The Paseo

The Paseo is Kansas City’s first grand boulevard — a roughly ten-mile, 85-block landscaped parkway running north-south through the center of the city, from Cliff Drive on the Missouri River bluffs to 85th Street and Woodland Avenue.¹ Proposed by the Board of Park Commissioners in 1893 and designed by landscape architect George E. Kessler under board president August R. Meyer, it was named at Meyer’s suggestion for Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma and built as the showpiece of the City Beautiful movement in Kansas City, with sunken gardens, a Doric pergola, and monumental fountains.¹²³ For most of the 20th century it was also the ceremonial spine of Black Kansas City — the address of the Paseo YMCA, where the Negro National League was founded in 1920 — and in 2019 its name became the subject of the only successful citizen referendum in American history to reverse the naming of a street for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.⁴

Route and extent

The Paseo runs approximately 10 miles (16 km), or 85 blocks, north to south through east-central Kansas City, Missouri.¹ Its northern terminus is at Cliff Drive and Lexington Avenue, above the Missouri River bluffs in Pendleton Heights; its southern terminus is 85th Street and Woodland Avenue.¹

It runs roughly eight blocks east of Troost Avenue and parallel to it — a proximity that matters more than the distance. Troost was the line the city used to divide itself; the Paseo was the grand address on the Black side of that line. The two streets are best read together.

History

Conception and design (1893-1899)

The Paseo originated with the 1893 plan of the newly formed Board of Park Commissioners, led by its first president August R. Meyer, and drawn by landscape architect George E. Kessler as the backbone of an interconnected system of parks and boulevards.²³ Meyer proposed the name after Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma; paseo translates from Spanish as walk, way, or promenade.³ The design belongs squarely to the City Beautiful movement: a divided, tree-lined double roadway with landscaped interior parks, conceived as “a series of small parks” strung along a route — a thoroughfare and a linear park at once.¹³

The original scope ran 9th Street south to 17th Street.³ The first phase was completed in 1899, between Admiral Boulevard and 17th Street.²³ Kessler’s involvement was famously hands-on: he is said to have marked tree-planting locations “by stamping the heel of his boot into the ground.”³

The original ornament

The Paseo’s early stretches carried the most elaborate public landscape architecture Kansas City had built:

• The Pergola — a Beaux-Arts colonnade of Doric columns designed by architect John Van Brunt in 1899, wound with wisteria, stepping down three terraced levels from 10th Street south toward 11th.¹⁵
• The Sunken Garden — a formal garden including a Spanish cannon and terrace, built around a 19-foot circular limestone retaining wall.⁵
• Fountains — large basins described by contemporaries as reminiscent of Versailles.¹ The Women’s Leadership Fountain at 9th and The Paseo, originally dedicated in 1899, is Kansas City’s oldest working fountain.³
• A memorial to August R. Meyer at 10th Street, honoring the park board’s first president.³
• Troost Lake and the adjoining park land, folded into the same recreational logic.⁵

What the boulevard cost the people already there

The Paseo’s construction was not built through empty ground. Its right-of-way acquisition evicted African American families, who were displaced into other already-overcrowded quarters of the city.¹ This is the boulevard’s founding contradiction and it recurs through everything that follows: a public amenity of genuine beauty, produced in part by removing Black residents, which then became the most prestigious address available to Black Kansas City once the surrounding neighborhoods changed.

Extension south (1900-1919)

As Kansas City’s population moved south, the park board kept buying. Land acquisition was complete from Independence Boulevard south to 77th Street by 1917, and by 1919 the boulevard had been extended far to the south, linking to Linwood and Armour Boulevards along the way.³ The full modern route to 85th Street followed.

Northeast News records that Theodore Roosevelt delivered dedicatory remarks for the boulevard.³ The date and Roosevelt’s office at the time are not given, and the 1899 first-phase completion predates his presidency (1901-1909) — so the occasion was most likely a later ceremony or one held while he was governor or vice president. The claim is recorded here as sourced but not dated.

”A ribbon of white” — the 1920s

By the 1920s the Paseo’s own blocks were an anomaly: a corridor of white households running through an increasingly Black east side, to the point that more than half the area’s white population held Paseo addresses.¹ The boulevard was the desirable street; the surrounding grid was not.

The spine of Black Kansas City (1914-1970)

The pattern inverted over the next five decades, and the Paseo became the ceremonial center of Black Kansas City.

• The Paseo YMCA, completed in 1914 at 1824 Paseo (19th and the Paseo), was the segregation-era city’s most important Black civic building — the only facility in Kansas City with an indoor swimming pool open to African Americans, and a meeting hall for Black social clubs and study groups.⁴⁶
• On February 13, 1920, Rube Foster convened eight independent Black team owners in that building and founded the Negro National League — the event that makes the Paseo YMCA a site of national baseball history and the reason the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum sits a block away.⁴⁶
• The 18th and Vine district, the center of Kansas City jazz and Black commercial life, sits directly on the boulevard’s path.¹
• Gates Bar-B-Q — one of the two pillars of Kansas City barbecue — keeps its corporate headquarters and flagship restaurant at 1325 E. Emanuel Cleaver II Blvd, at the Brush Creek crossing a block west of the boulevard.⁷
• Paseo High School (today Paseo Academy of Fine and Performing Arts) traces the demographic turn with unusual precision. Local historian Diane Euston gives the school as all-white in 1954 and 99 percent Black by 1970 — a complete inversion inside sixteen years, produced by blockbusting, restrictive covenants west of Troost, and the school-boundary manipulation described at Troost Corridor.⁸ (A secondary rendering of the same statistic reports “10 percent white in 1954”; the figure above is taken from Euston’s own text.)

By 1969 the corridor was overwhelmingly African American.⁴ The Paseo thus carries a double inheritance: a Kessler-plan landmark prized by preservationists, and the backbone of the historic Black east side — a duality that made the 2019 renaming fight far harder than a simple question of who deserves a street.

The renaming saga (2019-2021)

On January 24, 2019, the City Council voted 8-4 to rename the Paseo Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. A citizen petition drive — Save the Paseo — forced the question onto the November 5, 2019 ballot as Question 5, and voters reversed the renaming roughly 69 percent to 31 percent. It was the first successful citizen referendum to undo an MLK street designation in the United States. In April 2021 the Parks Board resolved the impasse by naming a connected Blue Parkway / Swope Parkway / Volker Boulevard route for Dr. King instead — a route that crosses Troost.⁴

The full account, including the procedural dispute over the waived two-thirds resident-consent requirement, the petition numbers, and the national reaction, is at The Paseo / MLK Boulevard Renaming Saga. It is not repeated here.

Preservation and present-day work

On August 9, 2016, the Kansas City Parks and Boulevards Historic District was listed in the National Register of Historic Places — a district comprising Kessler Park, Penn Valley Park, and The Parade, connected by seven boulevards including The Paseo, Independence, Gladstone, Linwood, Armour, Benton, and Broadway.⁵⁹

Current public work on the corridor centers on its northern end. The city’s Paseo Gateway Project is reconstructing the Paseo Boulevard / Independence Boulevard intersection, adding turn lanes, sidewalks on both sides, a 10-foot two-way cycle track on the east side of the Paseo north of Admiral and another on the north side of Independence west of the Paseo, plus a new at-grade intersection at Cliff Drive and Paseo.¹⁰ A separate Paseo Blvd. Shared Use Path project is also on the city’s capital list.¹¹

Landmarks along the boulevard

North to south:

• Cliff Drive and the Historic Northeast bluffs — northern terminus
• Women’s Leadership Fountain (9th and Paseo, dedicated 1899) — Kansas City’s oldest working fountain³
• The Pergola and Sunken Garden (10th-11th Streets)¹⁵
• August R. Meyer memorial (10th Street)³
• Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences (Independence Ave and Paseo)¹
• Paseo YMCA / Buck O’Neil Education and Research Center (1824 Paseo)⁶
• 18th and Vine — Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and American Jazz Museum¹
• Gates Bar-B-Q corporate headquarters and flagship (1325 E. Emanuel Cleaver II Blvd, at Brush Creek)⁷
• Paseo Academy of Fine and Performing Arts (formerly Paseo High School)¹
• Rockhurst University (52nd-54th Streets)¹

Registry businesses on or at the Paseo

Verified from the KS.City Registry as of 2026-07-26:

Business	Relationship to the boulevard
Gates Bar-B-Q	Corporate HQ and flagship at 1325 E. Emanuel Cleaver II Blvd — at the Brush Creek crossing, a block off the boulevard, not a Paseo address7
Yasmeen Cafe	1447 Independence Ave, at the corner of The Paseo (Historic Northeast)

Coverage of the boulevard’s own storefronts is thin in the Registry relative to Troost, where fifteen businesses carry verified Troost addresses. That gap is a real one, not an artifact of the Paseo having no commerce.

Relationship to Troost

The two corridors are the same story told from opposite sides of the line:

	Troost Avenue	The Paseo
Origin	A section-line street through the Porter plantation; named for a slaveholding physician	A designed City Beautiful parkway, named for a Mexico City promenade
Function in segregation	The boundary itself — covenants west, redlining east	The premier address inside the Black east side
Naming fight	”Truth” proposal, repeatedly stalled at council (2022-)	MLK renaming enacted then reversed by referendum (2019)
Today	Business-led reinvestment, $21M safety rebuild proposed	Historic-district protection; gateway reconstruction at the north end

Where Troost was a wall, the Paseo was a showpiece — and both were shaped by the same municipal decisions. Kansas City’s segregation was not only a matter of what was withheld from the east side; it was also a matter of what was built there, who was moved to build it, and who was later permitted to live on it.

Sources

Footnotes

1. Wikipedia — “The Paseo (Kansas City, Missouri).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paseo_(Kansas_City,_Missouri) — asserts: ~10 miles / 85 blocks from Cliff Drive and Lexington Ave (Pendleton Heights) to 85th and Woodland; laid out in the early 1900s by George Kessler under August Meyer, first Parks Commission president; named for Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma at Meyer’s suggestion; conceived as “a series of small parks” with formal sunken gardens, a pergola, and large fountains reminiscent of Versailles; Beaux-Arts pergola of Doric columns designed by John Van Brunt in 1899, decorated with wisteria; construction required the eviction of African American families displaced into other overcrowded quarters; by the 1920s the Paseo was “a ribbon of white in an otherwise black village,” with over half the area’s white population holding Paseo addresses; institutions along the route (Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences, Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, American Jazz Museum, Rockhurst 52nd-54th, Paseo Academy, Gates BBQ headquarters at 4621 Paseo); 2019 renaming timeline (Jan 24 council vote, Apr 26 petition, Nov 5 vote). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵

2. Kansas City Parks and Boulevards System (KS.City Wiki) and its source, Wikipedia — “The Paseo (Kansas City, Missouri)” — asserts: the 1893 Kessler plan, Meyer’s championing role, and the Paseo’s status as the city’s first major boulevard within the system. ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Northeast News — “History of The Paseo.” https://northeastnews.net/pages/history-of-the-paseo/ — asserts: proposed 1893 by the Parks Board under August R. Meyer; original scope 9th to 17th Street; first phase completed 1899 between Admiral Boulevard and 17th Street; land acquisition complete from Independence Boulevard south to 77th Street by 1917; designer George Kessler; name from the Paseo de la Reforma, paseo = walk/way/promenade; City Beautiful movement; terraces, sunken gardens, fountains and memorials; 10th Street memorial to August R. Meyer; Women’s Leadership Fountain at 9th and The Paseo, originally dedicated 1899, “Kansas City’s oldest working fountain”; Kessler marked tree plantings “by stamping the heel of his boot into the ground”; Theodore Roosevelt delivered dedicatory remarks (date and office not stated). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³

4. The Paseo / MLK Boulevard Renaming Saga (2019) (KS.City Wiki) — asserts: the January 24, 2019 council vote (8-4, Ordinance No. 180828); the Save the Paseo petition and November 5, 2019 Question 5 referendum (~69%-31%, ~31,000 to ~13,900); the first successful citizen referendum reversing an MLK street naming in U.S. history; the April 13, 2021 Parks Board resolution renaming Blue Parkway / Swope Parkway / Volker Boulevard; Paseo YMCA completed 1914, the only indoor pool open to African Americans, site of the February 1920 Negro National League founding; the corridor overwhelmingly African American by 1969. (That page’s own footnotes carry publication names and dates but no URLs — a standing Iron Rule gap flagged in Open Questions below.) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

5. Kansas City Parks and Recreation — “The Paseo.” https://kcparks.org/places/paseo/ — asserts: land acquisition began 1893; broad tree-lined double roadway with narrow interior parks completed Admiral to 17th in 1899; the Pergola’s three terraced levels descending from 10th Street toward 11th with a latticed wood roof on vine-wound columns; the Sunken Garden’s Spanish cannon and terrace and 19-foot circular limestone retaining wall; Troost Lake; extension far to the south by 1919; the Kansas City Parks and Boulevards Historic District listed in the National Register August 9, 2016. (kcparks.org returns HTTP 403 to automated fetches; content verified via search-index extraction 2026-07-26.) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

6. Paseo YMCA (KS.City Wiki) — asserts: 1824 Paseo, built 1914, segregated branch YMCA serving Kansas City’s Black community, now the Buck O’Neil Education and Research Center under the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, currently under restoration. ↩ ↩² ↩³

7. Gates Bar-B-Q — “Corporate Headquarters” (official site). https://gatesbbq.com/locations/corporate-headquarters/ — asserts: the corporate headquarters address is 1325 East Emanuel Cleaver Blvd., Kansas City, MO 64110 (page text read directly 2026-07-26). This confirms the KS.City Registry page gates-bar-b-q, which lists the Cleaver Blvd location as the Corporate-HQ flagship. It contradicts the “4621 Paseo Blvd” corporate address circulated by Wikipedia ¹ and by search-engine business panels, which the company’s own site does not support — 4621 Paseo may be a former address, but it should not be asserted. on whether 4621 Paseo was ever a Gates address. (Operational note: gatesbbq.com currently has a broken DNS delegation — the domain is registered and active through 2027-03-07 on Network Solutions/worldnic nameservers and resolves via Google’s 8.8.8.8 to 165.140.69.238, but SOA lookups return SERVFAIL and Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 returns nothing, so the site is unreachable for some visitors. The address above was retrieved by resolving the IP directly. The Registry page’s website: field points at this domain.) ↩ ↩² ↩³

8. Diane Euston (with contributing historian Tim Reidy) — “Dissecting the Troost Divide and Racial Segregation in Kansas City,” The New Santa Fe Trailer (2020-06-30). https://newsantafetrailer.blogspot.com/2020/06/dissecting-troost-divide-and-racial.html — asserts: Paseo High School 100% white in 1954 and 99% Black by 1970; blockbuster Bob Wood’s method; 75% of the east-side population African American by 1920. (Euston was also the lead petitioner of the 2019 Save the Paseo campaign — see paseo-mlk-renaming-saga — which is disclosed here because she is cited on the same boulevard’s history.) ↩

9. Kansas City Parks and Boulevards Historic District, National Register of Historic Places nomination (NPS ref. 14000931). https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/14000931 — asserts: the district’s composition (Kessler Park, Penn Valley Park, and The Parade, connected by seven boulevards including The Paseo, Independence, Gladstone, Linwood, Armour, Benton, and Broadway). (The same 343-page nomination cited on gladstone §Naming and historic-northeast. Note the listing-date discrepancy: NPS reference 14000931 carries a 2016 listing, while ⁵ gives August 9, 2016 specifically — consistent, but the reference number’s “14” prefix indicates a 2014 nomination submission.) ↩

10. City of Kansas City, Missouri — “Paseo Gateway Project,” Capital Projects Division. https://www.kcmo.gov/Home/Components/FacilityDirectory/FacilityDirectory/140/1750 — asserts: reconstruction of the Paseo Blvd / Independence Blvd intersection; new dedicated left-turn lanes on Independence; new sidewalks on both sides of both streets; a 10-foot two-way cycle track on the east side of Paseo north of Admiral and another on the north side of Independence west of Paseo; a new at-grade intersection at Cliff Drive and Paseo; project in design. ↩

11. City of Kansas City, Missouri — “Paseo Blvd. Shared Use Path,” Capital Projects Division. https://www.kcmo.gov/Home/Components/FacilityDirectory/FacilityDirectory/197/1750 — asserts: a separate shared-use-path capital project on Paseo Boulevard. ↩