What are those pants doing up there?!

I've seen some fantastic pants on strangers, like the guy in the Newark train station who had an embroidered skull on the butt of his jeans, or the guy on the subway with guns embroidered all over his jeans. But they didn't speak to me for this purpose (or, I was too chicken to try to sneak a pic of the gun guy and the skull one didn't turn out). So I waited until I came back home to Kansas City from school for this task because...

Kansas City is the city of mysteriously discarded pants. It's like the aftermath of a Dr. Seuss story. In the urban core over the years, I've seen a seemingly disproportionate number of pants on the sidewalks. Why? Do these fall out of bags of people making their way through the city? Are they soiled? Did the owners continue on without britches? Are they stolen and then dropped out of guilt? I don't get it. I don't know why, but I see more of them in Kansas City than I have in any other city so far. They puzzle me.

But lately the city's sidewalks have been bare, and the perfect stranger's pants eluded me--until this afternoon, when I was walking toward the river in a formerly industrial area. This is definitely the weirdest place I've seen a pair of discarded pants so far...