Why is there a 'castle' on Vine Street in Kansas City

Hey, Randy Mason here with more from What's Your KCQ? Our question comes from Catherine Bedora who wonders about some old stone buildings just east of the Paseo near 21st Street, including one that looks a lot like a small castle. She wants to know who built them and why. Okay, let's start with the turrets and porticos on a building that quickly came to be known for good reason as the Kansas City Workhouse Castle. It opened in 1897, replacing the old Kansas City Workhouse across the street, which was made of wood and by then vermin ridden and not a nice place at all. The new one was designed by A. Wallace Love and John Oliver Hogg, and yes, they were aware that Romanesque revival is not the usual style for a municipal jail. But as the superintendent at the time, Major Alf Brandt, explained, hey, if it doesn't cost any more, why not? Of course, keeping the cost down had a lot to do with the fact they were using inmate labor to quarry all the limestone right here on site. The men's cells were all in a line on the north side. Women were incarcerated on the second floor. And in the basement, there was a steel-clad dungeon. It didn't take long before things weren't going so well here either. In fact, by 1909, Kansas City Mayor Tom Crittenton Jr. decided to build a new facility out in the Leeds District. So depending on who you believe, the cell door is closed here for the final time in 1918 or 1924. The city used it then for offices, storage space, supposedly for a while as a marine training facility, and then abandoned it completely in 1972. You might recall that just a few years ago, an ambitious young couple energized a movement to try and reimagine the castle as a community center. They hauled out tons of trash, even got married here, but those ideas didn't come to fruition. At the moment, the Kansas City Workhouse Castle does sit smack dab in the middle of a proposed $22 million housing development that would, among other things, include rebuilding the castle to serve as the administration building for the project. As for the nearby buildings that Catherine was also asking about, across Vine Street you can see the shells of some structures that look very much like the castle, but actually were built right after the Civil War as Kansas City's first public works buildings, and you can still see the titles above the doors. They're being renovated with the idea that at some point, they'll hold offices, perhaps an Airbnb, and maybe even an event space or performance venue. And over there on the corner is the new kid on the block, relatively speaking, Firehouse Number 11. It was built by the WPA in 1931. These days, it's home to an art gallery and a few small business enterprises, including one that employed me to do some editing on a documentary for public television. Looking out those windows, I learned pretty quickly that even though, technically speaking, this is private property, there's never a shortage of people dropping by to check this place out. After all, who doesn't want their photo taken with the castle? For the Kansas City Star and the Kansas City Public Library, I'm Randy Mason asking, what's your KCQ?