Steamboats once landed daily near the River Market, the oldest commercial neighborhood in Kansas City and the place where the city's story begins. When Lewis and Clark paddled up the Missouri River in the summer of 1804 — camping at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers on June 26 — they were passing through a landscape that would, within a generation, become one of the most important commercial crossroads on the continent. The first permanent settlement here dates to 1821, when Francois Chouteau established a trading post near the riverbank.
By the 1830s, the town of Kansas was platted on the bluffs above the river, and the market district near the landing became the commercial engine of westward expansion. Steamboats arrived daily carrying manufactured goods from St. Louis and Cincinnati; they departed loaded with furs, hides, and the provisions needed for wagon trains heading west. The River Market has been through cycles of boom and decline, but it has never stopped being a market: the City Market in the center of the neighborhood has operated continuously since 1857, making it one of the longest-running public markets in the American Midwest.
Picture these buildings dating to the late 19th century, survivors of floods and urban renewal.