Long before there was Amazon, Montgomery Ward built this gigantic warehouse in KC
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Reinforced concrete. That’s the key to the Montgomery Ward warehouse that rose eight stories high at St. John and Belmont Avenues on Kansas City’s Northeast side in 1914.
It wasn’t the first building that Aaron Ward’s catalog company placed here. It was actually the third—but with 2.1 million square feet inside, it was easily the most imposing.
In fact, it was billed at the time as the largest building west of the Mississippi River.
Michael Bushnell in the Northeast News noted that it was also “one of the most technically advanced buildings of its time,” shaped like a “U” so that train cars could easily deliver coal to power the boilers at its center.
Because as many as 3,000 people were employed there at one point, the warehouse contained its own post office, library, a small hospital and rooms to gather for meetings and social occasions.
And in in 1928, a retail store was added to the front, bringing streetcar traffic into the mix as well.
The architect who designed the warehouse, J.W. McKecknie, was also responsible for a number of concrete-reinforced structures in and around downtown. Most notable among them were the Grand Avenue Temple, the Exchange Building, the University Club and the Hunt Calvert home on Gladstone Boulevard. Thanks to the strength of the materials incorporated, most are still standing today.
Mail-order business, however, hasn’t fared as well. Though it boomed through the first four decades of the 20th Century, the tide eventually turned against pioneering stores like Wards and Sears.
Since the early 1990s, the once thriving mega-space has found a new way to serve bargain hunters. It’s now known as the Super Flea.
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