River Town on Rails

Heraclitus said you can't enter the same river twice. I say this because it's easy to get wistful when reading a book like Kansas City Street Scenes Featuring Kansas City Public Service PCC Cars by Ken Davis and Benjamin L. Bernhart. This short volume about our defunct street car system features mostly color and some black and white photographs of street cars in the waning years of the system. Although the book has issues, it's noteworthy for capturing views of the city not often seen in many of the other books of old photographs. I'll get to both issues in a moment.

As the title implies, this sixty-four page book focuses on the "Electric Railway President's Conference Committee" design of 1935 (what the "PCC" stands for). At the time, the street cars in common use in the United States followed the designs of the earliest street cars in the 1880's. The industry felt the need to modernize. The result was the streamlined Art Deco design of the PCC streetcar. (You can see one of these beautiful cars in the flesh. There's one on display in the parking lot behind Union Station.)

Kansas City's 184 PCC street cars were purchased in three lots between 1941 and  1947. Kansas City Public Service (KCPS), the predecessor of the KCATA operated these cars in Jackson County and Kansas City Kansas until the system's demise in the late 1950's.

The quality of the photos varies. But to do a book on something as particular as the PCC street cars is to do a book that contains at least a few snapshots by amateur photographers. The biggest problem with this book is that it needs a copy edit. Badly. I don't say this to quibble. It's what keeps me from recommending this book to people who don't already know Kansas City well. When Davis talks about watching the streetcars from the Winstead's parking lot as a boy in the 50's, then states that the location is West of the Plaza, I know that it's an editing mistake.

A good edit would surely have given Davis slightly more space for the pictures, a definite plus in a book such as this. The book also suffers from being slightly disorganized, a fault that forces him to repeat certain pieces of background information. The worst example of this is the three or four photos that separately describe the 1951 flood and its consequences for the KCPS system. Grouping these photos would have allowed Davis to explain the flood once and make the photos larger. 

Residents from Midtown to Waldo will enjoy views of the city rarely covered by other books, like the unrecognizable 43rd and Main intersection shown on the back cover, or the glimpses of Waldo shown in a few of the photographs. Rail buffs will enjoy the pictures of the various maintenance cars used on the KCPS.

(An aside here regarding Mike Sander's Rapid Rail plan. One item rarely talked about in all the discussions regarding light rail is that a city can't have a rail line without maintenance equipment. By proposing a system that uses conventional rail maintenance costs can either be shared with freight systems or contracted out to them.)

If you already have a sizable collection about Kansas City history, you'll want to add this one for the niche it fills. If you're new to the subject, you should move on.