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Early Kansas City was a terrific place to make money. Many entrepreneurs seized opportunities in grain, livestock, banking, distribution and retail and established lifestyles that rivaled those of the East Coast's wealthy and upper middle classes. But the luxury and distinction of their homes rarely extended beyond their gates. Middle class neighborhoods were planned by developers for ready access to the public trolley and cable car lines rather than for pleasant living conditions. Poorer workers, the new immigrants and the unemployed crowded into tenements in the neighborhoods left behind by the well-to-do as they moved to newly fashionable districts. Scattered throughout the city were patches of blatant poverty where people lived in ramshackle houses, shanty towns, even tent villages. Zoning was unheard of and no proposal that limited commercial use of land had a chance. Most early attempts at creating civic order through beauty or family recreation fizzled and died.
Citizens weren't interested in taxes for improvements, and in the nationally booming real estate market of the 1880's, property was a commodity not to be beautified, -but to be sold at a profit. Business leaders countered criticism of their city's aesthetic shortcomings by pointing to its astonishing prosperity. Confronting these issues was less a matter of leadership than of setting priorities. Kansas City has strong leaders, but their primary focus had been securing the town's economic future after the devastation of the Civil War. They had not set out to tackle "quality of life" in the growing city. Then William Rockhill Nelson came to town.
When Nelson arrived from Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1880 with his mind made up to build a successful newspaper, he cast a critical eye on his newly adopted city. Soon after, he fired the first shot in what was soon to become a raging local battle over the importance of urban amenities. "The pinching economy, the picayunish policy, the miserable parsimony, which characterize our city government must be abandoned", he wrote in an early issue of his evening paper, the Kansas City Star. "Kansas City needs good streets, good sidewalks, good sewers, decent public buildings, better street lights, more fire protection, a more efficient police and many other things." The idea that the highest purpose of cities was to make life better was a radical departure from the goal of landowners and businessmen who believed the first order of business was lining their own pockets. But Nelson had time and ink. For thirty-five years, as editor of the city's most popular newspaper, Nelson crusaded for civic improvements with an emphasis on parks and boulevards and well developed neighborhoods. At first he alienated readers. Then, people began to agree with him.
Though many opposed him and his crusade, Nelson's vision was shared by a number of influential civic leaders including millionaire smelting plant owner August R. Meyer.
Born in St. Louis, and educated in Europe, Meyer was a metallurgist who had established a modem ore reduction works in California Gulch, Colorado and helped incorporate the little town of Leadville less than a year before silver was discovered there. The silver rush boasted the town's population from 300 to 30,000 in three years. In those years, Meyer made his fortune, and in 1881 he left Colorado to establish a smelting company in Kansas City. He settled his home in the fashionable northeast section of Kansas City, and on early morning horseback rides along the bluffs of the Missouri River, he pondered the importance of enjoying natural beauty within a city's limit. He conceived the idea of a boulevard to the bluffs, culminating in a drive through a park there.
A vigorous social and civic leader with a sophisticated view of urban life and its amenities, Meyer eloquently pushed his ideas for the city of the future. He urged the business community to see social action and civic responsibility as corollaries to economic development. "A period of activity has suddenly tra11sformed a village into a city", he said. "We have attracted a large population and we fail to realize that this change imposes entirely new conditions and brings new problems". Meyer believed the answer to these problems did not lie with more people, more outside capital and expanded manufacturing. Instead, the city needed to develop its citizens' human faculties through education, good city planning and beautification. Other leaders heard his message and agreed. "Make Kansas City a good place to live in" became their unofficial slogan.
Considering the condition of the city at that time, this rallying cry seemed a shout into the wind. Instead, as the future would prove, the slogan reflected fairly the vision and courage of the city's early champions of open spaces and boulevards.
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