West Bottoms

The West Bottoms is mostly characterized by brick high-rise historical industrial buildings, built in the early 1900s for major regional stockyards, train yards, and factories.

Recent European immigrants, native-born white and African Americans arrived to work in West Bottoms factories and settled in tenements and boarding houses there.

The area became known as a red-light district, with numerous saloons, gambling dens, and brothels catering to the high volume of railway passengers passing through Kansas City daily.

[6] In the late 1800s and early 1900s, immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe were recruited to work in West Bottoms meatpacking facilities due to strikes by local workers.

The plant built one craft per day and floated them more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km) down the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans, Louisiana, prompting their "Prairie Ships" nickname.

In 1903, a major flood damaged West Bottoms businesses, shut down water and power in the city, and persuaded developers to choose a new location for the Union station railway depot.