HELL’S HALF ACRE: The Violent West Bottoms Ghetto Where “The Other Half” Lived

Hell’s Half Acre” was located in the extreme northwestern corner of the West Bottoms industrial district. 

There have been many Hell’s Half Acres.

There were the sections of Labette County, Kansas terrorized by the murderous Bender Family in the 1870s.

There was the Fort Worth, Texas red-light district, also in the 1870s.

Kansas City had a Hell’s Half Acre, too - from the 1870s through the 1890s.

In this month’s E-Journal Pat O’Neill - retired Kansas City marketing and public relations professional, as well as long-time historian of the area’s Irish community - serves as our guide through the district that earned that name in Kansas City’s West Bottoms.

O’Neill - who co-founded the annual Kansas City Irish Fest and is a former president of the Kansas City Irish Center - also is the author of several books. Those include “From the Bottom Up: The Story of the Irish in Kansas City,” published in 2000, and an updated version of the same title in 2015. 

In 2017 O’Neill published “Dearest Mother: Letters from a Lonesome Sammy, 1915-1919,” which compiled letters from George Wigert, an Army artillery sergeant during World War I - and a grandfather of the author.

In 2021 O’Neill, with co-author Tom Coffman, published “Ted Sullivan: Barnacle of Baseball.”

And in 2023 O’Neill co-wrote, with Pat and Kyle Kelly, “Kelly’s Westport Inn: The Poorman’s Playground.”

O’Neill, a JCHS member, is also a former board member of the historical society.

The article below has been adapted from a lecture O’Neill delivered earlier this year at the Kansas City Public Library.

All photos and illustrations courtesy of Pat O’Neill, except where noted.

BY PAT O’NEILL

In the 1880s, while cattlemen, railroaders, land speculators, barkeeps and gamblers raked in big and small fortunes in Kansas City’s booming West Bottoms, poor Black and Irish folks lived nearby in a squalid, violent, crime-infested neighborhood out near the point where the Kaw and Missouri rivers meet.

It was called Hell’s Half Acre. And a veritable hell hole, it truly was.

In 1871 about 100,000 animals - many of them cattle and pigs - were shipped east from Abilene, Kansas to what later became the Kansas City stockyards and packinghouse district in the West Bottoms.

Once a forested flat along the east bank of the Kaw, the West Bottoms was, early on, the domain of French traders who swapped store-bought goods for furs with bands of semi -domesticated Native Americans. Following the Civil War, the wide-open bottoms became a resting, feeding and transfer spot for Texas cattle driven here from Abilene before being shipped on trains to hungry rich folks on the eastern seaboard.

In 1871 a full-scale stockyards operation was established on 13.5 acres at what is now 12th Street and State Line Road.

That first year, some 100,000 animals – mostly cows, pigs and horses – were herded into what then was referred to as "West Kansas,” even though most of the bottom land was in Missouri.

The number of mooing, oinking and braying animals coming into the city doubled and tripled each ensuing year.

In 1874 Philip Armour opened a small packinghouse to start gathering and cutting up all that meat – and processing just about every inedible part of a cow for the making of glue, soap, fertilizer and pharmaceuticals. Armour’s operation, which would grow to become among the most productive in the world, needed cheap labor and lots of it.

In 1878 the Union Depot opened in the West Bottoms, bringing unknown thousands to booming Kansas City. 

Thousands of uneducated laborers and cowboys poured in to work the yards and the packinghouses – but found few decent places to live.

Shanties, boarding houses and overnight hotels sprung up all through the bottoms and desperate folks even perched like goats along the towering, precariously steep bluffs to the east.

“Goats.” Remember that word.

In 1878 an elaborate and architecturally-ambitious train station was built at a center point in the bottoms. The Union Depot was so big and grand that cynical locals called it “the Jackson County Insane Asylum.” But more and more railroads continued to bring more and more people into the bottoms – speculators, hardware merchants, gamblers, confidence men and shady ladies – all looking to make a big and fast buck in the booming cowtown at the convergence of the Kaw and Missouri rivers.

The Blossom House Hotel, which in 1882 opened in the West Bottoms, was a main attraction along Union Avenue, which one writer described as a “midway blazing with light.” 

Around the depot, packing plants and cattle yards danced a carnival of debauchery that went on 24 hours a day. Bawdy houses not only offered painted ladies and soiled doves, but also gambling, which included craps tables, roulette and shell games.

William Reddig, in writing the 1947 book, “Tom’s Town: Kansas City and the Pendergast Legend,” described the scene like this:

“At night the avenue leading from the depot became a midway blazing with light, tumultuous shouts of ballyhoo men and cries of their suckers, booted cattlemen, silk hatted gamblers, ticket scalpers, bunco artists, blanketed Indians, Kansas yokels and scented ladies mingled in this boisterous democracy.”

The processing of animals in the Kansas City packinghouses began with “knockers” using sledgehammers.

Thousands of laborers were needed to work round-the-clock shifts in the cattle yards and the fast-expanding packinghouse operations.

Most of the jobs in the packinghouses involved dirty, bloody, back-breaking work. Inside the putrid, dimly-lit buildings desperate men - mostly immigrants from Europe and Exodusters from the American South - hit animals over the head with sledge hammers. They were the knockers, followed in line by the stickers, the gut-snatchers, the splitters, the rumpers, the grinders, the cheekers, boners, pullers and luggers.

The packinghouse process would continue with men using large metal blades, like these Swift & Co. employees in Chicago. (Library of Congress photo).

An old saying goes: “Poor People Have Poor Ways.”

And that’s the way it was in Hell’s Half Acre, where unemployable drifters, robbers, killers, pick-pockets and other criminals on the lam patrolled the dark and muddy alleys and streets at night.

Inside the Gates of Hell

“Police, social service workers and missionaries dared not enter ‘The Acre’ alone, lest they come out without their guns, their purses and their faith in mankind.”

Kansas City Police Capt. Thomas Flahive

Hell’s Half Acre – which was actually quite a bit larger than half an acre – was described as being located in the extreme northwestern corner of the bottoms, extending from the Missouri River on the north to Ninth Street on the south, and from Dodd’s smoke-billowing packinghouse to the state line with Kansas.

In the 1870s, ‘80s and ‘90s there were pockets of poor residential areas throughout the bottoms, but none was reported to be as squalid, or violent or as dangerous as Hell’s Half Acre.

When the Hannibal Bridge over the Missouri River was completed in 1869, the families of laborers who had been employed in the construction of the bridge and who had lived in squatter’s shanties and tents planted in untended hollows in the south river bluffs were obliged to find other quarters.

Some were Black Exodusters who had come north following the Civil War; others were White.

Most of the Whites found long-term employment with the local railroads, and were allowed to construct and live in shanties on land belonging to the railroad that employed them.

The no-longer-employed Black employees and their families were sent to Hell’s Half Acre on the isolated point at the confluence of the two rivers – and as far away from local civilization as you could get, and still be in Missouri.

Some West Bottom workers were said to live perched like "goats" in the huts, shacks, and shanties they built on the cliffs overlooking the district.

The shanties and shacks in Hell’s Half Acre were bounded on both sides by packinghouses and shrouded in the sulphurous smoke that belched from tall packinghouse chimneys.

The Kansas City Daily Journal in 1881 described the dwellings in Hell’s Half Acre as “…small, many of them mere huts…thrown together like chips in a mud puddle. In many places upwards of 200 hovels can be counted in one block.”

An appalled scribe from the Kansas City Star described the interior of a typical Irish-occupied home in “The Acre” this way:

“If there is a bed, the bed clothes are pieces of gunnysack, old quilts or pieces of carpet, all black with unlaundered usage and full of holes and tumbled up with no thought of arrangement; tin cans, pots and cooking vessels are scattered about the room; the stove, if there is one, stands in one corner; a small pile of coal or other fuels is scattered about on the floor; two or three boxes or a shaky, backless chair lies amid the general disorder; two or three colored posters representing John L. Sullivan or some other illustrious hero or prize fighter adorn the walls; two or three chickens, probably a like number of ducks, possibly a pig, and invariably a dog or two eating from the cooking vessel or sleeping on the bed or floor, and then the occupants lounging about the fire or asleep two or three deep on the bed or in the corner.”

After a visit to The Acre, an investigator from Kansas City’s Board of Health wrote “The patch swarms with children, whose occupation is to gather coal from the railroad tracks, and spilled grain. Everything of possible use is fish to their nets… the children are as wild as hawks.”

According to the Star, the residents so housed “packed themselves like sardines in a box, and soon an enterprising Irishman opened a saloon, a billiard room and a bowling alley on the most prominent corner. His place became the headquarters for all the lowest thugs and petty thieves, prostitutes and general scum of society.”

The paper went so far as to call Hell’s Half Acre “a resort that would have furnished volumes for Charles Dickens,” and “a hotbed of Crime and Debauchery – The Resort of Thieves and Murderers”

Not to be outdone, in 1883 the Kansas City Journal snorted facetiously: “As to its character of The Acre, we would merely remark that it is in keeping with its name. It is the home of Scar-Face Mary, Steamboat Nell, Whoop-up Sally and a host of other fighting celebrities who support the police in affluence and cocktails and macadamize our lovely boulevards. Hell’s Half Acre is to the body municipal what a boil is to a body personal.”

The notorious “Mother Duff”

According to police records, no resident of Hell’s Half Acre was as well-known to law enforcement as an old Irish woman they called “Mother Duff.”

Kansas City police did their best to maintain order among the many West Bottoms criminals.

Her shack was considered the resort of the most notorious thieves of the city, and where police generally went to catch them. She was said to know, personally, every criminal of reputation known to the police.

Police Capt. Thomas Flahive, who would later and for many years serve as Kansas City’s police chief, recalled that the woman “was the bane of a policeman’s life in those days. She kept an old den near the river and harbored the worst kind of thugs and crooks. The pickpocket ’Nosey’ O’Brien has been hidden from the police by her many a time and so has Andy Martin, a notorious burglar. She had a secret passageway, a kind of chute, leading from her hovel to the riverbank, and when the police trail became too hot the men went through the chute to the river and of course always got away.

“I carry a nasty scar above my eyes from a brawl in the patch between four of us Irish policemen and a mob led by two Irish thugs – they were hard characters who owned a particularly rough dance hall. The saloons and dance halls in the Acre were the toughest in the western country.”

The notorious “Mother Duff” housed many criminals in her West Bottoms hut, and maintained a unique “chute” that would allow them to escape the police. 

By the late 1890s, when there were some 20,000 people – including many Germans, Swedes, Greeks, Italians, Croatians, Slovaks, and Lithuanians – working in West Bottoms, life in Hell’s Half Acre had begun to calm down.

In 1896, The Star determined that the once roughest of all Kansas City neighborhoods was “only an ordinary slum now.”

Big Jim

However hellish Hell’s Half Acre was, the district - as its very name suggested - represented only a very small portion of the entire West Bottoms.

James “Big Jim” Pendergast, patriarch of a Kansas City political machine, arrived in the West Bottoms in 1876. 

There, hard-working Kansas City residents did their best to provide for themselves and their families as well as prevailing conditions, customs and attitudes allowed. 

James Pendergast, coming from St. Joseph, Mo., joined them in the bottoms in 1876.

He took a hot and dangerous job as an iron smelter at the A. J. Kelly Foundry. He later worked as a puddler, pouring molten iron into molds 10 to 12 hours a day, six days a week at Jarboe’s Keystone Iron Foundry.

There has always been the legend that puddler Jim took some of his modest wages and bet on gelding race horse named “Climax” and bought a saloon with the winnings – and sure enough, there’s a Pendergast family picture to prove it. Big Jim can be seen in the doorway.

Big Jim’s saloon was considered one of the more respectable joints in the bottoms, frequented by railroad men – considered the upper middle class of bottoms workers.

According to Pendergast legend, Big Jim placed a bet on a horse named “Climax” and when the horse proved a winner, Pendergast bought a saloon with his winnings.

Jim prospered. He soon bought the American House restaurant and boarding house. As one of the most liked and trusted men in the bottoms, he loaned money to the down-and-out and kept customers’ savings in his safe, along with signed pledge cards, reminding many a young man of his sworn promise to quit the drink.

When voters elected him by a huge margin to the lower house of the Kansas City city council in 1892, Big Jim spread his wealth and favors all over town. When the bottoms flooded in 1903, he was among the first to guide the rescue and clean-up.

As “Alderman Jim,” Pendergast served in that office through 1910 before dying the following year.

Younger brother Tom, who in the 1890s had come from St. Joseph to join Big Jim in the bottoms, started his own city council career in 1911 and continued to build what came to be known as the “Pendergast Machine.” That organization - later largely corrupt but nevertheless supported by many faithful constituents - to varying degrees dominated Kansas City and Jackson County through the late 1930s.

In those days the Pendergast faction of the Democratic Party were known as “goats” - just like those workers who had lived in those ramshackle homes on the cliffs overlooking the West Bottoms.

Pat O’Neill is a member of Jackson County Historical Society and a local historian and author.