The City of Fountains — with more fountains than any city in the world outside Rome, a jazz scene that shaped Count Basie and Charlie Parker in the 1930s, the most competitive slow-smoked barbecue culture in America, the Country Club Plaza (the first outdoor shopping centre in the world, opened 1922), and an art deco skyline defined by the 217-foot Liberty Memorial — the only World War I national monument in the United States
Kansas City (500,000; metro 2.2 million) straddles the Missouri-Kansas border — the Missouri side is the larger and more culturally significant of the two Kansas Cities (Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri are separate municipalities with a shared cultural identity). The city has more miles of boulevard than Paris and more fountains than any city in the world outside Rome — 200+ decorative fountains, including the J.C. Nichols Memorial Fountain (four bronze horses, 1960, Country Club Plaza), the iconic image of the city. Kansas City barbecue (burnt ends — the fatty, charred ends of…
The confluence of the Missouri and Kansas Rivers (the Kaw) was a major Osage Nation trade and settlement site before European contact — the area was called 'Fire Prairie' in Osage. The city grew from Westport Landing (established 1833 by John Calvin McCoy) and Kansas City (incorporated 1853) as the primary departure point for the Santa Fe, Oregon, and California Trails — an estimated 400,000 American settlers passed through here between 1843 and 1869, making Kansas City the starting point for the largest land migration in American history. The Kansas City jazz style of the 1930s (Count Basie…