An extraordinary event has taken place in greater Kansas City--almost without anyone noticing it. The area's center of economic gravity, which had been sliding inexorably towards the south and west for 50 years, has reversed itself. A series of developmental forces, some of them entirely unanticipated, has pulled that center back north.

Now, the area finds itself re-centered--ironically, right where it all started, on the bluffs above the confluence of the Missouri and the Kaw, in the heart of a town that has been known for the last 155 years as Kansas City, Missouri.

As is well enough known, on August 3 Kansas City voters by a comfortable margin approved a hotel and rental car tax to build a new arena. What is less well understood is why.

In fact, one reason the tax did pass is that Sprint Corporation agreed to purchase the new arena's naming rights. This had a more powerful psychological impact on the deal than it did financial. In announcing his support, Sprint CEO Gary Forsee affirmed Downtown Kansas City as the center of the metropolis and all but renounced Overland Park's generation long effort to wrest that designation away from Kansas City.

This not so subtle rivalry between city and suburbs had been brewing since the completion of I-35 through Kansas in the late 1960s and the opening in that same period of the Metcalf South Shopping Center. These events marked Johnson County not only as a prosperous appendage to Kansas City but as a competitive entity.

Meanwhile I-435, which was built as a bypass around the area's southern flank, turned into the main street of the erstwhile small town of Overland Park. The highways helped transform greater Kansas City into what was beginning to seem a bi-polar metropolitan area with downtown at one pole and the newer and shinier Overland Park at the other.

Indeed, if there was any one date that marked Overland Park's ascendance it was October 1, 1999, when Sprint officially dedicated its new World Headquarters. With a new Convention Center and adjoining hotel in the planning stages, one could be forgiven for thinking that Overland Park would one day soon overtake Kansas City, Missouri and dominate the metropolitan area. With Sprint's renewed participation Downtown, however, Overland Park's dominance is less likely.

A second and related reason that the tax passed is that much of the leadership in Clay and Platte County--the source of a good deal of historic resistance--had come to see that a revitalized downtown is in its own economic best interest.

Unlike the leadership in Johnson County, economic leaders north of the river have never had the ambition to compete with Downtown Kansas City. Just the opposite is true in fact. "The Northland is tied to downtown," Clay County Commissioner Craig Porter shared with Ingram's readers in July's Clay County Economic Development Report. "The downtown is the heart and soul of any town."

"Kansas City is the central city," agreed Charles Garney. "A lot is expected of it." Garney argued that a stronger central city would stimulate development in the Northland, which in turn would stimulate a stronger central city. Garney complimented City Manager Wayne Cauthen's efforts to accomplish just that. Historically, the Northland resisted initiatives in Kansas City not because it was competing with Downtown but because its residents did not trust city government. Cauthen, more than Mayor Kay Barnes, has helped change that.

For many years before Cauthen's arrival, the future had seemed to bypass Downtown. In this auto-friendly city, Downtown seemed an anomalous, impenetrable island. What created the image of impenetrability were the subterranean freeways that wrap around the central business district (CBD) like a moat. If in fact the Interstates made Downtown more accessible to the rest of the metro, in spirit they made it less so. To many they proved a psychological barrier that sealed the CBD off.

Kansas City made its first serious effort to bridge that barrier with the signatory extension of Bartle Hall across the Interstates to the south. This move in turn inspired more interest in linking Downtown to the fully viable urban corridor that ran south for the next four miles to the Country Club Plaza.

That link became tangible when plans were unveiled for a dazzling new $300 performing arts center to be built just south of Bartle. If Downtown could no longer function as the commercial hub of the metropolis as it did in the first half of the 20th century, before the advent of the Interstates, it could at least serve as a vibrant and entertaining point of entry to the rest of the city. An additional two billion dollars of projects emanating out of Downtown that are now under construction or in planning has given this vision additional life.

Still, despite these projects, one problem remained, a major one, and that was the gaping whole in the very center of the central business district. Although the western flank of downtown was flourishing with new business and upscale residential properties, and the eastern flank remained a vital center of govern-ment, law, and finance, the center could not and did not hold.

That problem has been solved with two bold strokes. The first is the launch of a 425,000-square-foot entertainment district of restaurants and specialty retail on a seven-block site just east of Bartle Hall. Managed by the Cordish Co. of Baltimore, the Kansas City Live entertainment district has been conceived to provide the amenities necessary to keep Kansas City in play as a sports venue and convention city. As attractive as the entertainments to the south might be--Union Station, Crown Center, Westport, the Plaza--they lack the kind of easy access that convention-going pedestrians demand.

The second stroke, of course, is the new $250 million Sprint Arena project, which will buttress the entertainment district to the east. Plans calls for an arena that will seat approximately 20,000 or more spectators, and that will include a National Collegiate Basket-ball Hall of Fame as well.

Voter approval of the arena project proved a real shot in the arm for Kansas City, the Cordish Company and advocates of Downtown alike. "We are incredibly excited by the Sprint Arena approval," Blake Cordish, who is in charge of the entertainment district project, in the immediate aftermath of the vote. "It is the perfect complement to the enter-tainment district. When people go to see events, they naturally want to make more of an experience out of it both before and after."

Although the city is charging forward with its plans, it will be 2008 before the arena, the enter-tainment district, and the perform-ing arts center are all on line. When they are up and running, however, it is likely that Kansas Citians will breach the moat, and it is possible that they will forget there ever was one. If so, the metropolis will have a center once more.