In March 1997, Show-Me Publishing under the watchful eyes of Joe and Michelle Sweeney, launched its first edition of Ingram’s Magazine. In fact, the magazine had been in business since 1975, but under three different titles and a variety of owners, including Bill Dorn, Mike Russell and Bill Worley as well as Bob Ingram, who changed Corporate Report Kansas City to his namesake. The March 1997 issue represented not so much a break with this worthy tradition as a fulfillment.
Had a Rip Van Ingram’s fallen asleep at the time of Show-Me’s purchase and awoken from his slumber in 2007, some of the changes in Kansas City and its business community would have leaped out at him, but some he would have had to observe closely to discern.
Curiously, it was those subtler changes that have most affected business in the last ten years.
For instance, both Commerce Bank and UMB ran ads in the March 1997 Ingram’s. Commerce invited its would-be clientele to call 234-2658. UMB invited its would-be clients to check out www.umb.com and then, if need be, call 860-7000.
Incredible as it might seem, UMB was the only advertiser in that issue to post its web site—although Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City did invite readers to email a certain “lemurf” @ bcbskc.com.
Note, as well, the phone numbers. How easy it is to forget that, ten years ago, local companies on either side of the state line did not need to list area codes.
When Rip fell asleep in March ‘97, Ingram’s was housed on the tenth floor of the weary old Argyle Building catty-corner to the Jackson County Court House and across 12th Street from a homely—often times homeless—Kansas City Public Library.
Just as Rip was dozing off, however, plans were being made to begin a controversial $234 million rehabilitation of Union Station at the southern edge of downtown. A few months earlier, in November 1996, voters had approved a unique bi-state sales tax to raise $118 million for the project.
Although the jury is still out on the future use of Union Station, there is no doubt about the positive effect of the renovation on the station’s neighborhood. Even before the renovation officially got underway, real estate prices began rising on the north side of the tracks. That price rise was due to a market-spurred demand.
In Ingram’s special downtown edition from March 1997, we noted this movement, but without much fanfare. While other area media were writing off downtown, we were writing it up.
We talked of the “young Turks,” who were “buying up warehouses around Union Station for lofts, offices, art galleries, and restaurants.” Said one of them, Mike Rainen, then of Rainen Business Interiors,
“The void is going to fill in between the Loop and Crown Center,” and he was righter than anyone knew.
Soon afterwards, Dan Clothier and his partners acquired and renovated the old freight house building across the tracks from Union Station. The renovation attracted well-known New York City restaurateur Lidia Bastianich and even the attention of the New York Times, which covered the area’s revival.
The City Tavern and Fiorella’s Jack Stack Barbecue also opened in that same building. In 2004, Ingram’s moved into a converted, brick stand-alone freight shop in full barbecue fallout range due north of Jack Stack, and this part of the city’s future was sealed.
The Union Station restoration inspired the Federal Government to build a massive IRS Center across the street and to its west, and the new Federal Reserve building to its south. It also spurred new building in Crown Center and Union Hill as well as the renovation of the Liberty Memorial and World War I Museum.
The city was pulling itself together once again, and we at Ingram’s were urging it on.
