How to find out if a building is on the historic register in Kansas City

Kansas City keeps two historic registers, and the city’s open-data portal publishes a file for each. Both files stopped on August 15, 2021.

The National Register file still draws ten buildings that have since been demolished and formally removed. It carries nothing listed after November 2019. The local-register file is missing designations the City Council has passed as recently as July.

The thirty-second version

• For the National Register, use the state’s list. The Missouri State Historic Preservation Office keeps one page per county, and it records demolished buildings as delisted.
• For the Kansas City Register, search the Council’s legislation. A local listing is made by ordinance, and the ordinance title names the property.
• Search the street name, not the house number. Most houses on the register are inside a district described by the streets around it.
• Try numbered streets both ways. The state writes some as words. 9th will not find Ninth.
• Do not use the city’s portal files for either register.

How to look it up in a browser

The National Register

1. Open the state’s list for your county. Jackson County is at mostateparks.com/basic-page/missouri-national-register-listings/Jackson. For Clay County, change the last word of the address to Clay.
2. Press Cmd-F on a Mac or Ctrl-F on Windows and type your street name alone: Troost, not 3740 Troost Ave.
3. Read the district entries as well as the single buildings. A district entry reads roughly bounded by a set of streets. If your house sits inside those streets, it may be part of the district even though its address is not printed.
4. If your street is numbered, search it both ways: Ninth and 9th.
5. An entry that reads demolished; delisted is no longer on the register.
6. For anything listed in the last few months, check the National Park Service’s weekly list. The state’s page runs behind it.

The Kansas City Register

1. Open the City Council’s legislation site, kansascity.legistar.com.
2. Search for Register of Historic Places.
3. Each result is an ordinance. Its title names the building or district, gives the address, and says whether it passed.

We could not open the Missouri pages for Platte and Cass counties on September 24; the site refused our requests for those two. Jackson and Clay answered.

The catch: the city’s National Register map stopped in 2019

The portal lists it as giy9-wqjq, National Register of Historic Places, with 313 rows. Socrata, the platform the portal runs on, records its rows as last written on August 15, 2021. Its newest listing date is November 14, 2019. It has been downloaded 894 times.

The National Park Service keeps the authoritative record, and it answers public queries with no account. On September 24, 2026 it held 302 Kansas City records: 286 listed and 16 removed.

We matched the two on name and on street address. As a check on the method, the same match finds 235 of the 264 buildings the Park Service listed before December 2019, and the ones it misses are mostly boundary changes to existing districts. Then we ran it on everything listed since. The Park Service shows 22 Kansas City listings from December 2019 on, and the city file has none of them. The state’s list confirms 19. The other three are January 2026 listings the state page does not yet show: St. Stephen Baptist Church, Fire Station No. 11, and the Phillis Wheatley School-Willis Chapel AME Church.

The 22 include the Kansas City National Guard Armory on Main Street, the Wheatley-Provident Hospital on Forest Avenue, the El Torreon Ballroom, Sunset Tower on Roanoke Parkway, and the John Hancock Building on West 47th Street.

# Check when the city's National Register file last changed
curl -s 'https://data.kcmo.org/api/views/giy9-wqjq.json' | python3 -c "import json,sys,datetime as d; m=json.load(sys.stdin); print(d.datetime.utcfromtimestamp(m['rowsUpdatedAt']))"

# Count Kansas City listings in the National Park Service's own record
curl -s 'https://mapservices.nps.gov/arcgis/rest/services/cultural_resources/nrhp_locations/MapServer/0/query?where=State%3D%27MISSOURI%27+AND+City%3D%27Kansas+City%27&returnCountOnly=true&f=json'

The catch: ten demolished buildings are still on the city’s map

The Missouri State Historic Preservation Office lists sixteen Kansas City properties as demolished and delisted on January 7, 2025. The Park Service marks the same sixteen Removed. Ten of them are still rows on the city’s National Register map, each with its outline drawn.

The city has a fair defence, and it should be stated. When the file last changed in August 2021, all ten were still formally on the register. Six were already gone, but the delisting did not come until 2025. The file was not wrong in 2021. It has not been touched since.

The other six on the state’s January 2025 list, the oldest demolished around 1995, are not in the city file at all.

The catch: the local register file is missing the Council’s recent votes

The portal’s other file, 5s6x-ukjj, KC Register of Historic Places, holds 106 rows, and its rows were also last written on August 15, 2021. Its newest listings are three apartment buildings on Locust Street designated in August 2019. Those three are there, which shows the file was current up to that point. One of them, the Parkview Apartments, is stored at 4225 Loucst St, so a search for Locust will not find it.

A local listing is made by ordinance, so the Council’s legislation records every one. Searching the titles for Register of Historic Places, we found five designations that passed after the file stopped, and none of them is in it:

The search matches only titles that contain the phrase, so five is a floor.

# List local-register designations the Council has passed since 2019
curl -s -G 'https://webapi.legistar.com/v1/kansascity/matters' --data-urlencode "\$filter=substringof('Register of Historic Places',MatterTitle) and MatterIntroDate ge datetime'2019-01-01'" --data-urlencode '$select=MatterFile,MatterPassedDate,MatterStatusName,MatterTitle'

What a listing does, and what it does not

The two registers are easy to confuse, and they do different work.

The National Register is federal. The National Park Service’s own guidance says listing “places no restrictions on what a non-federal owner may do with their property up to and including destruction,” unless the project uses federal money or a federal permit. The Board of Education building was listed in October 2017, and the state records it as demolished in 2020.

The Kansas City Register is local. The Council adds a building or district to it by ordinance, and the ordinance titles describe it as a historic overlay on the property’s zoning, written H/O or HO. The 2019 ordinances cite section 88-580 of the city code as the rule that requires it. If you are buying, renovating, or watching a building next door, the local register is the one tied to the city’s own review. City Planning and Development holds the case files.

What would fix it

Both portal files could be re-published, or they could say that they stopped in 2021 and point to the state’s list and the Council’s legislation. Until then, each is a picture of August 2021 with nothing on it to say so.