For years, Michael Zeller looked at the lonely, rusting railway bridge crossing the Missouri river and wondered whether something could be done with it. No train had crossed it since 1980. It was useless, but structurally sound and eye-catching. If anything, it was a relic of Kansas City’s disappeared past as the epicentre of the cattle industry in the United States.
The Stockyards, the fabled 55 acres of holding pens in the city, earned KC its early 20th century reputation as a brawling, rambunctious saloon town. But by the time Zeller had returned to live in his home city after periods in Europe, it was done.
“I think the last cow was sold in 1992,” he tells me one morning when we visited the Rock Island Bridge.
“But the Stockyards was pretty much dead in the 1970s. For business reasons, the industry started to locate the feed lots and slaughter houses closer to source. We are right on the edge of the Great Plains – 600 miles to Denver, just graduating upwards towards the Rockies.
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“You can imagine how much bovine was out there. So, if you drive out on to the Plains and go to Garden City, Kansas or down in Oklahoma, you’ll know you are there. Put it that way. Because they smell like cattle. KC was ‘Cowtown’, a saloon town right up through the Depression. My mother, she grew up on the other side of Kansas City and she would tell me in the summer time, that, oh God, you could really smell it, because there would be 15 to 20,000 cattle in the stockyards. And four big packing houses on the other side of the river where the produce would all be put on rail and shipped east.”
The Rock Island railroad company built a bridge in 1905 to shuttle livestock across the river. After the cattle disappeared the bridge was used by passenger trains, but when that stopped, in 1980, it was less expensive to leave it than to tear it down. Structurally, it has remained immaculate in the decades since.
“The bridge was never salted in the winter time, ” Zeller explains. “It has a patina of rust on it, but it is not shot through with rust. It was never salted in winter time, as a car bridge would have to be.”
In his years working with Kansas PBS, Zeller habitually suggested to city officials that something should be done to make the bridge a feature – maybe a few benches and seats and a vendor selling fried chicken. But the city had bigger issues. One former mayor used to tease Zeller by calling him “chicken boy”. When he celebrated his 50th birthday, he realised that the only person who would make it come alive again was himself.
He is now on the threshold of what has, over the past nine years, ballooned into a comprehensive $22 million reimagining of a symbol of the old Midwest. The public-private facility will serve as a public amenity, featuring weekend markets, access to levee trail heads and facilities for hikers, a live concert venue and a tabled restaurant incorporated within the original structure. Kansas City is the host city for the football teams from England, Argentina and Holland for this summer’s World Cup. Rock Island Bridge will be open before they arrive.
The rebirth of the bridge is significant in that it is symbolic of the slow renaissance of a city that had felt moribund when Zeller and his peers were growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. There was, he concedes now, something of an inferiority complex that came with growing up in Midwestern cities in the decades when their essential point, be it manufacturing or industry, or, in the case of Kansas, livestock, had already passed.
“I have a broad theory that after World War Two, a lot of America went national. But we stayed local and it was... terrible. It seemed like the only good things happening were in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Whether that was true or not, perception made it true. Unlike Europe, we had lost our connection to our historic brands and tradition. You go to Parma, Italy and you will get Parma ham. And starting in the ’90s with coffee and beer, people started rallying around this local thing again. People are proud of their locality now, unlike 30 years ago. And I think it is part of a broader thing of creating centres.”
Reclaiming the bridge from generations of teenagers who dragged old couches and beer kegs up there for parties (no bad use in itself) is part of that broader story. The intensifying property and cost-of-living crisis that has gripped the US has cast mid-sized cities, once-unfashionable places such as Kansas, in a new, appealing glow. Less traffic. Less hassle. Affordable living. A better quality of life. Regal, Superbowl-chomping performances by the city’s football team, the Kansas City Chiefs, over the past number of years have placed the city in the national mind’s eye.
Kansas City has retained several major meat processing plants, but has also become something of a tech and bio science hub, with a reputation for technical design excellence. It has developed an imaginative restaurant culture framed around its reputation for burnt-ends barbecue. Even its once-deserted downtown is undergoing a revival.
‘There has been a great return, not just to Kansas City, yes, but to places like Milwaukee – these middle-sized cities with infrastructure that is ripe for reinvention’
— Michael Zeller
“You could have fired a cannon gun off in the ’90s and not hit anyone downtown. It was empty – just a daytime place of commerce. But there are about 30,000 people living downtown now,” Zeller says.
“There has been a great return, not just to Kansas City, yes, but to places like Milwaukee – these middle-sized cities with infrastructure that is ripe for reinvention. Everything has been more intensively exploited in the great cities. There is just more room to experiment here, culturally and physically.”
Moreover, the official reopening of the bridge offers another natural connection between the two sides of a city that are divided not only by the Missouri river but by state lines. Zeller points to the steps on leading up to the structure and says that, while we are in Missouri, the Kansas state line starts with those steps.
It’s an invisible line that has created a world of complexity for the 2.2 million people who live in Kansas City’s 14-county metro area. The state line “kind of lobotomises” the city, as Zeller puts it. Fifty seven per cent live in Missouri, 43 per cent in Kansas. So, locals are part of the same city, but within different states. State identity is important in America – particularly given the turbulent Kansas/Missouri history, considering that the former entered the Union as a free state, in 1861.
As we tour the bridge, Zeller stops to describe the method the workers used to hammer in red-hot bolts, which expanded. He shakes his head as he observes that many workers would have turned up on horseback. Now, it is set to become a feature in 21st century Kansas, where last preparations are under way for the arrival of football’s blue bloods.
“We are going to have a peace party on the bridge for the England and Argentina fans,” he says hopefully.
That’s when they’ll know they’re not quite in Kansas any more, nor Missouri either.
