Page 5 of 5
Kansas City, Missouri
Your purple mouth says snicker snack
The slideshow rolls on and makes one last stop in the only place it possibly could. Welcome to the last page of the slideshow and welcome to Kansas City, Missouri.
This story starts in some corporate boardroom in Chicago when United Airlines decided to change their rules for frequent flier elite status. Now instead of just miles (which are easy to figure out), you need to accrue PQM, program qualifying miles, which are variable yet always invariably less than what you think they'll be. You also need to reach a minimum threshold of PQD, program qualifying dollars. This is the hard one. When assessing a year that included flights to DFW, LAX, SFO, LHR, MIA and FLL, I was already pretty close to getting back to Elite Silver status. But then when trying to find a last flight to nudge me over the finish line, things got hard. A flight to Chicago would easily get me the PQM but even west coast flights wouldn't get me where I needed to be with the PQD. After some searching, I finally found the magic bullet and one of the only places that actually got me back to Silver. It was MCI. Kansas City. Home of damn tasty barbecue and other worthwhile but honestly far less important attractions. There are are far worse places to consider and a weekend out to Kansas City is a better idea than you think it is, even if like a normal person you're not looking for PQDs or PQMs or whatever the hell an FLL is.
The Kansas City pictures start atop the World War I Memorial, with Union Station and Crown Center up front and the rest of downtown lurking behind.
In 1919, shortly after the end of World War I (then known as The Great War), Kansas City was the first to act in the US by designing a great big memorial to the great war on a prominent site right near the train station. Years later they were able to build on their early action by landing the country's National World War I Museum, a world class museum about an incredibly important and generally under appreciated war. The museum has all sorts of amazing artifacts from tanks to trenches to all levels of personal effects, part of a collection that is incredibly dense and well explained. It's almost impossible to imagine the levels of horrors those people were dealing with a hundred years ago today. They were totally unprepared for unending mechanized warfare, although even if they were prepared it's hard to imagine the outcome being any less different or any less horrible.
The picture here is from the museum or rather from right on top of it. Part of the original 1919 plan included an observation tower which still fills its purpose today (as you can see from the first picture this page). It also features an eternal flame atop the tower, although "eternal" and "flame" are not quite accurate. Instead of a flame, the tower releases a plume of steam that is then lit by orange lights, an alternate truth that can still be quite effective. However the day we were there, the fog and eternal flame was turned off. It turns out that when they leave the steam on during cold nights, it creates a deadly dangerous layer of thin ice on top of the observation deck that needs to be laboriously chipped off in order not to send visitors sliding right off the damn thing.
One of the great acts of vandalism of our time (and by “our time” I mean well before I was born) was the destruction of New York's Pennsylvania Station, a landmark Roman scaled building that once expressed the hope of travel and pride of place but today only expresses whatever level of hell has the worst overcrowding issues. The bones of the original building with all of its ornaments were mostly sent to the New Jersey Meadowlands to die, specifically to a dump site that is now the first truck transfer site on the left that you see after your train successfully escapes the failing North River Tunnels. Small artifacts of the original station remain if you know where to look and there are salvaged eagle statues saved from the building now scattered throughout the northeast from Seventh Avenue in New York to Thirtieth Street in Philadelphia to Ringwood to Maine. However (as you probably guessed by now) the most significant artifact is safe and hiding in exile in Kansas City, of all places.
This sculpture of "Day and Night" once stood directly above the main entrance to the station, on Seventh Avenue and West 32nd Street, where it was all about the time. In the middle was a giant clock (now gone), on top was a non functioning stone hourglass sculpture and on either side were two women, Day on the left and the far more fun Night on the right. They were surrounded by eagle statues (which were all over the exterior) as the symbol of the Pennsylvania Railroad, one of the most powerful companies in the history of the Union and one now long gone. For reasons best known only to them, this statue was saved, sent to an especially non prominent site in Kansas City and repurposed as a monument to Eagle Scouts. Where once it greeted men like kings atop the main entrance to a station designed to last forever, today it watches cars go by on Gilliam Road and is totally taken off guard when someone (like me) stops by to pay their respects about what it once was, and about all that remains lost to time.
Kansas City is full of surprises, and one of them has to be the Kauffman Center, all curves and concrete and metal under a cold December rain.
The building was designed by Moshe Safdie, one of the more underappreciated architects of our time. Even when I saw him receive the AIA Gold Medal in Atlanta (or AtlAIAnta as the AIA people liked to call it) a lot of the crowd seemed to think it was a good time to check their phones. Safdie has designed some damn good buildings and is all over some of your favorite past slideshows. From the Canadian Museum of Art to the Salt Lake City Library to Habitat 67 to Pearson Airport ) to Crystal Bridges to the Sands in Singapore to the glorious Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, there's more than enough good Safdie buildings out there to go around.
The Nelson Atkins Museum is reason enough alone to visit Kansas City, and it’s hard to imagine me being there and not being here too. The museum has a deceptively well designed addition by Steven Holl, with a series of translucent glass buildings scattered across the lawn just waiting for you to explore them.
The Nelson Atkins Museum is free to visit, which is a good thing because otherwise it would be a logistical nightmare to keep checking tickets considering how porous it is. All those glowing boxes connect underground and a lot of them connect outside to a path that weaves in and out of them. If you’re inside, it makes you want to head outside, and if you’re outside it makes you want to head inside. Good thing that you can do both.
For a slideshow what was all about safe museum additions, avoiding getting struck by lightning on your wedding day, the awful crap passing for art at the Perez (still trying to be positive), referencing old slideshows for no (good) reason, and (I guess) travel pictures with somewhat related stories, there is no better place to end it all then over the border in Kansas at Joe's Kansas City BBQ, hands down the best BBQ I have ever had in my life.
Anthony Bourdain called Joe's one of the thirteen places you need to eat at before you die. His reasoning was that there is nowhere better to get good BBQ in the world than Kansas City (agreed) and that there is nowhere better to get BBQ in Kansas City then Joe's (agreed), therefore Joe's is the best BBQ in the world. I have not eaten at every BBQ place there is (not that I haven’t tried), but from personal experience there is nowhere better. The actual in-restaurant experience would be terrible if it wasn’t for the food- it's literally attached to a gas station convenience store with crazy long lines and pretty slow service, but all is forgiven because the food is so damn good. This is reason alone to go to Kansas City, even if you are a total monster who hates things like glowing free museums, Moshe Safdie, World War 1 and important modern relics exiled in out of the way parks.
