50 Fun Facts About Kansas City

Thanks to more than 200 working public water features, what is KC's official nickname?

Locals like to say only Rome has more; the biggest privately funded ones sit behind the outfield at the Royals' ballpark.

Which NFL team plays its home games at Arrowhead Stadium?

Opened in 1972, Arrowhead is now the oldest stadium in the AFC and the largest sports venue in Missouri.

Kansas City's Major League Baseball team is named after which annual event, held in the city since 1899?

The American Royal is a livestock show, horse show, rodeo and barbecue championship rolled into one, and it beat out other suggested names because of its pageantry.

Which greeting-card company has been based in Kansas City since Joyce Hall moved there in 1910?

The company still runs the Crown Center complex around its headquarters, and it also owns Crayola.

Along with brown sugar and tomatoes, which ingredient defines thick, sweet Kansas City-style barbecue sauce?

The sweetness is relatively modern: Henry Perry's original sauce was harsh and peppery, and the molasses style spread with KC Masterpiece in the 1970s.

Burnt ends, the Kansas City barbecue delicacy, are cut from the point of which smoked meat?

They were once handed out free at the counter while customers waited, long before food writers made them a menu item in their own right.

Which political boss dominated Kansas City by 1925 and helped launch Truman's career?

The machine collapsed in 1939 when its boss pleaded guilty to tax evasion, and the crackdown that followed ended the city's jazz heyday too.

Which future president ran a Kansas City haberdashery and became a Jackson County judge in 1922?

The shop failed in the early-1920s recession, and he was famously still paying off the debts years into his political career.

Before moving to Kansas City in 1963, Lamar Hunt's AFL team spent three seasons where?

As the Dallas Texans they had just won the 1962 AFL title, but they could not out-draw the NFL's Cowboys in the same town.

Kansas City's NFL team is named for the nickname of which figure, who lured it from Texas?

Bartle earned the nickname 'The Chief' as a Boy Scouts executive; a fan contest picked the name over keeping 'Texans'.

Which team did Kansas City beat 23-7 in Super Bowl IV, the last before the AFL-NFL merger?

The Vikings were 12.5-point favourites; Len Dawson won MVP and mob boss Nick Civella was later caught on tape discussing bets on the game.

What reading did Arrowhead Stadium hit in September 2014 to regain the loudest-crowd record?

The record was set against the Patriots on Monday Night Football, taking it back from Seattle's CenturyLink Field.

The Royals have won the World Series twice: 1985 and which other year?

They beat the Mets in five games, a year after losing Game 7 to the Giants at home in 2014.

Which pharmaceutical executive founded the Royals in 1969 and now has the ballpark named after him?

He commissioned the stadium's outfield fountains, said to be the largest privately funded fountains in the world.

Which major-league team played in Kansas City from 1955 to 1967 before moving to Oakland?

Senator Stuart Symington threatened baseball's antitrust exemption over the move, which is how the city got the Royals two years later.

Under what name did Kansas City's Major League Soccer club begin play in 1996?

A trademark dispute turned the Wiz into the Wizards after one season; the club became Sporting Kansas City with its 2010 rebrand.

Which NBA franchise played in Kansas City from 1972 to 1985 before leaving for California?

For their first three seasons they were the Kansas City-Omaha Kings, splitting home games between the two cities.

The NHL's Kansas City Scouts (1974–76) are the ancestor of which current franchise?

The Scouts became the Colorado Rockies in 1976 and moved again to New Jersey in 1982.

Which bebop pioneer, nicknamed 'Bird', was born in Kansas City, Kansas in 1920?

He learned by hanging around the alleys behind the Twelfth Street clubs, and his sound came to define the leap from swing to bebop.

Which pianist joined Bennie Moten's orchestra in 1929 before forming his own famous big band?

After Moten died in 1935, Basie built a new band from the remnants and took the Kansas City swing style national.

The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum shares its 18th and Vine building with a museum devoted to what?

Buck O'Neil, the former Monarchs first baseman, sat on the baseball museum's board until his death in 2006.

Which future Brooklyn Dodger hit .387 as the Kansas City Monarchs' shortstop in 1945?

The Monarchs also gave the Negro Leagues Satchel Paige at his peak, and their run from 1920 to 1955 makes them the longest-lived franchise in that history.

Which cartoonist founded Kansas City's Laugh-O-Gram Studio in 1921, two years before it went bankrupt?

The studio's staff included Ub Iwerks, Friz Freleng and Hugh Harman, and its last film, Alice's Wonderland, became the pitch that launched the Disney studio in Hollywood.

Which novelist spent six months as a cub reporter at The Kansas City Star before joining the Red Cross in WWI?

He later credited the paper's style sheet, with its 'short sentences' and 'vigorous English', as the best rules he ever learned for writing.

Which architect designed Union Station, opened in 1914 as the third-largest US train station?

Traffic peaked at 678,363 passengers in 1945; the building was rescued by a five-county bistate sales tax approved in 1996 and reopened in 1999.

The 1933 Kansas City massacre outside Union Station was an attempt to free which captured fugitive?

Four lawmen and Nash himself died in the gunfire, and the FBI responded by arming all of its agents for the first time.

Which Kansas City landmark, dedicated in 1926, was designated the country's official WWI museum by Congress in 2004?

At night the top of the 217-foot tower emits a 'flame' of steam lit by red and orange lights, visible across the city.

Which French marshal attended the 1921 groundbreaking of Kansas City's WWI monument?

Pershing, Britain's Admiral Beatty, Italy's General Diaz and Belgium's General Jacques joined him before a crowd of 200,000, the only time all five met in one place.

The Country Club Plaza (1923) was built in Baroque and Moorish Revival style echoing which Spanish city?

Its tallest building is a half-size replica of that city's Giralda tower, and the project was mocked as 'Nichols' Folly' because the valley was pig-farming land.

On which night each year are Kansas City's Country Club Plaza holiday lights switched on?

The tradition grew from a single strand of 16 coloured bulbs hung over a doorway in 1925; the formal ceremony began in 1930.

Giant sculptures of what object have stood on the lawn of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art since 1994?

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen imagined the museum building as a badminton net; each of the four weighs 5,500 pounds and stands nearly 18 feet tall.

Which two definitive Kansas City barbecue restaurants trace their roots to Henry Perry's pit?

Charlie Bryant took over Perry's restaurant in 1940, brother Arthur renamed it in 1946, and Perry's cook Arthur Pinkard co-founded Gates the same year.

Which Kansas City-born essayist called a local rib joint 'the single best restaurant in the world'?

The line made a counter-service rib joint on Brooklyn Avenue a pilgrimage site for presidents and food writers alike.

Henry Perry, father of Kansas City barbecue, migrated from near which other barbecue capital?

He sold slow-cooked ribs wrapped in newsprint for 25 cents a slab, working out of a trolley barn in the 18th and Vine district.

Which sweet tomato-based sauce, created by a Kansas City child psychiatrist, was sold to Clorox in 1986?

Rich Davis kept the right to run restaurants under the name, and his recipe is the reason the local sauces turned sweet.

Which French fur-trading family founded Kansas City's first permanent settlement in 1821?

François Chouteau's landing of warehouses and dwellings moved several times because of floods but the French Canadian trappers stayed put.

When the settlement was incorporated on June 1, 1850, what was it called?

It became the City of Kansas in 1853 and only took the name Kansas City in 1889, partly to stop confusion with the Kansas Territory.

Which 1869 bridge, the first across the Missouri, made Kansas City a rail hub?

Kansas City won the crossing over rival Leavenworth, Kansas; the designer, Octave Chanute, later became a mentor to the Wright brothers.

Which Civil War battle in today's Kansas City on 23 October 1864 ended Sterling Price's Missouri raid?

Sometimes called the 'Gettysburg of the West', it was one of the largest engagements fought west of the Mississippi.

Landscape architect George Kessler gave Kansas City more boulevards than any city except which one?

The system, 132 miles of boulevards and parkways, is why the city was nicknamed 'Paris of the Plains' and was named a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1974.

Swope Park in Kansas City covers 1,805 acres. Roughly how does that compare with New York's Central Park?

The park holds the city zoo, two golf courses, two lakes and the Starlight outdoor theatre.

Two suspended walkways collapsed during a 1981 tea dance in which Kansas City hotel, killing 114?

A change to the hanger-rod design doubled the load on one connection; the disaster is now a standard case study in engineering ethics.

Where was the wreck of the steamboat Arabia, sunk in the Missouri River in 1856, rediscovered in 1988?

The river had shifted so far that the Hawley family had to dig it out of a cornfield half a mile from the water, before spring planting.

Kansas City, Kansas is the county seat of which county?

The city and county merged into a single 'Unified Government' after a 1997 vote, one of the few consolidated city-counties in the country.

Which NASCAR track anchors the Village West development next to KCK's Legends shopping district?

The 1.5-mile tri-oval, with 15-degree banking, drew a casino, an IMAX, Nebraska Furniture Mart and the Sporting KC stadium to the same corner of the metro.

Which craft brewery, founded in Kansas City in 1989 with a used Bavarian brewhouse, is now Missouri's largest?

Belgium's Duvel Moortgat bought it in 2013, and its Unfiltered Wheat is the beer most likely to be poured at any Kansas City barbecue.

Kansas City's 2023 single-terminal airport replaced three older terminals nicknamed what?

The 1972 design let passengers park almost at the gate, which was loved by locals and hopeless once post-9/11 security screening arrived.

Missouri has two Federal Reserve Bank headquarters: Kansas City and which other city?

Kansas City owed its selection partly to Senator James Reed, who broke a tie to pass the Federal Reserve Act; the bank moved into a new building near Union Station in 2008.

Which two national political conventions has Kansas City hosted for the Republican Party?

The 1976 convention at Kemper Arena was the last one to open with the nomination genuinely undecided, as Ronald Reagan pushed Gerald Ford to the final ballot.

The Kansas City Current opened CPKC Stadium in 2024. Why did it make headlines beyond the city?

The 11,500-seat ground on the Berkley Riverfront broke ground in October 2022 and is the first privately financed stadium built exclusively for a professional women's soccer club.