Kansas City Public Library: Emery, Bird, Thayer Met The Wrecking Ball

Press release from the Kansas City Public Library:

July 30, 2021

On Aug. 7, 1968, when the downtown Emery, Bird, Thayer department store closed for good, thousands of shoppers swarmed the huge building for a going-out-of-business sale.

Forty-one police officers were assigned to control the crowd, the size of which perhaps challenged even the throng that had invaded the store on July 11, 1896. On that date, six years after the building was erected, an estimated 5,000 shoppers ascended to the third floor by 10 a.m. for a shirtwaist sale. Some 9,619 of the newfangled button-down women’s blouses were discounted from $1.25 to 25 cents.

Called the “Big Store” in its early days — a 1915 story in The Star said there were “two acres of floor space” — EBT became a downtown institution and the king of Kansas City’s famous Petticoat Lane — a bustling block of 11th Street — during its nearly eight decades of operation. But with the emergence of malls and the resulting demise of retail shopping downtown, the end came on that hot summer day in 1968.

The historic structure would stand empty for nearly five years, then would be demolished and replaced by a surface parking lot for another 10-plus years before a bank headquarters was finally constructed.

Like many Kansas Citians, reader Jane Murphy wondered why EBT met the wrecking ball instead of being preserved and repurposed. Her question to “What’s Your KCQ?,” The Star’s ongoing series with the Kansas City Public Library that answers readers’ queries about our region:

Who was responsible for tearing down the beautiful Emery, Bird, Thayer and why did they?

Murphy was particularly befuddled because the structure had gained a place on the National Historic Registry just before being razed.

“I am puzzled and angry, and I have been for years, that that building was torn down,” the Overland Park resident said. “It was such a landmark building that it’s sickening that happened.”

Every tragedy needs a good villain, and the demise of the downtown Emery, Bird, Thayer building had a made-to-order villain: R. Crosby Kemper Jr.

President of a bank, scion of an influential family (with an arena, foundation and art museum named after it), powerful force in the community. But Kemper, who died in 2014, was a reluctant villain at best and, as it turned out, a somewhat remorseful one as well.

“It was a sore subject for him for a long time,” said his son, R. Crosby Kemper III, the longtime director of the Kansas City Public Library and now director for the Institute of Museum and Library Services in Washington, D.C.

Kemper Jr.’s City National Bank (later United Missouri Bank) obtained the EBT property shortly after the store closed. He told The Star in August 1972, “I bought the damn thing myself, and I didn’t sleep for nights. But the (bank) board saw the light and took it off my hands.”

His original idea was to bring in another business operation.

“He genuinely thought that it was a fine building, and he thought it could be a department store again,” his son said, indicating meetings with Marshall Field in Chicago and others proved fruitless.

At that point, Kemper Jr. decided to erect a headquarters building for City National Bank and hired the famous New York architect I.M. Pei to design it.

In the summer of 1972, as demolition began, he said he expected construction to commence in early 1973, telling The Star: “If anybody knows about a town, we ought to, and we’re putting our money where our mouth is, in the core of downtown. This town, what it really needs is pizzazz.”

Pei’s twin triangle-shaped office towers with 14 floors and glass facades certainly would have provided that. Instead, Kansas City got a big hole in the ground. When the final EBT brick was cleared in 1973, it left empty a full block along East 11th Street from Walnut to Grand.

“The Emery, Bird, Thayer building late last week was just like in the pictures of all those horribly bombed German cities,” Star columnist William D. Tammeus wrote.

The lot remained vacant until 1975, when Kemper Jr. announced he had abandoned the plans for a new headquarters and would build a surface parking lot. But it was a very nice parking lot, complete with a fountain, trees and objects salvaged from the EBT building.

This press release was produced by the Kansas City Public Library. The views expressed here are the author’s own.