View of a new development in the Crossroads in downtown Kansas City (photo by Jim Barcus)
The words came from somewhere behind me, sharp enough to surprise, put me in a fighting stance.
“Hey! What are you doing in my neighborhood.”
I hadn’t seen her for years. In the interim, she’d moved from the West Bottoms to the Westside. Though I laughed it off, I bristled at the quickness of my dismissal. In that instant her claim of ownership made me an outsider in the neighborhood I spent some years nourishing and being nurtured by.
The evolution of the Westside into a gentrified gathering place with million-dollar views, contemporary grand houses and townhomes, alongside century-plus structures, some sturdy, others renovated and some worse from the wear-and-tear of evolving generations, marks for me the first glimpse of gentrification.
I noticed it first at the corner of Summit and 17th street. I spent two years in my teens delivering tortillas and Mexican products out of La Flor de Mayo Tortilleria. Across the street was Jingles Market, he of the grumpy but fair disposition. A doctor’s office was at the next corner. My delivery van was a constant at Brooks auto shop just one building east on 17th.
The area has evolved into a mix of distinct restaurants, school, community center, businesses, new apartments and remodeled homes. A community garden anchors another corner. My friend was right. I was in a different neighborhood than the one that gave me refuge many years before.
It’s an inevitable consequence of evolving priorities, housing patterns, civic neglect and suburbanite rediscovery. Eventually we all become strangers, the familiar becomes a veneer of nostalgia with a hint of regret. I’ve been fortunate to call many places in this metro home and seen the inexorable advance of progress.
I fondly recall the Night of the Living Safeway on Broadway across from the Uptown Theater. It provided the essentials for 15 years of meals and snacks and late-night ventures to a weirdness that was sublime in its surprises, triggering in its contradictions. The store was a different place at night when all the freaks descended. I felt very comfortable there and never thought it weird until it attained its moniker in a story in The Kansas City Star.
I worked at the Uptown Theater for a few years in the late ’70s to early ’80s. I saw a lot of shows, bought a lot of snacks and cigarettes from Safeway. We lit many a joint in its parking lots, watched many a show on the streets after the bands were done. The Ambassador Hotel was party central if you knew some people. Eventually the area was home to The Writers Place, just a couple of blocks off Broadway. The area was a place made for writers and other freaks but not those that set up neighborhood associations.
For a time, I lived off Troost at 34th and Harrison. It was a mixed neighborhood with a vibrant and at times dangerous street scene. A neighbor pulled a gun on some dudes trying to break into my house while I slept, oblivious of the crime. I do remember a quick shop on the corner that one glorious summer sold homemade Cajun food that was good, real
damn good.
I could write of living in the West Bottoms before it became residential, the Crossroads before it had the name, Brookside before it got so expensive. Midtown, always a constant, or Volker, the one main anchor over many decades.
I’m not opposed to things changing. There is an expectation, a vibrancy that attends the change when areas long neglected are rediscovered. Yet there is a cautionary tale in the pell-mell rush to redevelopment. Property and rent prices soar. Housing stock becomes an investment arrangement, not a living priority. Neighborhoods fray, losing the unique identity that made them distinct areas.
I’m reminded of the song “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds. “Little boxes on the hillside/ Little boxes made of ticky-tacky/Little boxes on the hillside/ Little boxes all the same…”
Long the norm for suburbs, now I see it everywhere from high-density apartment construction in the West Bottoms to those built and being built along Richard L. Berkley Riverfront Park. It’s there along the Troost corridor from 22nd Street up to 31st Street. Signs of it are in the Westside, Midtown and God forbid we think back to what the Crossroads was like before “Urban Pioneers” rediscovered it. It’s in old Overland Park’s downtown.
Everywhere the ubiquitous sameness of the cookie cutter, high-density apartments and condos announcing progress and growth. This heavy footprint changes the urban feel of a city. Go anywhere in this country and look at the variety of designs and enclosures being built. The corner as a hive of activity disappears, the porches long gone. Balconies are acknowledged by strips of color, faux materials, or designs that mimic depth but are at best sketched facades.
Neighborhoods, jeopardized by their proximity to main thoroughfares, become target areas. The rush to remold the city into a familiar, sanitized version of what some consider urban living leads to a redefinition of market rate at the expense of common sense, and the sacrifice of dignified, affordable housing.
You can be on Troost at 24th and be challenged to see the uniqueness between that and other complexes that sprout along Berkley Riverfront Park, or Midtown along Broadway, where Valentine neighborhood residents have charged that Kansas City Life Insurance practices malignant stewardship over its housing stock, abandoning maintenance in plans to tear down for a large-scale ticky-tacky redevelopment.
A fitting end to this rumination are the words of Bill Luening, a former Kansas City Star editor, commenting on the Safeway story. “An urban landscape… is, in its soul, a story about differences and tolerance and an appreciation of diversity in a society that today, perhaps more than ever, tends to revere the conventional.”
