Why was a giant leg sticking out of a downtown Kansas City building? A mystery’s afoot

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When librarian Katie Eschbacher first saw the black-and-white photo of 1890s downtown Kansas City, she knew something odd was afoot.

Why was there an enormous leg — at least one-story tall — sticking out of a building, dangling rather dangerously, a little provocatively, above pedestrians on the sidewalk?

Had giants attacked Kansas City, and one left a limb behind? (And no, this is not an April Fools’ Day joke. We aren’t pulling your leg.)

A local history buff found the photo online. Wanting to know more, he shared the picture on X, formerly Twitter. Then others tweeted at Eschbacher and her employer, the Kansas City Public Library, for help.

“Looking through historic photos from downtown Kansas City and saw something that caught my eye,” wrote Zachary Cobb, aka @ZachIsHere. “On 9th St between Main St and Baltimore Ave taken in the year 1890.” (Eschbacher’s research later dated it 1895.)

The appendage made Eschbacher think of the sexy leg lamp in “A Christmas Story.” But that 1983 movie was set in the late 1930s, early ‘40s. Too modern.

Or maybe the building was an old vaudeville house advertising the dancers and “gams” inside, she thought. “They obviously built a really fine looking giant leg,” she said.

It took her only about an hour to find the backstory because, well, she’s just that good at her job as a digital history collections librarian. “I’m pretty well practiced at going down rabbit holes,” she said.

The library hailed her on Facebook: “Shout out to librarians for doing important LEG WORK!”

That’s a humble brag for a library system that cares for an expansive database of local history available to the public, information people can use to “DIY their own deep dives,” said Eschbacher, who has worked there 14 years.

“I think history is those big-scope projects that make it into history books, but there’s also, ‘Hey, I wonder what was on this block or what is that leg?’”

(The easiest way to find those tools? Visit kchistory.org, the website of the Missouri Valley Special Collections, the library’s local history archive and the home of thousands of digitized photos and other material related to the region’s history.)

She happened to know the history buff who found the photo and credited his “eagle eye” for even noticing the leg, which can’t be seen easily without zooming in. “He somehow spotted this giant leg sticking out of the second story of that building,” she said.

“And understandably when you see it you have some questions about why it’s there and what it’s trying to communicate to people … which is certainly how I felt.”

Newspaper archives held the key

First, she recognized the New York Life building — considered Kansas City’s first skyscraper — in the center of the photo “so we knew for sure this is Ninth Street just west of Main,” she said.

The leg building was immediately east of it, which narrowed down its possible address to 10, 12 or 14 W. Ninth St.

Unlike the New York Life building, which still stands, the leg building is gone. Eschbacher used the library’s Sanborn Maps Collection, created by the Sanborn Fire Insurance Co., with detailed maps of buildings dating to the 1890s. She found the leg building’s address there.

Next she went to the Kansas City Star Historical Edition. It is a searchable, digitized database of information published by this newspaper from 1880 to 1990 — stories, but also classified ads and other advertisements.

(It is Eschbacher’s favorite historical research tool, but enough of our own humble brag.)

She had also found a different photo of the building on kchistory.org, which showed the other side of the leg. Zooming in, she saw the word “braces” printed on it.

Thus armed with a new clue, she searched for “braces” and “9th” in the Star database and found the answer.

The building housed B. F. Rounds & Sons, a business that made and sold artificial limbs and orthopedic braces.

An ad in The Star said the business was established in 1879 — “satisfaction guaranteed” for its braces, trusses and crutches.

But where’s the giant leg?

Eschbacher tweeted her findings to @ZachIsHere, who told one of his social media followers that he finds old photos from the Library of Congress website and local historical societies, “but the best is KC Library at KCHistory (dot) org.”

“Mystery solved, and hopefully you now have a leg up on the Library tools you can use to research #kcHistory curiosities. And we’re also always here to lend a hand, foot, leg, etc.,” the library wrote on Facebook.

So many pun possibilities.

The McCownGordon construction company operates on the site of the bygone leg building. Eschbacher thinks “they should put it back. Lean into the neighborhood history,” though she’s not sure what a giant leg says about construction work.

She didn’t know whether the giant leg was the limb of a man or woman but noted that “the foot looks pretty big.”

And where is it now?

“That’s the one thing that’s frustrating,” she said. “OK, we found out what it is, but it wasn’t either big enough or important enough at the time for people to save information about it. It would be incredible to know more about that, to know if it got saved … if it’s somewhere, in a descendant’s basement.”

She searched for the giant leg in late January and was happy to retell her adventure this past week.

“I was glad the story had legs,” she said.