River Market, Kansas City — Area Guide & Where to Stay

What are the main landmarks in River Market?

The Arabia Steamboat Museum holds a whole cargo. It stands at 400 Grand Boulevard and shows thousands of artefacts from a steamboat that sank nearby in 1856 and was recovered in 1987 and 1988. City Market has run since 1857.

That makes it one of the largest and most enduring public farmers' markets in the Midwest, linking growers and small businesses to the city, and its buildings went up between 1931 and 1939. Pendergast's Ten-Year Plan paid for them. The scheme was meant to replace jobs lost in the Depression, and the row it built still shelters the Saturday market and the restaurants around it.

What is the history of River Market?

A fur post came first, in 1821. François Chouteau ran it on the river bank, and the landing took the name Westport Landing because it was the dock for goods bound for Westport, three miles south on higher ground. John Calvin McCoy ran that trade.

He led the settlers who created the Town of Kansas here in 1850, which became the City of Kansas in 1853, and that is why this is the oldest incorporated district in Kansas City. The first courthouse stood here too. Police headquarters and city hall joined it in the mid-1800s in what became the southern part of City Market, and the Pacific House Hotel was built in 1860.

Union troops occupied that hotel. General Ewing issued General Order No. 11 from it during the Civil War, emptying parts of rural Missouri to cut off support for Confederate fighters. Streetcars started at Fourth and Main.

The first line in Kansas City ran from there to Westport as a horse-drawn service in 1870 and was converted to cable in 1887, and the Centropolis Hotel of 1880 at Fifth and Grand was the first in the city with electric light.

Where is River Market?

River Market holds the Kansas City riverfront north of the Interstate 70 loop, running to the Missouri River between the Buck O'Neil Bridge and the Heart of America Bridge.