Romeo wooed Juliet under one. The pope sends forth blessings from one. Even Taco Bell’s Chihuahua, Dinky, hawks gorditas from one.
Balconies are so much more colorful than the Webster’s definition of “a platform projecting from the wall of a building and enclosed by a railing.” They can be a window to the world. A lanai with a view. A veranda to slow the pace of life.
Rome, New York and New Orleans are famous for their balconies. In the Midwest, the average balcony seems as bland as bologna, little more than an outdoor minigarage to park a bicycle, a rusted grill or a moldy lawn chair.
But an above-average balcony doesn’t take a lot of time, a lot of money or a lot of space to create. Miniature menageries of whimsy sprout above Kansas City’s treetops.
Just look up.
On the corner of 40th and McGee Streets is a second-floor balcony curtained in green. On one side are 8-foot-tall vines of Better Boy and Super Fantastic tomato plants dotted with little green knobs. On another side are feathery fronds of Scarlett O’Hara morning glories stretching upward, sheltering a chorus of petunias, passion flowers and impatiens.
Even a bubbling pond gurgles softly in this midtown oasis. And all are contained on a 10-by-12-foot suspended slab of concrete.
“This,” Mike Elser said with a sweep of his hand, “is my own private sanctuary. Mostly why I do this is to block out the neighborhood and to give my partner and I a nice view. It does something to your soul to look out here. This place shuts out the world.”
Although traffic noise still drifts onto the balcony, the spot holds the promise of serenity.
“The very best time to be out here is in the evening or really early in the morning,” Elser said. “But even with the traffic, this feels like our very own secret garden.”
Elser waters the garden daily. Each plant also gets a daily dose of fertilizer. “It changes here every day,” he said, stressing that an apartment farmer must be diligent in training vines where they should grow. “All it takes is a little twist to encourage the vines to grow up through the lattice work. . . . It gives us a great view. And other people, too. I get a lot of compliments on it, and that’s nice.”
Bill Devine gets more than compliments. His apartment balcony, facing busy Southwest Trafficway, has been known to stop traffic.
“Last year, I had a yellow school bus stop here with a bunch of kids who asked me why I do this,” he said. “It’s fun, I told them. While everybody else puts plants and stuff like that on their balconies, I wanted to be different. I guess I zag while others zig.”
Devine’s balcony mirrors each season with a collection of pop-culture whimsy. And collection is the key word here.
At Christmas, lighted statues stand shoulder to shoulder. There’s Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus, a pair of 4-foot candy canes, elves, reindeer and a life-sized nativity scene.
Today Devine has animal statues glued onto his railing. Twenty-two, in fact, from little raccoons and roosters to squirrels, rabbits and ducks all in a row.
He bought the statues at K mart, all together in a box for $30. “It was a deal and it was different,” he said. “Besides that, all these animals were here when I was a little boy, 50-some years ago. For me, it reminds me of that time.
“My balcony is an extension of my life. I collect things and I enjoy sharing them with the world.”
Apartment balconies are a luxury that developed in the early 1900s throughout the United States, said Cydney Millstein, a local architectural historian.
And one style even originated in the Kansas City area.
Millstein, along with another architectural historian, Linda Becker, wrote a report for the Kansas City Landmarks Commission in 1990 titled “Colonnaded Kansas City Apartment Buildings.” A colonnade apartment building was a three-story, walk-up apartment featuring six units per floor, each with an exterior porch framed by Corinthian columns supporting a flat roof.
Before the 1880s, “apartments across the nation were considered to be a necessity of the poorer classes,” Millstein said in the report. “Tenement flats were boxlike in design, poorly lighted and ventilated. Most were generally narrow and unadorned of any porches.”
But a Kansas City builder at the turn of the century, William H. Collins, developed the colonnaded porch style — a style indigenous to Kansas City, she said.
“The trend for apartment buildings today is that architects are putting a lot more thought into the exterior design, really as much as the interior,” Millstein said. “In the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, garages replaced porches. The screened-in porch, literally called a sleeping porch, went out of popularity when air conditioning came into the picture. Those kinds of apartments with porches peaked in the 1920s.
“I think people are taking another look at the garden-apartment design because it sells apartments. It’s appealing and a much more pleasant way to live.”
The sight of a decorated balcony can be so inviting that it spawns other porticoes to sprout life, too.
Six years ago, Tarry Bartholomew moved into a colonnade apartment on McGee, one of six apartments with an almost 10-foot-square porch surrounded by thick Corinthian columns. None of the other porches was decorated.
But Bartholomew, a visual merchandising and display artist at Saks Fifth Avenue, chose this apartment for its balcony, which felt like a tree house.
“There was this huge tree in front, and when its leaves bloomed, it created this wonderful sense of isolation.” he said. “I had two palm plants that needed a space, so I decided to create a mood on the balcony that would match. I think it feels kind of Mediterranean out here.”
With a style in mind, he painted the floor a brick red, installed black wrought-iron curtain rings for gauzy drapes, set out the plants, and a private abode was born.
It wasn’t long after he decorated that several of his neighbors’ balconies also sported greenery, snippets of red flowers and chairs sitting around tables dressed in crisp tablecloths topped with candles.
“I love what has happened around here,” he said, “and it makes me feel good that I helped it. Our balconies make this building seem very cultured. I even think that it draws renters here.
“We love it out here,” he said. “My roommate and I stay out here as long as we can with the weather, until the bitter end. There’s really only a few months out of the year that we can’t enjoy it.”
