. I never got to go into this room. I just stared in at the historical findings like a polar bear exhibit at the zoo. The Missouri Valley Special Collections Librarian placed me on a archival computer. I sat there for 3 and 1/2 hours. This is what I learned:

A street car ran by our house.

Streetcars are dangerous.

A horrible street car accident happened close to our house in 1907, reported by the Kansas City Journal: THANKFUL FOR HER ESCAPE...Devout Expression of Little Girl Struck by a Car.
"God was good to me that time," was the comment of a 5-year-old girl when she was taken from the fender of a rapidly moving Northeast car at Locust street and Independence avenue about 1 o'clock yesterday afternoon. And while a dozen grown-ups, who had witnessed her narrow escape from death, were yet struggling to recover their equanimity, she calmly caught hold of the hand of her uncle, John Reed of Kansas City, Kas., and walked away.
The child had become separated from her uncle and, in attempting to catch up with him, tried to cross the car tracks in front of the car. Before the motorman, C. M. Johnson, could stop, the car struck the little one, who was caught by the fender. The car was brought to a quick halt and Johnson and the conductor, H. L. Moe, ran to the front, expecting to find her mangled remains beneath the wheels. Instead, she was seated on the fender, not greatly disturbed by the accident. She left the scene with her uncle before her name and address could be ascertained.

There was a carriage house for the horses behind our home.

An identical house sat next to ours, where a 1950's ranch house sits now.

The library computer is hard to navigate.

Our neighborhood was one of the first "sub-divisions" of Kansas City. People started to move to our neighborhood to escape the wild area known as "downtown."

There is a special link on the Missouri Valley Special Collections room computer called the Sanborn Maps page. Sanborn Maps were originally created for assessing fire insurance liability in urbanized areas in the United States. The maps include detailed information regarding town and building information in approximately 12,000 U.S. towns and cities from 1867 to 1970.

Our house is on the map from 1896. I can see it. The 8 houses across the street from us did not exist. The lot where the Honduran Restaurant, the post office and nail-hut sits had only one big mansion on it.

That's it. That is all I learned, so far. Konrad Adenauer said "History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided."

I probably could of avoided this trip to the Missouri Valley Special Collections room.

But then I probably would of never known that we, like our friends in Olathe and Lee's Summit, live in a suburb rife with dangerous public transportation.

Until next week, watch for streetcars!

Ron (and Jon and Atticus)