Iconic KCTV-5 Tower was recently re-lit. What that means for 2026 World Cup in KC
For nearly 50 years, our most conspicuous landmark in the dark was the so-called “Eye-full Tower,” KCTV-5’s 1,042-foot structure atop a hill at 31st Street and Grand Boulevard that gleamed across the region.
“Like red rubies …” The Star wrote soon after it was finished in May 1956, “these 1,360 25-watt bulbs glow against the night for miles and miles around.”
Because of rising maintenance expenses and the demanding logistics of often changing all those lights crawling up 900 feet of the tower’s four legs, it had been nearly 20 years since the lights were dimmed out on what debuted as the third-tallest freestanding structure in the world.
(It then was exceeded only by New York’s Empire State Building and Chrysler Building but remains 18 feet above the 1,042-foot Eiffel Tower, which now is 1,083 feet because of various changes over the years.)
But if you happened to be gazing that way on Dec. 5, or see a couple of social-media posts from Mayor Quinton Lucas, you would have witnessed the tower resplendent in red.
“We’re working on bringing back a bit of KC history,” one of Lucas’ posts read in part, with a later one adding, “Back soon.”
As the centerpiece of a broader initiative to Illuminate KC, as the mayor is calling it, that test run with lighting engineers further probed the feasibility and options for permanently relighting the tower.
Certainly, it made for a promising aesthetic start .... even with lighting generated only from the ground up instead of what is ultimately envisioned as installations on the seven platforms above the structure painted aviator orange.
Working with renderings from Burns & McDonnell, Mercer Zimmerman Lighting & Controls used only three of the anticipated dozens of programmable LED color-changing lights to great effect that night.
So much so that it drew a retired iron worker to pull over in his pickup truck in admiration of the structure he called his “muse.” And it compelled dozens of comments on Lucas’ post that spoke to the nostalgia and warmth the site evoked.
“This picture calms me,” wrote a follower with the X handle Monica Mistletoe. “I remember looking at it from my bedroom window as a little girl. Oddly, it gives me peace.”
The hope now is that the revamped tower lighting can be completed by June 2025 for a cost Lucas’ office estimated in the mid-hundred thousands. While not insignificant, that’s substantially less than the multi-million-dollar sorts of projects that have been pitched in recent years.
That’s because it’s on a more modest scale. But also because it’s intended as a modern spin on an established and cherished site that would be enabled by state-of-the-art technology — particularly LED lighting.
That element already is so evident in or near downtown and increasing all the time.
Consider the recent lighting revivals of the Bartle Hall Sky Station and City Hall and ongoing work at the Convention Center and Kit Bond Bridge.
Those accent the effects of such distinctly lit structures, among others, as Children’s Mercy Research Institute, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, downtown Marriott and Union Station.
The target timing for relighting the tower would be approximately a year out from the impending 2026 FIFA World Cup, in which Kansas City will host six games starting that June 16 while the region also serves as a base camp for several nations’ soccer teams.
In keeping with the sorts of Kansas City highlights that the city helped produce for NBC’s Sunday Night Football last week, Lucas in a phone interview said he believes this endeavor can be another signature aspect of World Cup marketing.
Put it all together, he added, and it can help make Kansas City “the coolest, most interesting and perhaps most surprising location” for international travelers coming to the United States.
While this has long been on his mind — especially as a fan of the lit tower while growing up here — Lucas said the impetus was discussion about it over the last year.
And then watching the 2024 Paris Olympics and seeing the Olympic rings on the Eiffel Tower.
Even if we don’t have one of those, he said, with a laugh, he figures being able to call ourselves a “City of Lights” adds to the “Paris on the Plains” nickname that goes back a century or so.
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(Never mind that term can only really be mentioned with an implied wink. And that the moniker apparently was conjured more from our Depression-era nightlife and debauchery than for jazz influence, boulevards and fountains: “If you want to see some sin, forget about Paris and go to Kansas City,” the Omaha World-Herald wrote in 1938.)
More to the point, Lucas believes relighting the tower and other plans to augment lagging lighting — from the 18th and Vine district to Waldo and the in-the-works South Loop Project over Interstate 670 — will make for beacons for a city on the move that “needed to improve our shine.”
All the better to do so by re-imagining and reinvesting in existing icons instead of, say, erecting a giant tower with a soccer ball on top.
Hearkening to the City Beautiful Movement that informed city planner and landscape architect George Kessler’s vision of a Kansas City teeming with parks along with all those fountains and boulevards, Lucas called lighting a significant part of engagement and entertainment.
That sort of impact, he added, has been apparent in Country Club Plaza over the holidays going back to the 1920s.
The possibilities are considerable for merely the tower itself, which Lucas said has the blessing of “good partners” KCTV-5 and KCPT — above which it stands — and sign-off from the FAA.
Though it wouldn’t be as elaborate as the roughly $2 million public art project proposed in 2018 by Jasper Mullarney and restated last summer, the initial premise calls for being able to highlight colors for local teams or causes and have the capacity to feature, for instance, the colors of nations here for the World Cup.
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Or for KCTV-5 to project or reflect the weather, as it previously did for so long.
Lucas also believes it’s possible that at some point the top of the tower can be used for a multi-sided LED messaging board that could be applied any number of ways: For the score of a local franchise’s game, for instance, or an image and a snippet about a player on the KC Current. And then some.
But that prospect in particular would depend on not just being able to create the right look but also the cost beyond this initial concept, for which a harder estimate is expected to be determined next week.
When asked about paying for what is now described as an initial expense in the mid-hundred thousands that also would necessitate an as-yet-uncertain maintenance cost, Lucas referred to such potential funding elements as the Midtown Redevelopment Tax Increment Financing Plan, arts investment sources, “certain capital improvement funds” and the Neighborhood Tourist Development Fund.
While it’s understood that city council would ultimately have to approve funding sources, part of the premise as described is that no new taxpayer money would be sought.
Like the project itself seeks to do, those details will need illumination of their own.
But if it indeed can be achieved and funded as described, it figures to make for another welcome and whimsical enhancement to the landscape.
Will Gregory, who has been “preaching the gospel” of this idea to whoever will listen, serves on the NTDF and Kansas City PBS boards. In an interview last summer, he said lighting the tower would make for exactly the sort of “time and treasure” each board seeks to create.
In ways we could see for ourselves and perhaps beyond.
“We always appreciate anything being done to illuminate the city and put the spotlight on us for our visitors and residents,” said Kathy Nelson, who leads both Visit KC and the Kansas City Sports Commission.
“It makes us proud to showcase our city, and lighting it up is another way to do that.”