Greetings From Waldo continued from page 9 grown younger and wilder: The bar patrons are in their 20s and 30s, and many of them come in from suburbs such as Olathe, Blue Springs and Leawood. Pub crawls, like the Waldo Crawldo, draw crowds in the thousands to the neighborhood. Gentrification typically follows a rough pattern: Artist types move into a cheap neighborhood, open coffee shops and music venues; yuppies seeking authenticity follow, driving up rents and bringing with them wine bars and boutique shops; artist types get priced out; then come the Jäger bombs and the sports bars. But that’s not really the story of Waldo, which seems to have skipped a few of those steps. How does a sleepy, family-friendly business district become a major nightlife destination without any formal city planning, à la Power & Light? And what does this new landscape mean for this independently minded neighborhood moving forward?
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don’t like that term, ‘nightlife district,’ ” says Chris Lewellen, owner of Lew’s Grill & Bar and the Well in Waldo. “I think it makes us apprehensive here in the neighborhood. We don’t want to be what Westport was in the ’80s or what the Power & Light District is now. We don’t have large clubs and piano bars. We don’t have food trucks outside. I think if people want to do a bachelor party, they think P&L. If they want a mellower party, there’s Waldo.” That’s debatable. Few would describe the mood inside the Shot Stop as “mellow,” for example. And what else would you call a twoblock radius of 10 establishments serving alcohol to young-skewing crowds well after midnight but a nightlife district? Lewellen’s reluctance to define Waldo by its bar scene is understandable: He sits on the boards of the Waldo Area Business Association and the Waldo Community Improvement District (CID). Still, he’s arguably the person most responsible for the evolution of nightlife in Waldo. Lewellen grew up in south Kansas City, near 120th Street and Wornall. After college, he bought a house at 67th Street and Oak “mostly because it was walking distance to Charlie Hooper’s,” the long-running Brookside tavern. In those days, the ’90s, Brookside was a gradually gentrifying first-ring suburb, not unlike Waldo today. Hooper’s was, and still is, an old-school neighborhood bar pulling in both local residents and young professionals. Lewellen wanted to open a restaurant-bar that would attract a similar clientele. Waldo is a neighborhood that already had in place the infrastructure for a bar district: bars clustered within walking distance of one another, a handful of 3 a.m. liquor licenses. It was one of the last remaining areas, if not the last, in the metro with those raw assets. But the neighborhood didn’t have the broad appeal to make use of them in the way Westport, the Plaza or, to a lesser extent, Brookside could.
Because Lewellen was already close to the neighborhood, his gaze turned toward Waldo. “I always loved going out in Waldo,” he says. “But my wife, at the time my girlfriend, would never come with me. I’d say, ‘How come you won’t ever come to Waldo with me?’ And she’d say the bars were all smoky and dirty and served bad food. And I had kind of an epiphany. I thought, ‘There’s a lot of women in this area like my wife.’ I figured if I opened a cleaner place with nicer TVs and better food, I could get some of the females who were otherwise going to Brookside or the Plaza to come to my place instead. And if you get those women to come, then the guys will come, too.” So in 2004, Lewellen and his brother, Andy, opened Lew’s, in a strip mall near the southeast corner of 75th Street and Wornall. “We had the first flat-screen TVs in Waldo or Brookside — two of them,” Lewellen says. “Pretty soon, every bar in Waldo and Brookside had flat-screen TVs. And what we saw was that we rose the standard in the neighborhood. One by one, most of these other restaurants and bars either changed hands or the owners got smart and remodeled. Within five years, the whole neighborhood was looking better. It wasn’t just us. Neighborhoods need options. My bars benefit from there being other options in Waldo.” The Lewellens opened the Well in 2009, on a lot across from Tanner’s formerly occupied by Roscoe TV and Video. “I felt Waldo could use a really nice place, nicer than Lew’s,” Lewellen says. “Lew’s was getting people stopping in after softball games on Tuesdays, but those same people were going to Kona on the Plaza on Friday.” With its rooftop deck, fancy fire pits, sleek interior and beyond-bar-fare menu, the Well was an immediate hit. “It blew up all the projections I’d given to the bank,” Lewellen says. “And it accomplished what I wanted: It made Waldo a destination. The people who come
to the Well are coming from Lee’s Summit, Olathe, the Plaza, downtown. They’re coming to the Well and checking out all the other spots in Waldo while they’re here. It’s good for all the businesses in Waldo.” Not every Waldo business necessarily views proximity to the 75th-and-Wornall heart of the neighborhood as a boon, though. Dan McCall and Jason Rourke (the latter previously was a manager at Lew’s and the Well) recently opened the District Pour House + Kitchen four blocks south, at Gregory and Wornall. Along with Louie’s Wine Dive a few doors down and Bier Station a few blocks east, the District is meant to appeal to Waldo residents looking to avoid the aggressive crowds that sometimes populate Quinton’s, the Well, et al. “When I go out there [around 75th and Wornall] now, it doesn’t feel like a neighborhood anymore,” McCall says. “It’s not people you recognize from down the street. That’s kind of the opposite of what we’re trying to do with the District. We’re not into that latenight Waldo scene. We want to be a place for dinner and drinks, and then if you want to really party and stay out late, you can head up to Waldo after.” Phil Bourne started running Waldo Pizza, an anchor of the neighborhood, in 1987. It sits at 7433 Broadway, between the Shot Stop and Tanner’s. “I’m not a big fan of binge drinking, and Waldo seems to be attracting more people into the area that are bent on consuming mass quantities of alcohol,” Bourne says. “It’s good to see the area becoming more vibrant, but I’m a little concerned about how the younger, rowdier drinking crowd impacts Waldo. I think we need to stay vigilant about the nightlife here becoming overwhelming.” Other business owners privately grouse about the arrival of Hookah Haven. Hookah bars, which have a reputation as seedy magnets for underage late-night crowds, aren’t the kind
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Lewellen (left) and Botwin are two of the architects of the modern Waldo. of establishments that a gentrifying district likes to play up in a brochure. Lewellen allows as much. “That’s why my brother and I have been purchasing real estate in Waldo,” Lewellen says. (They now own 80 percent of the square block east of the Well — home to such businesses as Hartman Equipment and the Plumber’s Friend — plus a piece of property just west of 75th Street Brewery formerly occupied by a dry cleaner.) “We want to make sure the tenants in these buildings are good businesses that stay up to speed. That’s the best way to influence what becomes of Waldo and protect our interests — by being invested in it.”
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kitchen fire reduced Kennedy’s Bar & Grill, at 75th Street and Washington, to a pile of ashes in February 2007. Kennedy’s was, in many ways, the quintessential Waldo bar: an Irish dive equally friendly to old drunks and underage graduates of high schools like Rockhurst, St. Teresa’s, Sion and Shawnee Mission East. But in its destruction, property owner Diane Botwin saw opportunity. Botwin’s parents bought their first building in Waldo in 1972: the Waldo Astoria Dinner Playhouse, adjacent to Kennedy’s. In 1986, Botwin joined her parents in the business. She now owns many of the commercial spaces in the heart of the district, and is landlord to the Shot Stop, 75th Street Brewery, Pickleman’s and Kokoro Maki House. Botwin is steeped in Waldo history, and the Kennedy’s fire opened the door for her to think about the legacy she wanted to leave in the neighborhood. She was aware that mixed-use developments have become a standard model for successful urban development. She also knew continued on page 13
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