William Rockhill Nelson, founder of The Kansas City Star, is credited with saying this about his adopted hometown: ”I decided that if I were to live here the town must be made over.”
However imperious that may have sounded back then-and sounds even now-anyone who has lived in or visited Kansas City is a beneficiary of his surety and determination.
In the early years of this century, Nelson-and several other equally tenacious entrepreneurs-went about imposing their ideal of beauty on Kansas City.
Fortunately, their ideal is a hard one to dispute. It is centered on the notion of giving people lots of parks, boulevards, outdoor art and grand public buildings.
What makes their achievement more noteworthy is that the turmoil of urban life in America in the last few decades, which Kansas City has not avoided, has failed to destroy their handiwork.
Kansas City is still a beautiful city. To visit is to get a welcome respite from the world of shrinking expectations.
The Kansas City I`m talking about is the bigger, more bustling one in Missouri, which converges inconspicuously with Kansas along a straight and narrow seam called State Line Road. Just to the west is Kansas City`s smaller and quieter sister, Kansas City, Kan.
River city
Kansas City, Mo., grew up along the banks of the Missouri River where it takes a big easterly swing toward its confluence with the Mississippi.
Like many cities that developed on the interior watercourses of this continent-Louisville, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, to name a few-Kansas City now benefits more from its terrain than from its river.
The city sits astride bluffs, huge swells of earth stacked along the Missouri River that provide outstanding vantages.
While Kansas City is rightfully known for its barbecue and music, its vistas are equally impressive, and you don`t have to clog your arteries or stay up past your bedtime to appreciate them.
An excellent place to get the lay of the land is Liberty Memorial. This elegant 217-foot art deco tower in Penn Valley Park, Main Street and Pershing Road, was built to commemorate casualties of World War I. It stands on the prow of a bluff overlooking downtown Kansas City to the north and marks roughly the midpoint of a 5-mile stretch of the city that will keep a weekend visitor busily entertained.
These include such institutions as Arthur Bryant`s Barbecue, the Grand Emporium (noted for its blues acts), Thomas Hart Benton`s home, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and two shopping areas, City Market and the Country Club Plaza.
In Kansas City, Main Street lives up to its name. It is a major north-south thoroughfare that stretches from City Market to and beyond Country Club Plaza, and most of the recommended stops are either on Main Street or just off it.
At Liberty Memorial you can take an elevator to its pinnacle, or simply stand on its grand plaza with the breeze in your face.
You will note a number of prominent structures on the downtown horizon to the north. The one with the glittering gold-leaf cupola is the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. The slim art deco spire is the Kansas City Light and Power Building.
But the most conspicuous object in this urbanscape is Union Station, practically at your feet along Pershing Road. You can`t miss it because it is so big and so lonesome.
Station disputes
If you start to feel too optimistic up here on the bluff, Union Station will bring you back to earth. It is one of the few legacies from Nelson that haven`t done well in these times of tight money. Union Station, which has been empty for nearly 10 years, is the subject of litigation between the city and several companies that are accused of reneging on redeveloping it.
The beaux-arts station is also a topic of heated debate between preservationists and pragmatists who disagree on whether the building is worth restoring. It is hard to gaze down on Union Station-the inside is off-limits- and imagine what could save the gorgeous but obsolete terminal short of the reincarnation of passenger trains.
What has made it to the end of the century-has even survived the whims of fickle economies-are Kansas City`s parks and public spaces, its broad and winding boulevards, its outdoor sculptures and fountains.
Whether you go on foot (the recommended way) or by car (that is, one with the windows rolled down), it is virtually impossible to be far from the sound of trickling, spraying, gushing or pulsing water.
The styles of fountains range from the grandiose classical horses and riders splashing amid the geysers of the Plaza Fountain on the esplanade at 47th and Main Streets; to the serenely stylized art deco stone statues of a man and woman perpetually pouring water from vessels in their hands, which stand in the fragrance and texture garden at Loose Park; to the abstract stainless-steel pipe-and-waterworks sculpture in a downtown pocket park at Walnut and 12th Streets.
Citizen sculpture
Kansas Citians latched on to the concept of public sculpture long before it was fashionable in this country. Consequently, an endeavor that often seems like an afterthought or affectation in many other cities is an intrinsic part of living and doing business in Kansas City. The maintenance and acquisition of public sculpture is a given.
Having been at it for so long, Kansas City has all styles of sculpture rather than what is so often the urban norm: a few monstrosities of abstraction purchased when the fancy for public art coincided briefly in the 1970s and early 1980s with available tax dollars.
What is even more impressive than this concerted effort to put art in public places is the public`s concerted effort to get out into these open spaces and enjoy it.
At least on the weekends, people are out in force in Kansas City, pursuing all the ordinary activities-walking, jogging, biking, shopping, pushing a baby carriage, sitting on a park bench-that can make life wonderful in a city. Their presence provides an added attraction for those bystanders who watch people as avidly as they watch art.
While surely there are shopping malls somewhere in the metropolitan area, we did not see one. If you keep to the Main Street course you will be just as fortunate. The city`s best shopping areas are at City Market on the north end of Main Street, where shopping is a latter-day take on the age-old bazaar, and farther south on Main Street at Country Club Plaza, where art meets commerce. Commerce is king
Country Club Plaza, which Kansas Citians simply call the Plaza, is one of the oldest and most indomitable shopping complexes in America. Begun in 1922, when this area of the city verged on farmland, the Plaza is now the heart of a thriving district of businesses, condominiums, apartments, and hotels.
The Plaza makes no bones about being an orgy of retail opportunities, but it is also an exhilarating place to mill about. Its Spanish-style buildings, several of which are crowned with exotic domed towers, make the Plaza look more like a rambling palace than a shopping center, and you cannot turn a corner without bumping into a sculpture.
City Market, at Fifth Street between Main Street and Grand Avenue down by the river, can claim a longer history than can the Plaza. People have been selling their wares here since the 1850s, and even as Kansas City grew south the market never missed a beat.
City Market offers shopping different from the Plaza`s. Here the socioeconomic spectrum of the merchants, their merchandise and the clientele is much broader, and the mercantile emphasis shifts from refined elegance toward willful chaos.
For example, at Hung Yuong Market, an Asian grocery and seafood purveyor, you will find underwear in the same aisle as the canned mangoes. On Saturday and Sunday during harvest time, when vendors and shoppers are out in greatest number and the stalls are stacked with fresh produce, City Market comes close to resembling an experience in Latin America or Asia, where open-air markets still have primacy.
For people who don`t shop, or need an occasional break from it, Kansas City has three premier public parks. Penn Valley Park, which encompasses the previously mentioned Liberty Memorial, is 200 acres of undulating bluffs and ravines. It was being talked up as early as 1892 by George E. Kessler, Kansas City`s visionary park planner and landscape architect. His Penn Valley Park lies just south of downtown and across from Crown Center, the multipurpose complex of shops, offices, hotels and condos that is also the headquarters of Hallmark Cards.
A choice of parks
Considerably south, but still an easy drive by most urban standards, is Swope Park. It begins at 63rd Street Trafficway and Swope Parkway and rolls south for more than 1,000 acres.
Although the huge park was far removed from the city limits when it was dedicated in 1986, Kansas City has grown around it. Swope Park has a zoo, a nature center and Starlight Theatre, an open-air amphitheater for summertime music and theater.
Between these two huge parks is a smaller one that is more inviting to foot traffic. Jacob L. Loose Memorial Park is just south of the Country Club Plaza on Wornall Road between 51st and 55th Streets.
Loose Park is a pleasant compromise between formal gardens and less tamed expanses of meadows and trees. It is highly recommended for full-bore walking (and running), especially for out-of-town visitors, because its paths, which loop around the perimeter, have that symmetry conducive to getting exercise and because the park is near numerous hotels on the Plaza. Loose Park has the distinction of having once been wrapped in saffron nylon by Christo.
A weekend of walking and shopping can leave even the fit a little weary and footsore, which brings us to the subject of footwear. In the courtyard of the Raphael Hotel, one of the popular Country Club Plaza hostelries, is a reproduction of a Florentine statue. It depicts a young boy sitting with his left leg propped on his right knee; he is bent over examining the bottom of his foot, as if lost in the contemplation of a blister.
There is a message in that sculpture: Kansas City is made for walking, and you had better pack a pair of comfortable shoes. –
