Groundsite Image Gallery
Kansas River from City Hall
Artist: Hughes, Langston
Height: 0.000"
Width: 0.000"
Kaw (Kansas) River from City Hall fourth floor.
The city hall has a public observation deck on its fourth floor. It overlooks the river that Hughes refers to in his autobiography. The barbed wire factory is in the right foreground, and the electricity generator building is in the middle foreground.
In the poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Hughes writes,
I have known rivers:When Alice Walker stayed in a hotel overlooking the river during the Langston Hughes symposium (2002), she told a University of Kansas audience that the Kaw reminded her of Hughes’s years living alongside this river.
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep
like the rivers.