What's Your KCQ? What do you want to know about our community? The Library and The Kansas City Star combine resources to find answers to questions about regional topics.

At its height, Kansas City’s garment industry dominated much of the U.S. clothing market and was the second largest employer in town behind the Stockyards in the West Bottoms. Over the span of 50 years, it grew from a small wholesale district into one of the most robust manufacturing sectors in the Midwest.

A reader reached out to KCQ to learn about the history of the garment industry and the district in downtown Kansas City. Where was it? How did it come about? And, in the end, what happened to it?

Colonel Kersey Coates, an early frontier Kansas Citian, first owned the land that was initially a residential area in the Town of Kansas in the 1850s. The section, defined by Sixth and 11th streets and Washington and Wyandotte streets, later became the Garment District.

The strip along Broadway transitioned from a residential neighborhood into a cultural hub in the 1870s with the development of the Coates House Hotel and the Coates Opera House.

In the early 1880s, wholesale and retail houses along Main and Delaware streets, as well as in the West Bottoms, gradually moved to that stretch along Broadway.

Read the rest of the story at KCHistory.org.