Abandon "Downtown"

by Jack Cashill

I recently spent a swell weekend in San Francisco. Our hotel was on Nob Hill. I spent some time in Chinatown, Fisherman's Wharf, and the Marina district. I toured the rest of the city's other famed districts--Pacific Heights, the Presidio, Haight-Ashbury, the Embarca-dero, even the Castro. I never did make it downtown. I never have made it downtown. Does San Francisco even have a downtown? Does New Orleans? I have visited that fabled city a half dozen times without ever getting beyond the French Quarter or the Garden District.

Does San Antonio have a downtown? If it does, I haven't been there either. Like those who just attended the NCAA final four, I have never gotten beyond the Riverwalk. Does Washington D.C. have a downtown? I have never stayed there, never even heard of it. Does Las Vegas have a downtown? I can proudly say I have never been to that sinful city, but from what I hear all the more interesting sin takes place on "the strip."

Last month, I booked a trip to New York City and chose my hotel through the Internet. The program featured hotels in about eight different sites. I chose "central midtown." "Downtown" was not among the choices.

This much being obvious, why are we in Kansas City so desperate to make our humble downtown the center of our entertainment life? Like the draught horse, downtown Kansas City ceased to be functional the first time a Model T drove up Main Street. Ignoring all common wisdom, we have been beating this horse dead for the last fifty years and somehow keep expecting it to spring back to life. It won't.

In truth, we blew the one good chance we had to revive the nag about ten or so years ago; that is, before we dispatched the utterly disingenuous gaming industry to the muddy banks of the Missouri. Newcomers to the city might get a chuckle upon learning how this happened. Hard to believe, but we here in the alleged "show me" state actually let industry promoters prey on our nostalgia and con us into thinking that all the gambling and what not would take place on real floating riverboats. Can you imagine that? In fact, none of these "boats" have proved any more seaworthy than the Oak Park Mall.

This time, we are looking at a kinder and gentler con. City leaders call it, at least in the interim, "a planned entertainment district." Mayor Barnes promises that it will deliver 4500 new jobs in addition to the 1200 real jobs that H&R Block will bring downtown. Cynics call it "Son of Centertainment."

The father of this son was the late, lamentable, awfully-named "Centertainment" complex in the equally dubious "Power & Light District." So transparently goofy were the plans for this 1997 project that they dismayed even supporters of downtown. Before Centertainment, there was a comparably dreamy 1983 plan called "Downtown 2000." This project promised a new "Galleria"--a 230,000 square foot shopping center linking Macy's and Jones's that would energize downtown with all the oxymoronic "excitement of contemporary retail malls." Imagine Bannister Mall or Metcalf South without parking, and you have some idea of its likely charms.

This much said, it is still wise and just for H&R Block to make the move. The area to which it is moving already has a natural cluster of legal, financial, civic institutions, and now a cool new library. We just need to stop considering it--and calling it--"downtown."

Historically, city planners have gone awry by attempting to impose 19th century eastern urban models even on open western cities like our own. The centerpiece of this model is the "downtown" with its expensive, if archaic, accoutrements: the downtown convention center, a light rail system that goes in no direction any two people can agree on, and a gratuitous "downtown" ballpark among other misapplications.

Invariably wiser than the planners, the citizens of this fair city have rejected or will reject the latter two. What they have yet to reject--or even get to consider--is the location of the convention center. For the real issue in Kansas City is not that the ballparks are misplaced or even that Kemper is misplaced, but rather that Bartle is.

The Son of Centertainment has no loftier purpose than to entertain those conventioneers who people Bartle by day and wander aimlessly by night. The city proposes to create this district from scratch largely to amuse these lost souls. The only way this will succeed in any memorable way is if the city digs a canal up Grand Street (the Grand Canal?) and floats a riverboat in it. Otherwise, at best, the city will have an entirely unmemorable, franchise-thick entertainment district created at the expense of the Plaza, Crown Center, and the chronically struggling Westport.

The city invariably misunderstands itself. What first impressed me about Kansas City when I moved here was not downtown--many cities have funky, marginal downtowns--but the commercially and even residentially viable corridor that runs from the riverfront through downtown to the Plaza, and beyond that the superbly planned JC Nichols corridor that runs south for another several miles. Not many cities have anything like this.

The corridor centers on the Plaza, the most attractive urban space in mid-America, now fully in vogue again as "life style" destinations replace enclosed malls even in suburbia. Built for the automobile, the Plaza continues to work well, better in fact than any other section of the metropolis. As the development along Brush Creek pushes east in a significant way, the Plaza now finds itself at the very nexus of arts, culture, education, and commerce in bi-state Kansas City. This is just kind of lucky actually, but it is the kind of luck that the city should seize upon.

The city starts with one very difficult but necessary decision: the building of a new convention center to be located just east of Troost on Brush Creek and easily reached by the now traffic light-free 71 Highway. As I wrote a few months ago, this move will deliver city visitors to what my apocryphal architect friend calls "the Brush Creek Culture-Scape--the most aesthetically pleasing and culturally rich swath of real estate, not just in the United States but in the world." At the eastern end of this swath, just a five-minute trolley ride over the historic Sni-A-Bar, sit our perfectly located, highly functional, totally accessible, parking-rich ballparks. Leave them there!

To erase the memory of the scarily-isolated central business district of yore, we call the old downtown "Civic Park" and transform it into a sylvan, Corporate Woods-type environment but with some genuine character especially on its flourishing west flank. In time, we can pave over the loop to the south and integrate Civic Park with the Crossroads and Freight House neighborhoods beyond.

These neighborhoods yield to the south past Union Station, Liberty Memorial, Crown Center, the Negro Baseball Hall of Fame and the Jazz Museum (which have moved to Crown Center), up Union Hill, through Westport and on to the Plaza. We call this now visually and symbolically integrated stretch by the only kind of name that will stick, "The Corridor."

When an enterprise like the Federal Reserve moves from one point in the Corridor to another, there is no longer any weeping or gnashing of teeth. If a city official slips and says "downtown," he or she is publicly scourged in the old, misbegotten Barney Allis Plaza, now a permanent memorial to the area formerly known as "downtown."

Jack Cashill is Ingram's Executive Editor and has affiliated with the magazine for 25 years. He can be reached at jackcashill@yahoo.com. The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and o not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's Magazine.