Kansas City – which is not in Kansas
Monday, 23 December 2024So there’s the first thing that’s so surprising about Kansas City. It’s not in Kansas, it’s in Missouri, OK a bit of it sprawls across into Kansas, but most of it is in Missouri. Surprise two is it is so amazingly quiet. OK it’s the day after Thanksgiving, that might be the reason it’s so quiet. Or perhaps because there’s a Friday afternoon game for the Kansas City Chiefs and everybody is at the game. Hoping to catch a glimpse of Taylor Swift, although I don’t think she was in town. Whatever the reason while I was there you did not need to wait for the lights to change because there were no cars coming by. Not only were the streets almost empty, there was almost nobody on the sidewalks, interesting buildings, but huge expanses of car parks. Not multi-storey car parks, just flat open spaces, like the Kansas plains?
▲ Surprise three was it was cold. That’s spelt C-O-L-D. I woke up on Saturday morning to what soon became a little blizzard. OK I’d come prepared, I had my Helly Hansen jacket, warm stuff underneath it, gloves, but from summer in Australia to winter in Kansas City was, let’s be honest, a shock.
▲ Never mind, there was plenty to see and do starting with the Steamboat Museum, right across from River Market. The museum houses the very impressive wreck of the Arabia, it went down in 1856, lots of steamboats went down in the Missouri River. It was tricky to navigate and littered with debris like a stray tree trunk which could punch a hole right through the side of a careless steamboat. The Arabia sank quickly, although fortunately without loss of life, well human life, a mule tethered below decks died. But then the river changed track and salvaging the wreck proved impossible. When it was finally unearthed in 1988 it was nowhere near the river. The wreckage was actually underground, under a field. The river had dumped huge quantities of mud on top of the wreck and it really had to be dug up.
▲ A shoe shop full of shoes and boots.
The wreckage of the ship in the museum is excellent, but it’s the huge quantities of cargo which really blows your mind, a hardware shop full of tools, a department store full of plates and utensils, an amazing number of shoes. How did all this merchandise survive 130 years at the bottom of a river and then 50 feet (15 metres) underground?
▲ You could fill another shop with clothes and hats and a big enough button collection to stock a vintage haberdasher.
▲ From the Steamboat Museum with my travel companions Simon and Charlotte we took Kansas City’s modern – and free – streetcar service to the Hallmark Museum. Once they’d cleared a couple of snowbound cars off the tracks. Yes Kansas City is home for Hallmark Cards although today much more of the business is film and TV related although just as with Christmas cards it’s Christmas movies which are the big story for Hallmark.
▲ Nearby is the National WW I Memorial & Museum with a museum and a big, tall, pointy spire.
▲ The museum’s hillside location makes a fine lookout over the fine old Kansas City Union Station and the city. My first afternoon in Kansas City it was a relief, in the station, to finally find some people. I was beginning to think the city had been abandoned. Trains, however, are not so numerous. Today there are just a handful of trains a day running from what seems like a tacked on platform. Still I would quite like to have taken the Amtrak Missouri River Runner, five hours to St Louis on the other, eastern side, of Missouri for US$36.
▲ Meanwhile we visited the very impressive Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, noted for its giant shuttlecocks outside and an impressively diverse collection inside. Including a current Hokusai exhibit which included this reproduction of his signature work, the Great Wave of Kanagawa, made of Lego.
◄ There’s definitely a vintage feel about Kansas City, like the Gem Theatre in the 18th & Vine district and right across the road from the Jazz Museum, where I liked the ‘soundies,’ sort of jukebox tracks with video, black & white of course. The Negro Baseball League Museum is in the same building.
▲ Milwaukee Delicatessen, founded in 1900 in the Power & Light District, is also decidedly vintage, as was the nearby Hotel Phillips, where we stayed.
▲ We ventured from the city centre to West Bottoms, which turned out to be less interesting than we’d hoped, but we were very glad to find shelter in the motorcycle-inspired Blips Café, during our introductory snowstorm. 
▲ The Buck Stops Here – Harry S Truman’s desk
We ventured out of Kansas City to neighbouring Independence, the hometown of President Harry S Truman, to visit his Library & Museum featuring the desk where, he claimed, the buck stopped, ie he carried the final responsibility for making things work. And what an amazing time it was, Truman had only been Vice President for 82 days when Franklin D Roosevelt died and Truman unexpectedly had to take over on 12 April 1945. From there his presidency encompassed the final weeks of WW II in Europe, the remainder of the Pacific War which ended with the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From there he oversaw the start of the Iron Curtain descending across Europe, the Berlin Airlift, the cold war kicking off, the Korean War and no end of turmoil in the USA.
▲ Until in 1953, having decided not to run for President for a second time – he had been elected in 1948 – Truman retired to Independence where he lived the remainder of his life through to 1972 in the same house he and his wife Bess had lived in since 1919. Bess continued to live there until her death in 1982, they’re buried side by side at the Library & Museum. Reportedly it’s little changed from then, at least downstairs, we don’t venture upstairs. It’s really a remarkably unprepossessing house for a former president. Supposedly when Truman moved back to Independence in 1953 he had to be persuaded to put a fence around the garden, previously it had just been open to the street.
Other Kansas City oddities, well we indulged in the classic cuisine, ribs and a beer. We stumbled upon a suitably vintage map shop, the Gallup Map Company with lots of historic maps of the region – particularly the Ozarks? – and weirdly a map of South Sudan which I buy because I would like to have had it with me in South Sudan earlier this year. Then we stumbled on Josey Records, a fine old (vintage again) vinyl records outpost. On the other hand Kansas City is also, from my experience, the place where Uber’s reputation goes to die. We never had a good Uber experience, either they didn’t turn up at all, or they turned up in an uncooperative and bad mood or the final bill was a distinct shock.
