Kansas City Off the Beaten Path Tips by AlbuqRay

In the park behind the jazz museum is a monument to Charlie "Yardbird" Parker. The Kansas City skyline is in the background.

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The historical Barker Temple is just around the corner from the Jazz and Negro Baseball League museums at 17th and Highland. The cornerstone says it was built in 1925 (during the heydays of the jazz district). It is still in use today as the Memorial Missionary Baptist Church.

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I originally called this tip, "Funky Buildings Near Troost and Linwood Blvd." and said "I wonder who built the building with its blue front and round windows on the side. Now it is the home of ASAP Bail Bonds, a great name I must say. For sure I would want my bail bond as soon as possible. It's located at Linwood and Forest, one block east of Troost." Little did I know what the building had been. The blue front and round windows just happened to catch my eye.

It turns out in trying to determine what the Troost Community Market building used to be, I found out that the RSC stands for Russell Stover Candies! This was one of its early locations in Kansas City. Take a look at the 1989 picture in the Kansas City Public Library collection. It may have also been the location of Russell's Restaurant.

Russell Stover was born in 1888 in a sod house in northwest Kansas. Clara Lewis was a farm girl too. She was born six years earlier in Iowa. They met at the University of Iowa and later married. It was in Omaha that a chap approached Stover with the chocolate-covered ice cream bar idea. In 1921 the Stovers introduced an edible "brainstorm" named the "I-Scream" bar, which was later called the "Eskimo Pie." It was a chocolate-covered ice cream square in a little bag. They produced and sold it for a year. After the first mad surge for the novelty, sales dropped off and the Stovers bailed out with $25,000.

They moved to Denver where they began "Mrs. Stover's Bungalow Candies." In 1931 they moved their by-now thriving business to Kansas City. There they barely weathered the Depression and the sugar-short World War II years that followed. However, they emerged with a multi-million dollar a year enterprise and world-wide sales. For two decades the business carried the name "Mrs. Stover's Bungalow Candies," but in 1943 it became "Russell Stover Candies."

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There is an interesting building with covered parking on the northeast corner of Linwood Blvd. and Troost Avenue (Linwood is essentially 32nd). It opened in 1930 as a Firestone Store designed by the architect, Charles A. Smith and a little later survived a large fire.

Before that, the location (which was on the corner north of the Elesmere family hotel) was also near the site of the fine home of Alexander G. Sutherland, which was listed in the 1905 city directory as 3125 Troost. Now it is the home of Best Deal and in the summertime, it hosts the Troost Community Market which combines fresh produce, crafts, and activities with fashion shows and music.

The 3125 Troost address had had a prestigous owner before. He was the richest man ever to live in Kansas City, Lamon Harkness or L. V. Harkness, who lived in Kansas City from 1888 to 1891 in "a brownstone mansion on Linwood Boulevard east of Troost Avenue. Upon his death in 1915 he left an estate of $150 million dollars, garnered from Standard Oil money." There are many neat old buildings in this area of Kansas City, if they could only tell us what they know.

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During a May 07 trip to Kansas City, I spotted an abandoned but fascinating looking building at 20th and Vine near the railroad tracks. I figured it was the former castle of a rich person. It is far from that! Some research on the Kansas City Library's online history pages yielded..."The building is known as the Vine Street Workhouse. It was designed by Wallace Love and built with the help of prisoners between 1895 and 1897. Prisoners also helped quarry the native limestone used in the structure. Until 1911, the castle-like building served as a municipal prison complete with dungeons in the basement to house the toughest offenders."

The internet also tells that when the Workhouse was built, "The Paseo [which runs parallel to Vine] was the home of the Jewish gentry of Kansas City, who were largely barred from Scarritt and some of the other then fashionable areas of KC. Also nearby was the Millionaires Row of Troost where even one of the partners with the Rockefeller's in Standard Oil lived. At the time Independence Avenue was another affluent address and of course the gentry passed here often as it fed off of the north end of Paseo. So I suppose to have stuck an unglamorous public works building here would have been unthinkable, so big brother chose a very nice castle instead." As late as 1969, the structure housed the city's sewer maintenance offices. It certainly has a varied history.

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