United States · Missouri · Kansas City
Westport, Kansas City — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Westport is a historic neighbourhood and the main entertainment district of Kansas City, formally incorporated in February 1857.
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Where to stay in Westport
How the choice of base plays out on the ground.
Kelly's Westport Inn is the oldest building in the city. The Ewing Brothers built it as a store in 1851 at what became the north-west corner of Westport Road and Pennsylvania Avenue, and it is still standing. Bars and music fill the rest.
Westport is the main entertainment district of Kansas City, about three miles south of downtown, which makes it a place to go out from rather than only to sleep in. The Nelson-Atkins Museum is close by.
Things to do in and around Kansas City
Ranked by global recognition; descriptions from Wikidata (CC0).
Museums & Galleries
2- The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
- Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
Churches & Religious Sites
3- Westminster Congregational Church Heritage
- Pilgrim Lutheran Church for the Deaf of Greater Kansas City and Parsonage Heritage
- First Swedish Baptist Church Heritage
Nature & Outdoors
1- World War II Memorial (Jackson County)
Stadiums & Sports
1- Gordon and Koppel Field
Landmarks & Notable Places
8- Bernard Corrigan House Heritage
- Thomas Hart Benton Home and Studio State Historic Site Heritage
- Mineral Hall Heritage
- House at 5011 Sunset Drive Heritage
- House at 54 E. 53rd Terrace Heritage
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- Reverend Nathan Scarritt Home Heritage
- William D. Repp House Heritage
- William Francis Shelley House Heritage
worth knowingacross 5 categories in and around Kansas City
About Westport
What are the main landmarks in Westport?
Albert G. Boone kept a store on the corner. The grandson of Daniel Boone bought the Ewings' building to provision the wagon trains heading into Kansas Territory in the 1850s, and it later became Kelly's Westport Inn. Two log houses came first.
Isaac McCoy built a large one on a hill at what became Forty-third and Wornall, and his son John built a two-storey house and trading post at the north-east corner of Westport Road. A battle was fought here in October 1864. The Battle of Westport came in the middle of the Civil War, and after the war the trade fell off sharply and never recovered.
What is the history of Westport?
Daniel Yoacham settled here about 1823. The Tennessee native and his family were the first, and Isaac McCoy followed, a missionary who brought his son John Calvin McCoy as surveyor and his son-in-law Johnston Lykins to buy the land. John McCoy cut a road to the river.
It ran four miles north from West Port to a landing rock on the Missouri beside François Chouteau's, and that was how the settlement meant to compete with Independence to the east. The two landings became one town. McCoy's West Port Landing joined Chouteau's town on the levee bluff in the 1830s to form the settlement called Kansas, which was incorporated as the City of Kansas.
West Port was platted and incorporated in February 1857. John McCoy bought the parcel from Lykins and laid it out, and he is generally counted the father of Kansas City. Cholera halved the towns in 1849.
The pandemic killed half the people of both West Port and Kansas, filling the only cemeteries each of them had, and prosperity ran from 1854 to 1860 before the Civil War and then the railways ended it. Kansas City annexed Westport in 1897.
Where is Westport?
Westport lies about three miles south of downtown Kansas City in Missouri, around the crossing of Westport Road and Pennsylvania Avenue.
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Updated October 2026