Now Open to All: See The Star’s Historical Photo Archives, With the KC Library
Published by The Kansas City Star on January 8, 2026.
By Derek Donovan
Today, I’m excited to announce the launch of KCStarPhotos.org, a new project from the Kansas City Public Library and The Kansas City Star. It’s a free website with a database of hundreds of thousands of images from The Star’s archives of the pre-digital era of photography. It’s searchable by keyword and has also been organized by topics such as jazz musicians, Crown Center, and the BOTAR Ball.
It’s a fascinating and unique collection that has been out of the public eye for decades in The Star’s offices, where its images were used in regular news production. And how it made its way to this new website is a twisted tale involving FBI raids, cocaine and even a nefariously altered Heisman Trophy.
Really.
But let’s start with why these photos exist in the first place. Before coming to the Opinion department, I was The Star’s director of research and information, and that included overseeing the newsroom library (also known at some papers as the morgue). The library was a huge, L-shaped room on the top floor of The Star’s building at 1729 Grand Blvd. and it housed row after row of heavy metal filing cabinets. Near the entrance, their drawers were full of manila envelopes containing news articles, columns and editorials, individually trimmed by hand from copies of the newspaper, then date-stamped and filed away by subject matter, and also by the name of people mentioned in the coverage. These “clips” were often duplicated in multiple envelopes when they concerned more than one topic or person...