The Kansas City Public Library has added a new addition to their history of Kansas City archive. The new collection, featured in the Missouri Valley Special Collections, includes forty-seven newly scanned menus and illustrations from restaurants and hotels all over the Kansas City area.
The images are part of the S. Stephen Lispi Collection and feature art by the Kansas City area illustrator during the mid-twentieth century, such as a 1960s menu for the Rendezvous restaurant, formerly inside of the Hotel Muehlebach (now part of the Marriott) on Baltimore Avenue.
Among others, the collection features menus from restaurants some may remember in the Kansas City area, like Putsch’s Coffee House, formerly found in the Country Club Plaza and Metcalf Center during the seventies, the Prairie Room, once in Kansas Union at the University of Kansas and restaurants still operating today, such as a 1970s menu from the Golden Ox, located on Genessee Street.
In addition to the menus, the Missouri Valley Special Collections also feature historical images such as a group picture of the 1968 Kansas City Chiefs football team’s offseason charity basketball team and a prohibition-age political cartoons about Thomas Pendergast, an American political boss who commanded Kansas City and Jackson County, Missouri from the mid-nineteen twenties to late-nineteen thirties.
