A promotional post card published by The Royal Family of Downtown Merchants pictures the Christmas decorations at 11th and Walnut in 1962. Emery-Bird-Thayer's fine old five-story brick building is at the right side of the card. The store was known as the Southwest's greatest merchandiser, but to seven generations of native Kansas Citians who shopped there, met friends there and dined there, it was much more. Today the store is gone and a parking facility is on the site. The huge crown in the center of the picture was one of the nine crowns custom made for downtown intersections by the Merchants Association of Greater Kansas City. Each was 13 feet in diameter and seven feet tall. Each crown had 621 colored lights and the swags supporting the crowns had 250 colored lights each. Their heavy weight made it necessary to have the support of a building at each of the four corners of an intersection. The crowns were copies of those used at Christmas time by the merchants on Regency Street in London. Permission to copy the crowns was obtained from the English architect who designed them. Cost of the crowns was $28,000 and with installation the total was $40,960. They were used each Christmas from 1962 to 1969. Today the crowns are in storage and cannot be hung because the supporting buildings at many of the intersections are no longer standing. The Merchants Association may run advertisements in the spring in an attempt to sell them. Today's Christmas decorations are supported by poles on Grand, Walnut and Main between 9th and 13th and on 12th, 11th and 10th, between Grand and Main. Kansas City Times, December 3, 1982.
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