KCTV Broadcast Tower

KCTV's transmitter tower as seen from the Liberty Memorial.

At the time of its completion in 1956, the KCTV Tower was the third tallest freestanding structure in the world behind only the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building [2] and the tallest tower in the world surpassed the original height of the Eiffel Tower by 18 feet.[3][4] The Eiffel tower would regain the title of the tallest tower the following year by adding a broadcasting aerial which increased its height to 1,052 feet (321 m).[5][6]

The KCTV tower has become a widely recognized Kansas City landmark, in large part because of the string lights that adorn the four corners of the structure's frame, which can be seen for miles around the immediate metropolitan area at night. It is so recognized that KCTV incorporated the "tall tower" – as the station referred to it on-air – into the logo it adopted as part of an imaging revamp in November 1999 (at which time, it also adopted the current KCTV 5 News identity as the title for its newscasts), which remained in use until May 2002. The tower itself is of the same design as the 750-foot (228.6 m) transmission tower on which ABC affiliate KQTV upstate in St. Joseph (which, coincidentally, also began broadcasting on the date KCTV commenced operations, September 27, 1953) maintains its transmitter antenna and the 843-foot (256.9 m) WTVR TV Tower in Richmond, Virginia. Both of which were completed three years earlier in 1953.

From the 1970s until 2001, the tower also served as a weather beacon to signal residents and visitors of inclement weather affecting Kansas City and its immediate surrounding communities. For this purpose, station engineers switched individual sets of lights on the tower and moded them to flash when a severe weather watch or warning was issued for any county in the immediate Kansas City area by the local National Weather Service Forecast Office or the National Severe Storms Forecast Center/Storm Prediction Center, activating them in descending order – in one or more of three sections – in pertinence to the specific weather situation:

• Lights flashing on the top third of the tower indicated that a severe thunderstorm watch, tornado watch or winter weather advisory was in effect
• Lights flashing on the top two-thirds of the tower indicated that a severe thunderstorm warning or winter storm warning was in effect
• Lights flashing on all sections of the tower indicated that a tornado warning was in effect or that highly threatening weather would occur

After the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and The Pentagon on September 11, 2001, as symbols of American patriotism were heavily embraced in their immediate aftermath, KCTV engineers installed LED lights on the tower to correspond to the colors of the United States flag, placing red lights on the top third, white lights on the middle third and blue lights on the bottom third of the structure. In 2004, the lights on the tower were turned off entirely until all of the bulbs could be replaced; the lights on the tower were reactivated on July 1, 2006, with white lights having been installed on all of its sections, as had originally been standard until the 1970s. Since then, the lights have not flashed for the purpose of being a notifier of inclement weather conditions as they did prior to September 11, 2001.

In 2015, a non-profit called The Tower KC, Inc. was founded with the goal of re-lighting the tower as a public art piece. The project includes Kansas City Art Institute faculty member James Woodfill as lead artist and José Faus as lead community engagement artist, with Tower KC founder Jasper Mullarney and Kansas City architecture company El Dorado Inc. providing management for the project. The concept (titled Seeing the Night Bluely by Woodfill) is to capture the colors of the sky every day—from sunrise to sunset, bright blue or overcast—and reproduce them on the tower at night in a minutes-long repeating loop, utilizing LEDs. The Tower KC claims that once live, this installation will be the tallest public art piece in the world.[7]

• Lattice tower
• List of tallest towers in the world
• List of tallest freestanding structures in the world
• List of tallest freestanding steel structures
• List of famous transmission sites