The Pitch: August 2017

news: Why is Jim

Hinson really leaving Shawnee Mission?

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streetside: A

AUGUST 2017 I FREE I PITCH.COM

living time capsule keeps rolling on Strawberry Hill.

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Good Dog Days Urban living — from Westport to the East Crossroads to a private dog park headed to the riverfront — is hot year-round.

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Contents

32

Photo Essay

off the Chain Bar K Lab is Stage 1 in its owners’ plan to build the better dog park — and it’s already great.

By april fleming

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28

tad Carpenter The graphic designer and illustrator gets all the emails.

d for downtown An A-to-Z glossary for KC’s urban workforce

QUEstIoNNaIRE

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NEws

the Invisible Man Jim Hinson, Shawnee Mission’s swaggering superintendent, vanished as soon as parents spoke up. What happened?

By Jay Senter and BarBara Shelly

Identity Crisis Once again, a pending development raises the question: Is Westport a historic neighborhood or an entertainment district?

By Bruce rodgerS

the sisterhood Uzazi Village grows into a new home as it continues to serve women, babies and families in the urban core.

By traci angel

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stREEtsIdE

URbaN lIvINg

By lucaS Wetzel

bloc Parties Neighborhood associations aren’t about busybodies and the burbs — they’re often KC’s real grass roots.

By Jennifer Wetzel

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Café

Net gain Mass St. Fish House & Raw Bar ups the fresh-seafood game in landlocked Lawrence.

By liz cook

Wash it all down with one of our beers brewed right in our own brewery, like the seasonal brew, Amerisports Draft Choice Special IPA.

Every Monday night is SIN night from 6p – close. Show your Service Industry ID to receive 50% off your check!

By april fleming

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study abroad Poet and teacher Cyrus Console turns himself into a different kind of writer with his Romanian Notebook.

PRofIlE

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dRINk

the butterfly Effect What happens inside the luxuryminded Monarch —opening this month on the Plaza —may well affect KC’s whole cocktail scene.

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Industrial strength Matt Abbott’s turbocharged gentrification of the East Crossroads

FOOD, BREWS AND SPORTS

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on a Roll A church-basement bowling alley draws a party in Strawberry Hill.

By david hudnall and chaSe caStor

A WINNING PLACE FOR

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By david hudnall

pitch.com | august 2017 | the pitch

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contents

L ive

LARGE Labor Day WEEKEND

42 ARt

the Bird Lady of the northeast Evie Englezos and her Sweet Destructor ceramics listen to the animals.

By Annie RAAB

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44 FiLM

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By lARRy KopiTniK

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COnCERtS PLuS

The Pitch’s Margarita Wars event deploys blenders to Waldo (page 34), and your Best of Kansas City votes are being counted (get to pitch.com).

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the pitch

Editor Scott Wilson Staff Writer David Hudnall Proofreader Brent Shepherd Contributing Writers Tracy Abeln, Traci Angel, Liz Cook, Karen Dillon, April Fleming, Natalie Gallagher, Deborah Hirsch, Ron Knox, Larry Kopitnik, Angela Lutz, Dan Lybarger, David Martin, Eric Melin, Annie Raab, Aaron Rhodes, Barbara Shelly, Nick Spacek, Jennifer Wetzel, Lucas Wetzel Art Director Christie Passarello Contributing Photographers Zach Bauman, Chase Castor, Jennifer Wetzel Graphic Designers Amy Gomoljak, Abbie Leali, Liz Loewenstein, Melanie Mays Publisher Amy Mularski Director of Marketing and Operations Jason Dockery Senior Classifieds & Multimedia Specialist Steven Suarez Multimedia Specialists Becky Losey, Ryan Wolkey Office Administrator and Marketing Coordinator Andrew Miller

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Chief Executive Officer Chris Ferrell Chief Financial Officer Bob Mahoney Chief Operating Officer Blair Johnson Director of Human Resources Becky Turner Executive Vice President Mark Bartel Vice President of Content/Communication Patrick Rains Vice President of Production Operations Curt Pordes Creative Director Heather Pierce

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National Advertising 1-888-278-9866 vmgadvertising.com

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copyright

The contents of The Pitch are Copyright 2017 by KC Communications, LLC. No portion may be reproduced in whole or in part by any means without the express written permission of the publisher.

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IMPACTING THE FUTURE of AGRICULTURE

4

SCHOLARSHIPS • EDUCATION • COMPETITION

On tHE COVER

Potato, posing at Bar K Lab (page 32) Photo by April Fleming, illustration by Dave Coates

the pitch | august 2017 | pitch.com

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questionnaire

ing anything. Also, old episodes of America’s Funniest Videos.

“I’ve been known to binge watch ...”

Friday Night Lights. I hate sports shows but, come on, FNL is more than sports — it’s so good. I binge a ton of old episodes of Parks & Rec and Seinfeld. Way too much.

“I can’t stop listening to ...” Kendrick Lamar’s Damn. Still.

“I just read ...” An email. So many emails.

But as a picture book writer and illustrator, I read a lot of children’s literature. I just read School’s First Day of School. Loved Christian Robinson’s illustrations and the overall story.

The best advice I ever got: “The harder I work the luckier I get,” by Buck Owens. Not really advice but has always stuck with me.

My sidekick? Not really my sidekick but my partner, my wife Jessica Carpenter. Everything I do is better because of her.

What is your spirit animal? George Costanza Who is your hero? I look up to a lot people — designers like Alexander Girard, Saul Steinberg, Tom Eckersley and Ikko Tanaka.

But there’s no one I look up to more than my dad, Steve Carpenter. He has taught me so much about design, ice cream, everything.

Bethany Hughes

Tad Carpenter

Graphic designer, illustrator and partner at Carpenter Collective Twitter handle: @TadCarpenter Instagram handle: @CarpenterCollective Hometown: Kansas City Current neighborhood: West Plaza What I do (in 140 characters or less): I co-run Carpenter Collective, a design and branding studio in Kansas City, with my partner and wife, Jessica Carpenter.

What’s your addiction? Take 5 candy bars.

I mean, guys, they have pretzels, caramel, peanuts, peanut butter and chocolate.

What’s your game? As a kid I loved the game Guess Who? But have you looked at it as an adult? Yikes, those people are so creepy.

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It would be a dream job to redesign the game, keeping a few of the creeps, of course.

What’s your drink? Typically a beer guy.

Love Tank 7 and Boulevard’s Tropical Pale Ale. In the summer I enjoy a horsefeather.

Where’s dinner? We are on the run a lot or at work late, so most likely Chipotle.

That’s the worst answer. In a perfect world, though, we love Port Fonda, Empanada Madness and Novel — and that is excluding KC barbecue.

What’s on your KC postcard? I love our creative history here in Kansas City. Probably an illustration of some of the heroes: Walt Disney, Charlie Parker, Thomas Hart-Benton, J.C. Hall, Kate Spade. Yeah, it might need to be a big postcard.

Finish these sentences: “Kansas City got it right when ...” They added the streetcar. It’s a good start to adding more public transportation to our city, and I’m excited to see it evolve.

“Kansas City screwed up when ...” We lost the Kansas City Kings. I know it was a long time ago but, man, I wish we had an NBA team in KC. “Kansas City needs ...” A new airport.

“As a kid, I wanted to be ...” An artist.

“In five years, I’ll be ...” Hopefully five years older. I truly hope to be doing the same type of work in five years I am doing today.

“I always laugh at ...” Photos and videos of dogs driving cars or bikes or just dogs driv-

What’s your greatest struggle right now? Sometimes it feels like I’m playing a game to see how many emails I can send in a single day. Not a real struggle, I know.

But finding balance between, life, communication and the time it takes to make what it is I am being asked to make is a constant struggle.

My brush with fame: After the 2015 Royals World Series, I shared a photo on Twitter of my friend Brad and I at both the 1985 World Series parade and the 2015 parade. The story got picked up and viewed thousands of times on Bleacher Report, the Royals’ website and CBS Sports. Most important, Kelvin Herrera retweeted it.

My soapbox: No real soapbox. I can say, though, I’m truly proud to live and be from Kansas City. I’m lucky enough, like many people, to travel quite a bit. Each trip I go on reiterates how special and important Kansas City is to me.

What was the last thing you had to apologize for? Probably eating the last doughnut.

My recent triumph: We recently moved our studio into a new space in the Crossroads. It’s a lot of fun watching it evolve into ours.

the pitch | AUGUST 2017 | pitch.com

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FIERCELY LOYAL. ALWAYS THERE WHEN YOU NEED. REPRESENTING YOU SO WELL, THEY’LL THINK WE’RE YOU.

GOT YOUR BACK BY STANDING AT YOUR SIDE.

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WWW.WHICHROLE.COM pitch.com | august 2017 | the pitch

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news

The Invisible Man

Hinson’s leadership style and abrupt retirement have sparked intense board races.

Jim Hinson, Shawnee Mission’s swaggering superintendent, vanished as soon as parents spoke up. What happened?

by Jay Senter and Barbara Shelly

In the spring of 2013, Jan Bombeck was wrapping up her 21st year as a librarian in the Shawnee Mission School District. She liked her job. But as a veteran employee and the mother of kids who had gone through high school in the district, she’d started to worry about Shawnee Mission’s direction.

For decades, Shawnee Mission had been the gold standard of public education in Johnson County — a community that, historically, had long treated its schools as a religion. Lately, though, that reputation seemed to be fading.

“I’d go to these conferences and hear people from around the state and other districts talking about new technology and iPads in the libraries, and I’d think, We don’t have any of that,” she says.

So when the Shawnee Mission Board of Education announced in March of that year that it had selected Jim Hinson, the charismatic and youthful-looking superintendent

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of schools in Independence, to replace retiring Superintendent Gene Johnson, Bombeck was pleased.

“I thought Gene Johnson was a nice guy, but I didn’t think we were moving forward as a district very quickly,” Bombeck says. “I was really glad when they announced they’d hired Hinson. You had a feeling he was going to get things going for us again.”

When she expressed that optimism to a friend from Independence, though, the friend “kind of just rolled her eyes,” Bombeck says. “She didn’t say too much. But you could tell that she thought something was off with him [Hinson].”

Still, Bombeck’s spirits were buoyed. On paper, Hinson looked like he was just the guy to give her district a much-needed injection of new blood. His career had been marked by rapid advancement and ambitious initiatives that had gotten lots of good press.

Two years later, Bombeck would come

to understand what had given her friend pause. Hinson had made plenty of changes, all right. But she wanted little to do with them — or with him.

“I had, like, an overnight realization of, Something’s wrong with this man,” she says.

Jimmie Leon Hinson, whose parents were Assembly of God ministers, began his career in education in 1984 as a sixth-grade teacher in his hometown, Carthage, Missouri. He quickly moved up to elementary-school principal, then served as superintendent for two rural Missouri school districts, Greenfield and East Newton. By 2001, he was a deputy superintendent in the Independence School District, perfectly positioned to move into the top spot when Superintendent David Rock retired a year later.

As superintendent, Hinson quickly made a name for himself with bold moves. He over-

hauled the top ranks of the administration and transformed the traditional school food service into a sort of wellness program. He became a leader in area school circles, and he handled with aplomb the tricky business of annexing into the Independence School District several buildings formerly served by Kansas City Public Schools. When Hinson called for an “extreme school makeover” to spruce up the newly acquired schools, more than 2,500 volunteers showed up to help.

Almost from the beginning, though, some patrons and staffers noted in Hinson a streak of arbitrariness and a tendency toward standoffishness — complaints that would later be echoed in Shawnee Mission.

Kate Beam, an Independence parent, recalls her first encounter with Hinson, a meeting in which he was announcing budget-cutting moves at an elementary school.

Beam asked if Hinson would consider giving parents a say in which services might be eliminated.

“He just kind of looked right at me, didn’t answer my question, and went right on,” Beam says.

Another parent, a man, rephrased her question. Hinson replied that he would be making the decisions.

Under Hinson’s leadership, the school board curbed its formerly freewheeling public-comment opportunities. Patrons were required to inform the board secretary in advance about the topic on which they wished to speak. Some never made it to the podium.

Teachers, too, felt a chill. “Teachers never really trusted him,” says Ira Anders, a former board member who is now a Missouri legislator. “They never felt they could speak freely. They always thought they needed to look over their shoulders.”

Perhaps the strangest aspect of Hinson’s tenure in Independence concerned his relationship with school board member Matt Mallinson, who also, until recently, was mayor of Sugar Creek. They socialized frequently and took out-of-town hunting trips. Anne Mallinson, Matt’s sister, recalls an instance when her brother took a trip to Europe and Hinson and his wife dropped by his house to mow the lawn and manicure the yard.

The bromance raised eyebrows when, early in 2011, the Independence School District purchased a 23-acre parcel of land in Sugar Creek as the site of a new elementary school.

The land belonged to Mallinson’s father, John W. Mallinson Jr.; it had been in the Mallinson family for generations. The school district paid John Mallinson $937,500 — a sum that many people found eye-popping.

“This is a modest community. There are no $900,000 lots in Sugar Creek,” says Bill Haman, who lives near the school.

The market value of the property in 2010, as determined by the Jackson County assessor, was $142,919. It was zoned for agriculture and residential use. But an appraisal by Sam

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LeVota, of the politically connected Eastern Jackson County LeVota family, used comparable sales of property in Independence and eastern Kansas City as part of the rationale for valuing the property at $875,000. (Sam LeVota died in 2014.) Hinson told the Independence Examiner at the time that the parcel was the district’s best option because other properties under consideration would have involved eminent-domain issues and razing structures.

Records obtained from the Independence School District show that Matt Mallinson recused himself when the school board voted in December 2010 to authorize Hinson to negotiate the land purchase. The final contract also gave John Mallinson naming rights, and the property is now the site of the Abraham Mallinson Elementary School, named after the family patriarch who purchased the property in the 1860s.

John Mallinson died in January 2014. His former property has turned out to be problematic as a school site. Contractors had to scrape about 40 feet of soil off the top to level the site, Haman says. Erosion problems have sent dirt, wood chips and other materials into a tributary that flows into Sugar Creek. The school district has spent thousands of dollars on vegetation and other runoff-prevention measures. The problem is “better, but not fixed,” says Haman, a former chairman of the Sierra Club of Western Missouri.

In a different district, the somewhat incestuous land sale may have attracted more notice. But questions about the purchase, and the simmering discontent with Hinson’s autocratic style, surfed under the radar in working-class Independence. That would change in Shawnee Mission, with its core of engaged, affluent patrons.

Hinson spent his first months in his new job darting around Shawnee Mission on a “listening tour,” sipping coffee at farmers markets and PTA meetings while parents vented about all manner of perceived deficits. His style — bold, confident, magnetic — stood in contrast to the reserve of Johnson, who had presided over a gloomy period of attrition in his final years: state funding declining, classroom sizes growing, schools closing.

At the district’s annual foundation breakfast, in the fall of 2013, Hinson reported the results of his sweep. Time and again, he said, patrons had told him they loved the district’s tradition of excellent outcomes, involved parents and committed teachers. But, he said, Shawnee Mission was going to have to be prepared for changes if it wanted to be looked to as a model for public education in the future.

“We have a great tradition, but the world is changing,” Hinson told the crowd of nearly 1,200. “What has gotten us to this point might not get us to the next level where we want to be. Can we dream larger than we have ever dreamed?”

Hinson re-emerged at the May board meeting, looking notably deflated.

It didn’t take long for Hinson to start trying to make some dreams — just whose dreams, perhaps, is still uncertain — a reality. Six months after coming into the office, he rolled out a $20 million “one to one” technology initiative, guaranteeing that every student in the district would have his or her own Apple device. High schoolers got sleek new MacBook Airs. Every elementary-schooler — even kindergarteners — was handed an iPad. He also wasted little time rejiggering the district’s high-level staff. Within a year, Johnson’s longtime deputy, Bob DiPierro, had signed a “retirement agreement” that provided him a cushy payout, provided he vacated his office. (He’s still being paid $1,625 a month in “consulting fees,” an arrangement that will continue through July 2018.) Two months before DiPierro and the district finalized his retirement agreement, Hinson hired former Belton Superintendent Kenny Southwick as his new deputy. He also recruited Overland Park Police Chief John Douglass to become the district’s first-ever director of safety and security and tasked him with fortifying aging school buildings.

To many, these and other top-level staffing changes looked like righteous moves, replacing a complacent administration with fresh faces who would implement modern technology and curriculum. Gone were ugly public fights about contraction and boundary changes. Here were steps to bring the district into the 21st century. Hinson’s action-packed agenda struck many parents and employees as welcome and necessary.

Inside school buildings, though, teachers and principals noticed a change in tone, and some were growing frustrated. Johnson and his predecessor and mentor, Marjorie Kaplan, had made a point of visiting classrooms across the district and learning teachers’ names. When Hinson took over, those visits largely stopped. Instead of expecting to see a district-level administrator at their schools, chatting with employees, teachers came to expect top-down decrees regarding classroom management. Several district employees report that teachers and principals who raised concerns about district policy would be ignored — or else would receive an unpleasant intervention from someone in the upper reaches of the administration. The message seemed to be “Get on board, or we’ll find someone who will.”

Still, Hinson remained widely popular in the community through his first years on the job. Patrons strongly approved the $223 million bond issue he championed, with more than 80 percent of voters supporting the initiative to fund reconstruction of aging elementary schools and the building of a new aquatic center. He hosted public question-and-answer sessions, dubbed “SuperChats,” throughout the year, generally leaving a good impression.

A couple of years in, though, cracks had started to show.

The one-to-one technology initiative had started out strong, but some teachers were raising concerns. They hadn’t received much training on incorporating the devices into their lesson plans. Kids were figuring out how to put games and other apps on them. Students were goofing off on their computers or tablets instead of paying attention to the lessons.

Some elementary-schoolers had managed to access adult websites. The central office, classroom personnel found, was little help.

And it wasn’t just a sense of aimlessness with the big district initiatives. Personal interactions with Hinson left several employees with a bad taste.

Bombeck, the librarian, recalls the episode that caused her view of Hinson to shift sharply. In July 2015, ground started to shift near Ray Marsh Elementary, and engineers suggested that the school should vacate a wing of classrooms while work was under way to shore it up. One of the teachers who was going to have to relocate to a new space had been working on cleaning and decorating her classroom for a few days. When Hinson delivered the news that some teachers would have to switch classrooms, the teacher piped up that the situation was “ridiculous.”

Hinson glared at her — “If looks could kill, she would have dropped dead right there,” Bombeck says — and proceeded to chew her out in front of the rest of the staff.

“She was probably being inappropriate,” Bombeck says. “But this is the guy who is making big bucks. I really expected that he would know how to handle a situation like that better. His reaction was not something that someone in that position should have.”

In the following months, Bombeck heard more stories about employees’ run-ins with the administration. Hinson’s seemingly thin skin was a contrast to Kaplan’s demeanor; that administrator, Bombeck recalls, had “always been really honest and open, in my opinion.”

“I lost all respect for him at that point,” she says.

In the fall of 2015, Hinson kept pushing hard for big changes to the way Shawnee Mission conducted itself. That November, he spent several thousand dollars to bring to town an education guru of dubious repute named Willard Daggett, who delivered a nearly threehour presentation. Teachers who couldn’t attend the event in person were required to watch a broadcast of it streamed to high school auditoriums. In his lecture, Daggett argued that too many schools simply prepare kids for “more school,” and don’t challenge their students with classroom experiences that prepare them for the modern world.

With Daggett’s expensive presentation serving as a foundation, Hinson’s administrators began moving forward with major shifts in the way Shawnee Mission schools functioned. Some libraries were re-envisioned as “maker spaces” where the focus would move from books to building things. Librarians pitch.com | august 2017 | the pitch

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were rechristened “innovation specialists” — and new employees would no longer be required to have a library certification. The district announced it would be converting Apache Elementary — a Title I school with a high concentration of at-risk students — to an “innovative school” model that would stress “project-based learning” opportunities for kids. The details of these shifts, and how they would affect staff and students, were fuzzy, but some employees say they felt like they couldn’t ask questions.

Teachers and librarians weren’t the only ones with creeping doubts about Hinson’s vision and motivations. Public sentiment took a turn against the superintendent in the summer of 2016, when it came out that the school board had stealthily approved a 9.5-percent pay raise for him in June 2015 — a period when he had frequently decried the district’s financial situation amid protracted school-funding debate in Topeka. Combined with a raise he’d received in the summer of 2014, Hinson’s salary had jumped more than $36,000 in two years. He also received a $1,000-a-month car allowance and $24,000 a year in contribution to a taxsheltered annuity. Teachers, meanwhile, had received only one step-and-column increase to their salary schedule since 2008 (though many had received other one-time stipends).

Small groups of district employees started an underground revolt. Anonymous Twitter accounts sprang up, amplifying rumors about Hinson’s personal life. Some teachers discouraged friends from applying for jobs in Shawnee Mission, citing a negative atmosphere.

The growing disconnect between Hinson and his constituents lurched into public view after last fall’s presidential election. Several Shawnee Mission teachers began wearing safety pins on their clothing as a sign of support for populations that had been the target of heated rhetoric during the campaign, including immigrants and members of the LGBT community. An employee at Belinder Elementary School sent a message from a work account, encouraging fellow staffers to adopt the practice. That email drew pushback from a Trump supporter, and the controversy reached Hinson’s office. He directed principals to tell their staffs that wearing safety pins would be forbidden.

That move, and the blunt way in which it was communicated, struck many parents and teachers as harsh. Why was an administration that had paid ample lip service to the perils of bullying going out of its way to quash a symbol meant to show support for the vulnerable? Soon, the district received a letter from the American Civil Liberties Union emphasizing the point.

“The district’s policy censoring teachers from making that statement, by wearing safety pins, suggests that the district does indeed believe it is ‘political’ or ‘controversial’ to say that the safety and success of all students is important,” read the letter, signed by ACLU of

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Kansas counsel Doug Bonney. “That sends a clear signal to students, parents, and members of the community that the district’s leadership does not regard the safety and success of all students as important.”

More than 150 people crowded the November school board meeting following word of the safety-pin debacle. Parents used the open forum to scold Hinson and the board for failing to show support for the disenfranchised. Afterward, Hinson sheepishly conceded that the district wouldn’t take any disciplinary action against teachers who violated the policy. It was just something, he said, “we’ve asked them not to do.”

Thus began a dreary season for Hinson.

A few weeks after the election, a group of district parents — wary of the negative press and the waning morale they’d been hearing about from teachers at their kids’ schools — decided to form a political action committee they called “Education First Shawnee Mission.” Frustrated by what they perceived as a lack of transparency by a board that rubberstamped whatever Hinson put in front of it, the group vowed to shine a spotlight on the coming year’s board races. Those highly involved parents whom patrons had cited as one of the district’s strengths during Hinson’s listening tour were now ready to apply pressure against his administration.

The stresses didn’t stop there for Hinson.

He had already alienated many of the state legislators who represented the district by supporting Gov. Sam Brownback’s “block grant” school-funding bill in 2015 — a scheme that locked in funding for two years, regardless of changing enrollment figures and increasing the number of at-risk and special-needs students. Many public-school advocates cried foul, saying the bill would not pass Supreme Court muster. They were right.

Hinson pointed out that Shawnee Mission had opposed the 1992 funding formula since its passage, noting — not incorrectly — that it shipped Johnson County tax dollars to schools out west. But public-education advocates whispered that Hinson was playing into conservatives’ plans to pit wealthy public school districts against less affluent ones in rural Kansas.

As the legislature faced its latest Supreme Court deadline this past spring, Hinson doubled down on his maverick approach. Instead of teaming up with the public-education community at large to build a unified front, he started cobbling together the outlines of his own funding approach. He held a press conference at the district administration building and laid out a school-funding concept that mirrored many aspects of the formula used in Missouri. It landed with a loud thud.

Melissa Rooker, the moderate Republican from Fairway who had emerged as one of the Kansas House’s foremost experts on school funding, immediately shredded the premise of Hinson’s approach. The Kansas School Super-

intendents’ Association issued a public statement opposing his plan. And it came out that Hinson had convened a meeting with a select group of area legislators to float his funding concept before he made it public. The panel he assembled had included only Republicans; conspicuously absent were Shawnee Mission–area Democrats who held positions on House education committees. Democrats were furious.

The mounting public criticism — from parents, teachers and elected officials — was a first for Hinson, whose career to that point had been a steady ascent dotted by promotions, praise and honors from civic groups.

A March 30 “SuperChat” question-and-answer session at Westridge Middle School had been on the books for months, and the library was packed with patrons, some of them itching to ask the embattled superintendent about school funding, safety pins and other matters.

Instead of holding the floor for the full hour, as had been his custom, a haggard-looking Hinson delivered a short introduction and then unexpectedly handed the room over to three of his deputies. Assistant Superintendent Rick Atha spent half an hour doing his best to cast Hinson’s much-maligned funding approach as being in line with the ideas being embraced

by Shawnee Mission–area legislators. Darren Dennis, the district’s director of curriculum, instruction and assessment, told the crowd about the sharp rise in English language learners, and the increased resources needed to properly educate them.

Hinson stayed to one side, leaning against a bookshelf. He looked like a caged animal.

Three weeks later, principals got an urgent message calling them to the shining new Center for Academic Achievement, a $35 million centralized administration building that had been among the first major initiatives floated

by Hinson after he arrived. There, the 54-yearold superintendent announced his retirement.

He said he wanted to spend more time with his family, take care of his health — off-the-shelf reasons. The news spread fast. Some teachers cheered out loud when they read the email from the district office.

At the regularly scheduled board of education meeting five days later, Hinson was absent. And in that void, the complexion of the upcoming school board races changed immediately.

Donna Bysfield, the Shawnee Mission East–area board member since 1993, initially filed for re-election, then dropped out after two challengers stepped forward to take her on. Four challengers filed to vie for the at-large seat Cindy Neighbor has held since 1997. Three stepped forward to take on Shawnee Mission West incumbent Craig Denny, another 20-year board veteran. Shawnee Mission hadn’t held a school-board primary in more than a decade. The flood of candidates triggered two.

Hinson’s unexplained absence from the board meeting days after his resignation fueled a new round of gossip. Word was that Hinson had disappeared. He rarely was seen in district offices, and almost never in public venues. Southwick, his deputy, took over the dayto-day running of the district and was named interim superintendent for the coming year.

Perhaps to quell the chatter, Hinson reemerged at the May board meeting, looking notably deflated. He usually had an assertive, confident demeanor at the meetings. Instead, his shoulders slumped as he spoke softly into the microphone. When one patron approached the podium and suggested that the next superintendent’s contract have a “moral turpitude” clause in it, Hinson kept his gaze fixed straight down at the desk.

Hinson skipped the June board meeting, his absence made all the more conspicuous when one board member felt compelled to deliver de rigueur words of thanks for the man’s service and contributions — essentially addressed to an empty chair. Meanwhile, the board races started to heat up, and the challengers all seemed to strike the same note: Morale among district staff is low, and changing it — getting teachers to be proud again that they work for Shawnee Mission — should be a top priority.

“The culture in our district is set by the board,” Christopher White, a former district project supervisor who is challenging Denny for the West seat, said at a forum. “The board needs to promote a culture of respect, understanding and appreciation for the core of our district, which is the teachers. ... And for the past several years, everybody, from what I’ve heard, doesn’t feel like that is the case.”

The board hadn’t reined in Hinson’s autocratic tendencies, some of the challengers argued.

It was time for the incumbents to go. The district needed fresh perspectives to select Hinson’s full-time replacement.

For a district that had seen remarkably stable leadership for more than two decades, this flux was a shock. And the man who had set it off had gone from confident, ambitious leader to invisible man in a matter of months.

Because of a botched school-finance formula? Safety pins?

Hinson isn’t saying.

In response to an inquiry from The Pitch about his retirement, he responded with a text message. “It is half-time in my life,” he wrote. “It is time to rest, and wait and see what the second half has in store. I will be forever grateful to the wonderful people of Independence and Shawnee Mission.”

Their gratitude to him seems already to have expired.

Jay Senter is editor and publisher of The Shawnee Mission Post; subscribe at shawneemissionpost.com.

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Opus wants to turn Westport’s Bank of America (opposite) into the project pictured above.

Identity Crisis

Once again, a pending development raises the question: Is Westport a historic neighborhood or an entertainment district?

by Bruce Rodgers

The red hashtag #NOPUS signs came down quickly after the City Council’s June 15 vote. In something close to unison, members of the Help Save Old Westport group rose and filed out of the council chambers.

First District-at-large Councilwoman Katheryn Shields stood by the railing separating the public seating from the council members. “I’m sorry,” she said as the group passed her.

HSOW had lost 8-2, with only Shields and Mayor Pro Tem Scott Wagner voting against an apartment and retail structure proposed for the corner of Westport Road and Broadway, now the site of a Bank of America branch and its parking lot.

Just outside the chambers, near the elevators on the 26th floor of City Hall, the group waited in near silence, demoralized on the far side of a fight that had begun in March. When Shield appeared, they gathered around her. The question was obvious.

So was her answer: “There’s nothing more we can do.”

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“Seems like Westport is under siege,” Mary Jo Draper said later. A longtime Valentine neighborhood resident, former KCUR 89.3 news director and author of the book Kansas City’s Historic Midtown Neighborhoods, Draper had helped lead the protest against the developer. Many Westport residents, business and property owners in the area, including Historic Kansas City and its executive director, Lisa Briscoe, were along for the ride. If they couldn’t halt the project, they at least wanted its developer, Opus Development Co. LLC, to decrease the size and height of the proposed building. “I always believed the city really listened to the neighborhoods — nine neighborhood organizations were against it — but nobody but Shields and Wagner cared,” Draper said after the vote.

The loss wasn’t a shock. One sought-after no vote was 1st District Councilwoman Jolie Justus, who had claimed she wasn’t for the project from the beginning and “had to be won over.” She was — though, by her own admission, she hadn’t attended any

of the meetings held by the Save Westport group and representatives from Opus. “I felt comfortable with the amount of work they [Opus] conducted with me,” she says.

It doesn’t take a visionary to recognize the potential of an intersection as prominent as Broadway and Westport Road. But the Opus conversation arguably started with Chris Kamberis and his Overland Park-based CTK Group. Kamberis, who founded CTK in 1995, has handled development work for large corporations in the past — including Bank of America. That connection, along with neighborhood consensus that the building was showing its age (some of it dates to 1876), may have turned Kamberis’ head.

Kamberis enjoys a reputation as a keen and knowledgeable observer of commercial real estate trends. He was recently quoted by Wave 3 News, the NBC station in Louisville, Kentucky, as saying, “Getting the timing of investments right can mean the difference

between an individual making a profit or suffering huge losses.” To get his own timing right, Kamberis pays attention to a city’s unemployment rate and to its available housing stock. Kansas City’s unemployment rate at the end of last year was 4.3 percent, and housing prices here have climbed amid a tight inventory. Another page in Kamberis’ real estate playbook is devoted to pedestrian traffic, something Westport has never lacked.

In December 2016, Kamberis and the CTK Group bought the Bank of America site, plus two other properties along Westport Road. A few months later, he sold the bank property to Opus Development.

Opus, based in Minneapolis and reportedly worth a billion dollars, was founded by Gerald A. Rauenhorst in the early 1950s, evolving from the Rauenhorst Construction Co. Rauenhorst pioneered the design model of construction, keeping almost all aspects of a project — the architecture, the engineering, the construction — in-house.

Today, the Opus Group consists of Opus

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Holding, Opus Development Company, Opus Design Build and Opus AE Group, all limited-liability companies. But the inhouse model goes only so far: The company does not have a history of keeping or managing the projects it builds.

The Opus name is well known in the Twin Cities, and founder Rauenhorst’s philanthropic activities have had an impact there and beyond. Company policy is to give 10 percent of pretax profits to community and religious organizations, with 1 percent to 2 percent distributed to local causes where Opus has offices or projects. Opus has made contributions to Kansas City charitable organizations.

Opus previously operated here as Opus Northwest. Bankruptcy filings by other Opus development subsidiaries and a 2009 reorganization led to a period of relative inactivity in KC, though Opus has completed projects in south Kansas City, just south of the Plaza and in Overland Park and Olathe.

It also is pursuing projects in the Crossroads.

Devon Coffey is the Opus representative in Kansas City and the main point of contact for the Save Westport group. She is the daughter of Dan Coffey, leader of a group called Citizens for Responsible Government. The elder Coffey has loudly opposed the single-terminal airport plan, tax subsidies for a downtown hotel and the streetcar line, but he has remained quiet about neighborhood-preservation efforts in Westport.

Plans for the Westport Apartments were first filed in early March. After revisions, the final plan was submitted in late May. John McGurk, a lawyer with Polsinelli, is listed as Opus’ agent on those plans. Revisions, mainly exterior modifications, were made between the two filings, but the rezoning request, the height of the proposed building and the number of residential units went unchanged.

The zoning request — the heart of the dispute with Westport neighborhood activists — was necessary to accommodate the proposed height of the Westport Apartments.

As it stands, the L-shaped proposed Westport Apartments, sitting on a 1.71-acre site, will rise six stories above ground, with three more below ground. It would contain 256 residential units, 275 garage-parking spaces and 28 surface-parking spaces. (Parking spaces for tenants would not be included in a tenant’s lease.) The plan also includes 8,500 square feet of retail space.

The Bank of America facility now at that location is two stories high, with surface parking in the rear. The bank has announced it will close the branch on August 22. Opus has said it wants to start demolition and construction before the end of the year.

Neighborhood activists against the Westport Apartments agree on their reasons for opposing the project: too big, certain to

Bank of America closes its Westport branch August 22. zach bauman

“The sliiperyslope argument doesn’t speak to me.”

Councilwoman Jolie Justus

cause congestion and parking problems, a bad precedent for the future.

“It’s just too big,” says the Rev. Scott Meyer, pastor of the historic Westport Presbyterian Church at 705 Westport Road. “I generally go along with Scott Burnett [Jackson County 1st District representative], that it’s fitting a Size 12 foot into a Size 5 shoe.

They’re going to shove this down our throat.

I guess we’re just going to have to learn to live with it but it’s not the right solution.”

Meyer, speaking for himself as well as for the church, brings a lot of weight to a historical argument against the project. The church, a few blocks east of the Westport Apartments site, was established in 1835 as the Westport Cumberland Presbyterian Church, and its first permanent building was completed just after the Civil War. The building suffered a devastating fire in late 2011, and much of it had to be rebuilt; it was rededicated in June of last year. Meyer has been pastor since 1994 and guides a congregation involved in many community outreach programs.

Across the street and west of the church, Thomas Platt and his brother Stephen operate the Westport Land & Management Company. Their father, Beverly, started the company in 1948, purchasing what was then Westport Floor Covering on Broadway in the early 1950s.

Thomas Platt says he jokes with Kyle Kelly, co-owner of Kelly’s Westport Inn, at Pennsylvania and Westport Road, about which family’s roots go back further in Westport.

Kelly’s Westport Inn operates in what is believed to be the oldest building in Kansas City, built by Albert Gallatin Boone, grandson of Daniel Boone, as a grocery in 1850.

Beginning in the 1940s, with Randall Kelly

— who started as a bartender — the Kelly family has poured countless beers to generations of Westport dwellers and habitues.

The Platt brothers own nine buildings operating 18 businesses in and around Westport. Their main concern is parking.

“There’s not sufficient parking for tenants and employers for retail now,” Thomas Platt says. “People end up parking in the neighborhoods. I want fewer units. I’m appalled the City Council changed the zoning to a multistory building. It’s a blow to what is a historic neighborhood.”

For Lisa Briscoe, of Historic Kansas City, it’s about the future.

“What we were advocating was consideration of the bigger picture,” she says. “This approval opens the door and sends a message, making it more difficult to say no. They [the City Council] were looking at a project in an isolated manner — a case in point here with Opus — and not looking at the consequence. That’s narrow-minded. You need to evaluate it.”

Mayor Pro Tem Scott Wagner’s no vote echoes Briscoe’s reasoning. “With this certain zoning change, it would be the first in the Westport corridor [Main Street to Southwest Trafficway] and open the door for high-scale — more height,” he says. Wagner believes a flood of developers in Westport eventually will cause the City Council to introduce height restrictions, but he understands a developer’s rationale. “Every company has a different rate of return and style,” he says, “and I wouldn’t say Opus was incorrect in theirs.”

Justus says she views development on a case-by-case basis. “The slippery-slope argument doesn’t speak to me,” she says.

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the day of the vote, she said, “If this project is to move forward, it has to have a long-term relationship between the developers and the neighborhood.”

But research by Draper shows that Opus has a history of selling projects it has built to real estate investment-manager firms. In reporting on the controversial District Flats apartments in Columbia, Missouri, in July 2014, the Columbia Tribune called Opus a “’merchant builder,’ where holding on to properties is not part of its portfolio of services.” The story went on: “It [Opus] offers wrap-around services for constructing buildings, including architectural and engineering work and shepherding the projects through governmental processes.

From there, the company flips the properties over to investors.”

Nine months after the District Flats complex was completed in Columbia, Opus put it up for sale.

Ownership of the Westport Apartments isn’t an issue for Eric Bunch, of BikeWalkKC. Speaking for himself rather than on behalf of his organization, he says he supports the project; the corner as it is, he says, is “dangerous.” He believes that the Opus project would make better use of the land than the bank has. With more density, he says, more city services may come to the area. More density, he adds, “means more eyes on the street to make it safer.”

Bunch also disputes the height argument.

“There are nearby buildings the same height, and not that many historic buildings. The cultural argument is overblown.”

The proposed privatization of Westport streets — a move unrelated to the Opus deal but worrying some of the same activists — concerns Bunch more. He fears such an effort would solidify the public’s perception of Westport as exclusively an entertainment district and lead to racial profiling. “Westport should be a mixed-use community,” he says.

When the news of Opus’ plans for the Bank of America building began to filter through Westport neighborhoods, the process toward approval was already in motion. With oneon-one meetings and phone calls to people likely to sway opinions, Opus, through Devon Coffey and Polsinelli lawyer John McGurk, was already at work.

McGurk is well versed in real estate and economic-development law, and his stint as Mayor Sly James’ chief of staff (2011-14) has given him both political gravitas and access to key players.

Coffey, for her part, told The Kansas City Business Journal earlier this year, “I’m the business developer as well as project developer. ... It comes down to understanding every intricacy and being very focused on details and understanding relationships and getting things accomplished. It’s really about working with people.”

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Arthur Benson’s air rights may prove important.

It didn’t hurt her networking efforts that Opus had been making charitable contributions locally, in keeping with philanthropic covenant instituted by Opus founder Rauenhorst, who died in 2014. The Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Kansas City and Operation Breakthrough have received contributions from Opus.

Draper, Briscoe and others lacked similar connections; they launched a GoFundMe campaign to cover the cost of a historical survey of Westport, with a goal of raising $25,000.

“Westport is perhaps the most important historic district of Kansas City, yet most of its historic buildings have no protection from demolition,” Draper told the Business Journal in March. “If we don’t act quickly, the Westport that we know today and that many people have loved for decades could be gone very quickly.”

Opus met with activists a number of times but refused to make size or height changes to the project. “My experience is that Opus, in every meeting, sat stone-faced and did not budge an inch,” says Arthur Benson, a lawyer who, with his wife, owns property in Westport.

Benson, a well-known legal personality in Kansas City, attracts varying degrees of opinion based on his past work in the Kansas City school desegregation case and his time on the Kansas City, Missouri, School Board. He is considered friendly with Councilwoman Shields, who concurs with Benson about Opus.

“They listened. But the responses to changes was unilaterally and consistently no,” Shields says.

Devon Coffey, who declined to be interviewed, says, through a statement issued by the PR firm Weber Shandwick: “When Opus pursues a project we actively seek and incorporate as much community feedback as we can to deliver the best possible outcome.” The statement notes the more than 58 meetings held with neighborhood groups, businesses and individuals and adds, “It’s simply not feasible to accommodate every idea.”

McGurk, who also declined to be interviewed, writes in an email: “In our view, it (Opus) did a great job of making changes where possible and being transparent about where changes were not possible.”

But Save Westport’s primary goal remains fairly simple: a reduction in size and height of the Westport Apartments. “It would be acceptable to me if it was four stories instead of six,” Benson says.

Whether McGurk tried to persuade Opus to reduce the project’s footprint isn’t known.

But he has a history of working toward that kind of compromise. In representing developers for a twin-tower apartment and hotel project north of the Country Club Plaza, he was able to change the plan from a 13-story, 168-unit apartment tower and a 10-story, 252-room hotel to a development of eight stories per building, with fewer apartment units and hotel rooms.

McGurk, in his email statement, points

to “a divergence of views.” One issue, he writes, has been an inability to come to an agreement on density.

Draper says the issue of density has drawn discussion away from historic preservation.

“Seemed like the argument turned into prodensity and NIMBY [not in my backyard],” she says. “That’s not a helpful discussion.”

Yet statistics indicate that increased density might be a nonissue in Westport. According to zipatlas.com, the Midtown-Westport area is ranked No. 2 in density in Kansas City, Missouri, ahead of downtown and the Crossroads.

Benson wonders about the role mayoral politics may have played in passage of the Opus rezoning ordinance. Both Justus and Shields have said they’re considering running for mayor. McGurk’s association with Mayor James has led some to speculate that he may be helping James search for his next political step when term limits turn James out of City Hall. A James campaign for some other office (U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver is in his sixth term and turns 73 this year) would mean soliciting campaign donations and likely contacting lawyers and developers with deep pockets.

Benson may turn out to be the chessmaster in the saga of Westport and Opus. As this story was going to press, the lawyer had sent

Devon Colley and Councilwomen Justus and Shields an email outlining additions to an agreement Opus is seeking for air rights (presumably for a construction crane) behind one of the buildings that Benson and his wife own, on Westport Road.

In the July 13 email, Benson asked that compensation be made to his tenants for possible utility disruptions and closures due to construction; a covered pedestrian sidewalk on Westport Road; additional “decorative features” atop the Westport Apartments building; changes to the exterior facing Broadway and Westport Road, and payment — of $1 — to Benson Westport Investment Inc., for the air-rights easement.

Benson had one more significant request in his letter: that demolition of the Bank of America building not start before January 2, 2018. If Opus Development agreed to that provision, the draft of the Westport historical study, paid for by the GoFundMe campaign and conducted by Rosin Preservation, will presumably have been completed — perhaps leading to further discussion.

Elizabeth Rosin, owner of Rosin Preservation, would not speculate what her research group would find within the survey boundaries (39th Street to 43rd Street, and Main Street to Southwest Trafficway).

As of July 22, Benson said he had not received a reply from Opus.

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Bever (left) connected with Payne (right) at Uzazi Village before she had her second baby. Soon, Bever will be a doula herself.

The Sisterhood

Uzazi Village grows into a new home as it continues to serve women, babies and families in the urban core.

zach bauman

by Traci Angel

Zara Bever, pregnant with her second child, wanted to avoid another cesarean section like the one she’d had at a Northland hospital when her first child was born. She had been confined to a bed then, prohibited from walking around. What should have been a time of elation had left her secondguessing her doctor.

“If I had let my body labor, it would have been all right,” she says. “I wasn’t given to the instinct from my body to do that and be allowed what my body needed to do.”

This time, Bever hoped to have a vaginal birth — which, for a mother with her previous experience, is called a VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean).

She understood that she’d probably meet some resistance. It’s common for doctors to advise women who have already had a

child to plan on a C-section for a subsequent pregnancy. The idea is to limit certain risks and potential complications (and to minimize liability for the doctor and the hospital).

Bever, who has bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Missouri Western State University, had done her own research and was comfortable choosing a VBAC. But she says what she encountered from some medical professionals she saw at first was a blunt insistence that she go with the C-section.

“Every time that I went there, I left there crying,” she says. “I just felt that my birth wasn’t welcome.”

Bever is Muslim, and she says a cultural divide may also have played a role in what she says was a harsh interaction with staff at her doctor’s office.

“I went there because my primary doctor was there,” she says. “I don’t know if it was a personal bias. But I had grown up in the neighborhood and I had a master’s. Biases do affect the way we interact with others. My pregnancy was a time for me to enjoy. It was what we prayed and were excited for. I wanted and deserved to enjoy every moment, as I believe every mother should.”

So she talked with her family and set out to find a place that did want her birth. Her search led her to Uzazi Village.

“We serve primarily the urban cores, and it is primarily African-American women — the women who reside in high-infantmortality areas like the Troost corridor,” says Sherry Payne. She is sitting at her desk

inside Uzazi Village, talking to a group of nursing students from Kansas City, Kansas, Community College. They huddle close to Payne, asking questions about how and why she started Uzazi.

Payne was a labor and delivery nurse, and in her hospital work she had seen what she calls a “two-tier health system” — one that treats patients of color differently than it does white patients. “There is a systemic bias in health care,” she tells the students. “It might be access. And then, when we get access, the quality of care might be different.”

In a 2015 committee opinion, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists notes that “significant racial and ethnic disparities persist in women’s health and health care.” While socioeconomic status was considered in some cases, “factors at the pitch.com | august 2017 | the pitch

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patient, practitioner, and health care system levels contribute to existing and evolving disparities in women’s health outcomes,” the report reads.

The Missouri Health Department reported in 2015 that the infant death rate of African-Americans in the state was 12.7 per 1,000 live births — nearly 2.4 times the white infant death rate (5.4 per 1,000 live births). This was the same as it had been a decade before. Statistics from the Kansas City Health Department indicate that a similar statistical disparity exists here.

“The healthcare system thinks it is above that [racism], but hospitals are just businesses,” she tells the students. “Altruism is not the motivation. I was naive. I thought that working as a nurse there I could have a positive impact. I burned out quickly. Practically no one wants to hear that the system is the problem.”

In December 2011, Payne — who has a bachelor’s degree in nursing and a master’s degree in nursing education and is on the board of the National Association for Professional and Peer Lactation Supporters of Color — was part of a discussion at the Kansas City Health Department about maternal health. When the idea of a place dedicated to improving birthing outcomes was raised, she helped recruit a few other people with the same concerns. They met on Saturdays to hammer out details on what Uzazi would be. Within a few months, they were able to open the first iteration of the facility.

“This is the place that is the intersection of health care and social justice” Payne says of Uzazi, which today is a 501(c)3 funded through a combination of grants, donations

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and fees, many paid through insurance companies. Healthcare workers pay to take classes here, and the center also offers perinatal doula classes, birthing classes, lactation consulting and advice on bonding techniques.

“It’s a three-pronged approach to solve the problems of racial-biased maternity care and bad outcomes and the high rate of Csections among black women,” Payne says.

First, she tells the students, Uzazi means to reach women and families, educating them about their options and how to ask for and receive the best perinatal care. The second prong involves communicating and collaborating with healthcare providers. “My goal is to influence the influencers,” she says.

The third part of Uzazi’s mission is arguably its most ambitious: bringing successful candidates of color to the healthcare field — as doulas, as nurses, as doctors. “We offer training and classes that help those candidates of color who want to become part of that group,” The idea is for Uzazi to provide clinical services and a midwifery school (the latter, Payne says, as early as this fall, depending on state accreditation) as well as a prenatal clinic and a birth center.

“I didn’t know much about having a doula, but I came here and told them that I just wanted to have a VBAC,” Bever says, recalling her first visit to Uzazi. “They let me know that I wasn’t crazy and that I could be an active participant in the birthing process.”

When Bever’s second child was past due, she says, Payne met her when she was induced to start labor. “She stayed with me the whole time, and I thought: Who in their

right mind would stay with someone who they hardly knew?”

Bever is sitting at a table inside Uzazi, holding her 2-year-old daughter on her lap while her 7-month-old son lies across her opposite arm with his head up, nursing. She tells me that, when she was pregnant with her third child, she headed to Uzazi early on.

Now, on this Saturday morning, she has returned again — to study toward becoming a sister doula herself.

Kellye McCrary, who was Bever’s doula, comes into the room to pick up some supplies for a client she’s going to visit at a hospital. McCrary and Bever smile at each other across the room and then move together to share a hug.

“I’ve lived in zip codes where infant mortality rates are the highest,” McCrary tells me.

She’d worked administrative jobs in the past and has sometimes been self-employed. Now, trained by Uzazi — which she joined when someone she was talking with at a local YMCA told her about the place — she’s a sister doula.

Her job, she says, is to provide “emotional and informative support to women who need it and may be high risk.” she adds, “We help the women advocate for themselves.”

McCrary also helped Bever’s husband, Aaron, become a larger part of the birthing process.

“My husband became an active participant,” Bever says. “They showed him how to rub my back. They invited him to the Uzazi childbirth class. They also showed him different techniques such as robozo, safe and effective counter pressure and massage. They encouraged him to be my birth partner, so he did a lot of holding, hugging, sway dancing, how to place the peanut and the birth ball,

Above left: Uzazi Village moved in July to a bigger home a few blocks from its original location (pictured) on Troost.

Bever and other students in class this past spring, learning to assist mothers and families seeking Uzazi’s services.

“Hospitals are just businesses.

Altruism is not the motivation.”

Hakima Payne

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and pep-talking to help me through contractions. They also made sure that he was a active participant in the birth plan so when I was too tired he could voice how we wanted immediate skin-to-skin and breastfeeding.

How, after the delayed cord clamping, we wanted him to be the one to cut the cord.”

Chrans invites McCrary to tell the students something about being a doula.

“It’s such a rewarding thing to be able to help moms,” McCrary says. “I just get emotional every time that I see that baby come into the world and hear I don’t know what I would have done without you.” She turns to Bever and goes on: “I’m proud that Zara is the first sister doula client that is now becoming a sister doula herself.”

As the class continues, with Payne joining the discussion, talk turns to how to know whether babies are getting the amount of breastmilk they need. McCrary tells the students it’s important to let women make their own decisions rather than telling them what to do. “You have to support this mom where she is,” she says. “You can’t put your goals on her. One thing we tell community health workers is that your goals don’t matter. You have to step back and let them [the mothers] lead the way. That is a really hard thing to do.”

“Uzazi reminds me of how the Senegalese culture and community in general — that of Senegalese communities still in Africa, and the immigrant community here,” Bever tells me later. I’d asked her why she wants to do what Payne and McCrary do. In her mother’s culture, she says, “it is customary for the community members to support new babies and their families.” That’s what she wants to do here, she says.

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Evening sun warms the front room of Uzazi on a Monday evening in April as future community health workers finish discussing their final chapters around a table at Uzazi. The women have studied since January and are here to talk with Payne — who has recently changed her name to Hakima Tafunzi Payne — about the group’s final project, an early summer workshop for local teenagers and women. (One part of the workshop: a presentation titled “Debunk the Funk,” about the harm of synthetic materials and chemicals in women’s hygiene and skin-care products.)

That and other events will take place at Uzazi’s new headquarters, 4232 Troost. A Gofundme campaign has been collecting donations to help fund the first six months’ rent, with the move set to take place in late July. Payne believes that this is the right spot to advance her three-pronged vision.

Payne arrives, and the women begin their discussion. At one point, she asks the class: “Some of you have roles in the community or had roles where you were doing community organizing — how would you define it? How else can you define community?”

A few students answer. Then Payne turns the question on herself. She tells the women about Uzazi’s mission — about the women, the babies, the, families, about training doulas and teaching health workers. There’s no easy summary for all of that, for the statistics and for the obstacles confronting women with and without health insurance. So Payne just says, “Part of my job is to make sure that the voice of the community is heard.” pitch.com | august 2017 | the pitch

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The St. John’s Catholic Club was founded in 1923 to keep parish boys out of trouble.

On a Roll

A church-basement bowling alley draws a party in Strawberry Hill.

by David Hudnall Photos by Chase Castor

It was Thursday afternoon, and Kenny Yarnevich was running late for his shift at the St. John’s Catholic Club. The place was empty, though, save for the old man sitting at the bar, who looked as though he’d been clipped out of a 1938 issue of Life magazine.

Everybody calls the man Jake, but his name is Charles. Why Jake?

“I got it in grade school,” Sutulovich said.

“In the old days, almost everybody had the same name — Joseph or John or Mary or Ann. So you had to have a nickname, too.

Back then, it was the Depression going on.

There wasn’t hardly any food. But on your birthday, you’d get a treat to take to school.

They asked me what kind of treat I wanted.

I said cake. This guy says, ‘You always take the cake, Jake.’”

Sutulovich has been hanging around St. John’s — 708 North Fourth Street, top of Strawberry Hill, Kansas City, Kansas — his entire life. Ninety years. He attended the school, which closed in 2008, and the church, which still holds Sunday mass. St. John’s is the oldest Croatian church west of the Mississippi (built circa 1900), and its congregation of mostly second-generation Croats maintains close ties to the homeland.

A few feet from Sutulovich, the latest copy of Zajedničar, a dual-language newspaper that calls itself “the official organ of the Croatian Fraternal Union of America,” rested on a counter. A flier on the wall announced the

upcoming Croatian Day Picnic (Saturday, August 19). On the fridge was posted an advertisement for Karlovacko, a Croatian beer named after the city of Karlovac, home to the ancestors of many St. John’s parishioners.

Increasingly, though, St. John’s enjoys a reputation that transcends its function to Croats and Catholics. That’s because it’s home to a well-preserved, six-lane, scoreyour-own-games bowling alley. Several of the Catholic churches in Wyandotte County used to have them, but over time they withered away, along with their old-world congregations. All Saints Church, over off Eighth and Vermont — it used to be St. Joseph’s, a Polish church — never removed its alley, but it’s water-damaged and has been closed for years.

That leaves only the lanes at St. John’s, built in the 1940s and still using the Brunswick A-2 pinsetter system: no plastic, no computer, entirely mechanical. For a price (about $350 for four hours), you can rent out the club — and unlimited rolls — for your party.

“The rental thing was initiated by Rick Mikesic, the president of the club before me,” Yarnevich told me later. “But it started really taking off three, four years ago. I used to work in sales for The Kansas City Kansan, the newspaper. Well, it shut down in 2009, as you know. So I took over management here at the club. I went to kindy-garten here, and my great-grandfather helped build the church.

Anyway, I used my sales continued on page 22 pitch.com | august 2017 | the pitch

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experience to promote the place. Got some business cards printed up and started distributing them down at the River Quay.”

Nowadays, St. John’s Catholic Club is booking parties “at least 200 nights a year,” Yarnevich said — and that’s not including the bowling-league nights that meet three times a week between September and April. Earlier that day, Yarnevich had booked a fundraising party for Kansas House Rep. Tom Burroughs. David Alvey, who’s running for mayor in KCK, held his first campaign party at the club not long ago.

“We get all kinds,” Yarnevich said. “Corporate businesses. Restaurant staffs. Ordinary folks from around the neighborhood. Christmas parties. Our busy season is the holidays.

But it’s a nice place to be on a hot day, too.

We got the AC going. You don’t have to fight the bugs. Our beers are reasonable-priced — $2.75 domestic, $3 high-end. We provide free ice. You can bring in your own catering. We got a bartender on staff. You roll some games.”

Other than for parties, the club isn’t open to the public. That’s a luxury enjoyed only by Jake and a few other old-timers around St. John’s.

“Yeah, Jake,” Yarnevich said. “He’s kind of like our watchman around here. This is kind of his second home. Did he tell you about his routine?”

He did not. He’d wandered out without saying much. He’d seemed suspicious of the nonmember asking him questions.

“Well, he’s been coming in here pretty much every day since he retired from the Wyandotte County Courthouse, 20 years ago probably,” Yarnevich said. “No kids, never married. Never golfed, never hunted. This was always just kind of his place. He used to bowl, but he’s too old anymore. Then he used to keep score on the league nights, but his eyesight got too bad.”

Yarnevich went on: “Nowadays, he and a couple other old guys, they meet here around 5:30 in the morning and head over to Corner Café, in Riverside, to have breakfast. Then they come back here to the club and watch TV a couple hours. Then those guys take off and Jake sticks around and goes off to lunch somewhere, or he’ll do some work helping out the church. Later in the afternoon, this guy John, who lives across the street, he comes by, and he and Jake go to the Village Inn restaurant, over there in Mission. Then, just before rush hour, he gets in his car and drives home.”

A 40-person party would be arriving soon. Yarnevich walked toward the lanes to lay out bowling sheets attached to clipboards.

“The old people around here, they died off or they moved out of the neighborhood when the highway got built, or their kids moved out south or west, where the better schools are,” Yarnevich said. “But they still come back for funerals and weddings and church events, things like that. And now we got people who like the older thing we do here. They like coming to these old kinds of places. They like keeping their own score.”

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“Jake” Sutolovich doesn’t bowl anymore, but he’s been hanging around the well-worn club (in the church, opposite page) all 90 years of his life.

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profile

Industrial Strength

Abbott envisions a “boutique area” for KC entrepreneurs. zach bauman

Matt Abbott’s turbocharged gentrification of the East Crossroads

by David Hudnall

In these boom times of downtown Kansas City — streetcars clanging, cranes in the sky — it is a particular pleasure to hear frontier tales about the gnarly old days when artists were unwittingly laying the groundwork for all the breweries, banks and questionably profitable tech companies that now occupy the Crossroads Arts District.

“Eighty percent of the buildings were vacant,” Suzie Aron, a real estate agent who’s been around the area for more than 20 years, told me recently. “There was prostitution, drugs, day-labor programs where 200 people would stand outside a building — a building with no bathroom — every morning and wait for somebody from the city to come along and pick them up for a job.”

“It was a wasteland,” Stretch Rumaner said of the area surrounding his restaurant and music venue, Grinders. “The buildings over here on the east side of the Crossroads were much more dilapidated and boarded-

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up than on the western side of the Crossroads. All my cars were broken into. Every building was broken into. It happened daily.

The police wouldn’t do anything about it.”

Rumaner paused, as though debating how strongly to lean into his urban-pioneer story. He leaned.

“I mean, we had virtually no help from the city. On my block [18th Street, between Oak and Locust], myself and three other artists all bought buildings around the same time and converted them, lived in them, worked in them, occupied them. We did it all by hand. We didn’t have crews. Even people like Suzie and Butch [Rigby, a developer] were swinging hammers and throwing up drywall.”

Nowadays, considerably less of the renovation taking place in the Crossroads is the DIY handiwork of idealistic artists. Developers run the game. And in Rumaner’s neighborhood — an increasingly busy area

that marketers and real-estate agents have taken to calling the East Crossroads, bounded by Grand Boulevard, 71 Highway, 20th Street and Truman Road — no developer has more skin in the game than Matt Abbott.

His firm now owns more than 30 properties in the East Crossroads. It would not be difficult to make the argument that the future of the area will be determined largely by his vision. So, what does Abbott think the East Crossroads should be?

Abbott Properties’ base of operations is at 1837 Grand, in a building not long ago occupied by a business called Cowtown TShirts. The space has been renovated — horizontal wood, glass-paned offices, concrete floor — to accommodate Abbott’s employees: construction workers, leasing agents, the management team. Guys in Carhartts come and go clutching Jimmy John’s cups; a

sign inside near the door warns, “If you are dirty, don’t sit on the couch.”

Abbott is 44, with blue eyes that rarely blink and a surfer’s lilt to his voice that partly belies the fact that he has been a millionaire since he was 27 years old. In many ways, Abbott embodies the current aspirations of the city. He cites articles on the internet that call Kansas City a city “on the move,” a place to keep “on your radar,” a spot that is fast becoming “on the map.” He is fond of Richard Florida–style buzzwords.

“We are working to create an entrepreneurial and creative heartbeat for the city,” Abbott says, gazing out his conference-room windows onto 19th Street. “I see the East Crossroads as a boutique area where entrepreneurs flock in Kansas City.”

On a summer break from Mizzou in the mid-1990s, Abbott and his brother Luke bought a duplex in their hometown of Quincy, Illinois, learned how to rehab and, within a year, purchased five more properties. He arrived in Kansas City in 2001 looking to invest in downtown real estate. But Abbott’s early projects here didn’t go so hot.

His mixed-use plan for the Law Building, at 12th Street and Grand, fell through after he missed a renovation deadline. (The structure was on the city’s dangerous-buildings list; it has since been torn down and is now a parking lot for the Sprint Center.) And Abbott’s firm was fined $100,000 in 2007 after he pleaded guilty to violating federal asbestosremoval standards while converting a highrise at Eighth Street and Charlotte — now called the Manhattan Lofts — into condos.

Throughout the aughts. Abbott was also pursuing real-estate deals in other parts of the country. He undertook projects in other Midwestern cities (St. Louis, Indianapolis) and in the Southeast (Pensacola, Huntsville), specializing in buying and rehabbing distressed apartment complexes. In 2010, Abbott moved to California; his son was ill, and the family moved there to be near a specific treatment facility. They returned to KC in 2012 and saw the city in a new light.

“I’ve lived all over Kansas City since 2001 — Soho South lofts, the Manhattan, Leawood, now North Kansas City — but I’ve spent a lot of time out of town,” Abbott says.

“When we got back from California, my wife and I were driving around the Crossroads one day, and it just had this great energy, this authenticity, this creativity.”

It occurred to Abbott that there was nowhere for development in the area to go but east, because north, south and west of the Crossroads were all either already developed or running into highways. There was already some natural redevelopment happening in the area at the time, of course.

Several art galleries and venue spaces had come and gone (RIP, the Studded Bird); Grinders and the Brick had been serving continued on page 24

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food for about a decade; the Living Room Theatre started staging plays on McGee in 2010; and the Guild, an events space, opened in 2012.

But farther east, dozens of buildings sat vacant along grim, industrial, mostly deserted streets.

“I sat down with a buddy not long after taking that drive with my wife and said, ‘What if I buy up a bunch of the buildings on the eastern end of the Crossroads and develop them?’ ” Abbott says.

At that time, Abbott’s KC plans centered on a Holiday Inn Express he was trying to develop at 13th Street and Locust. When a buyer came along who wanted to take it off his hands, Abbott sold it, freeing both his time and cash. The timing coincided with banks loosening up their lending standards for the kinds of projects Abbott wanted to do. Three years earlier, in the midst of the recession, a loan to redevelop a vacant East Crossroads building would have been tough to come by. But now the market was recovering, and he could finance such a project.

Within a few weeks of selling the hotel project, Abbott had eight properties in the East Crossroads under contract. Some were bought as foreclosures, some from families who had inherited the properties and were uninterested in maintaining them. He kept hunting and found that many buildings in the area were nearly a century old and increasingly inefficient for the industrial businesses that inhabited them.

“They needed bigger loading docks, higher ceilings and other, more modern ameni-

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ties,” Abbott says. “Their buildings weren’t working for them as well as they once were.”

He negotiated with the owners and snapped up properties along the 1600 and 1700 blocks of Cherry and Locust. Abbott also purchased several buildings from Suzie Aron.

“He came in at a very fast clip and acquired basically many blocks at one time,” Aron says. “It feels like a second phase for the neighborhood to me. We grew it piecemeal over 15 years, one building at a time.

He’s come in over the last few years and is doing so many all at once that you can really see and feel the changes.”

What you see a lot of these days in the East Crossroads are places making and peddling alcohol. In July, the International Tap House (iTap) opened at the southeast corner of 18th and Oak, a property Abbott bought in 2014 after a car crashed into the building, causing much of it to cave in. Lifted Spirits is distilling liquor in an Abbott-owned property on Locust. Elsewhere, local beermakers such as Brewery Emperial, Torn Label, Double Shift and Border are all crafting and selling beer in non-Abbott-owned properties in the neighborhood.

This month, a new music venue called the Truman will open in an Abbott property at 601 Truman Road, between Cherry and Holmes. The venue is owned and operated by a partnership out of Nashville, which is true of several Abbott properties; iTap and

Abbott’s HQ (above) and the latest result of his efforts (opposite) zach bauman

“It’s definitely not the cheapest rent in the city.

But we’re building an area that attracts creative minds.”

Abbott

the adjacent Mission Taco Joint are regional chains based in St. Louis, and Josey Records comes from Austin, Texas. The Hotel Indigo that Abbott’s firm is building at 2020 Grand promotes its “distinct local personality” but is nevertheless a member of a global hospitality chain. Abbott’s vision for the East Crossroads isn’t the Power & Light District, exactly — local businesses such as Bread and Butter Concepts, Pathfinder and Opal & Orchid Hair Studio call Abbott properties home — but it isn’t strictly local, either.

“Matt and I talk a lot — his properties basically surround me at this point — and I think it’s great that he’s not just sitting on buildings he buys over here,” Rumaner says.

“But the difference between Matt and most of the rest of us around here is that he’s not an artist; he’s a developer. And developers tend to bring in people from out of town.”

“We don’t see ourselves as limited to KC [tenants],” Abbott says. “We’re looking to find buildings where we can make the numbers work and where we can transform the neighborhood and create community.”

Getting the numbers to work has necessitated Abbott’s formulation of the East Crossroads Urban Renewal Plan, a tool designed to solicit tax breaks in exchange for revitalizing property in the area. It was approved by the City Council in 2015. Abbott’s firm regularly avails itself of such abatements.

“If you look at downtown Kansas City today versus when I came here in 2001, and how we’re on the map, one of the coolest cities in America — that would never have happened without those [tax incentive] programs,” Abbott says. “You need those incentives to make these spaces affordable to entrepreneurs and creatives.”

But are Abbott’s spaces affordable to the average small-business owner?

“I think that’s a legit question,” Abbott says. “It’s definitely not the cheapest rent in the city. But on the other hand, we’re building an area that attracts creative minds, and I think that fosters success. Creative businesses want to be located in an area where their team wants to live and work. That’s the thing about entrepreneurial tenants: They’re always growing. So we work to build adaptable spaces to allow for that and keep them here.”

Because of the East Crossroads’ proximity to the 18th and Vine Jazz District — it’s only about 12 blocks down 18th Street from Grinders to the Negro Leagues Museum, with a corridor of warehouses and manufacturing structures, several of them unused, in between — there’s been much chatter about how the city might engineer a more coherent connection between the long-suffering, historically black cultural area and the newer, whiter, gentrifying East Crossroads. It’s an idea that goes back a long time; Rumaner says he conceived of his early arts space as one that would “connect our jazz history to the visual arts that were happening in the early days of the Crossroads.”

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Mark O’Renick’s digital-marketing agency — formerly Salvy O’Renick, now Will & Grail — has called the East Crossroads home since 2005, and O’Renick is part of East Bridge KC, a group that’s brainstorming possibilities. He has had discussions with property owners, the city, the Economic Development Corporation, bankers, business owners and real-estate agents about how to, in his words, “connect with transportation that provides year round connectivity between the streetcar and Paseo ... use the gap area to manufacture and ship ... train young folks at Metro Tech High School to work in fabrics, wood, metal, food. To learn trades along with technology and digital economy skills.”

Big, exciting ideas, but Abbott says he

isn’t too interested in drawing outside the lines of the East Crossroads.

“We don’t necessarily want to spread very far outside this area,” he says. “We’d like to make an impact right here, and if we spread ourselves too thin in too many different places, we don’t get as much out of it.”

Aron says that, regardless of where Abbott draws the line, “Matt is creating a lot of value.”

She adds, “His properties have a specific architectural style and personality, but the spirit of the neighborhood is still there. It’s always been makers [in the East Crossroads], whether it’s industrial businesses or artists. His people [the tenants of his properties] seem to be more entertainment-oriented — restaurants and bars — but it’s still a neighborhood of creativeminded makers. Instead of art, now it’s beer.

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Urban Living

First Friday

Downtown workers get to treat First Friday like an extended happy hour. It’s much easier to stay downtown than it is to go home and return for the galleries. (In fact, if you wait too long to exit the loop, you’ll feel lightly imprisoned.) Yes, there are drones, hula-hoopers and suburban teenagers pretending to be rock stars. But this is city living, and if you like your urban experience lively, this is a hundred times more electric than any other night of the month downtown.

Green Roof

The Green Roof above Cosentino’s is an excellent, tucked-away space to read, eat lunch or get a few minutes of fresh air. The landscaping is meticulous and beautiful, with native prairie grass and trees that are beginning to mature enough to provide shade. And the grocery store below offers everything you’ll need for an impromptu picnic.

History

D Downtown

Helicopter vantage of downtown Kansas City, looking southeast

for

jennifer wetzel

An A-to-Z glossary for KC’s urban workforce

by Lucas Wetzel

In 2008, the company I work for relocated from a swank office on the Country Club Plaza to a nearly 100-year-old building in downtown Kansas City. When I first saw the architectural rendering, with its cheerful depictions of people walking down a gently shaded sidewalk, I laughed. I knew there were zero trees on that block, and the only people I’d ever seen walking there had either asked me for money or tried to sell me drugs.

Almost a decade later, things look a lot different in the central business district.

Cosentino’s on 13th Street is as bustling a grocery store as the metro has. The Power & Light District packs in fans for daytime sports events and nighttime concerts. Conventions unleash tourists onto the streets. The streetcar ding-dings up and down Main. And yes, there are trees now, and the pedestrians on the sidewalk outside my workplace seem altogether law-abiding (give or take any jaywalking forced on them by construction).

Even if you work within downtown’s socalled renaissance, though, it’s easy to spend your free time on the job in the company breakroom, lost in your phone. I do it, too.

But downtown Kansas City rewards your curiosity. Next time you clock out, look for some of the the elements listed below.

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Art

One way to enrich your work day is by taking occasional “culture breaks”: Take an architecture-appreciation walk, stop by an art exhibit or find a midday performance. The Art in the Loop organization makes all of this pretty easy, sponsoring public sculptures, concerts and art installations within the downtown loop.

Many of the galleries and art spaces in the Crossroads keep daytime hours, and are much easier to visit over lunch than during peoplepacked First Fridays. The Charlotte Street Foundation (disclosure: I’ve been one of its studio residents) also regularly hosts art openings, performances and open studios events during the week.

Bicycles

Biking to work is a much more invigorating — if occasionally terrifying — way to commute (see our June issue for more about Kansas City’s changing bicycle infrastructure). If you don’t own a bike, you can rent from any of the many B-cycle stations. My favorite time to ride is during the Big 12 tournament, when you can cruise past all the annoying traffic barricades. I have yet to snag a keg from a delivery vehicle and ride off, but with a bit of strength training, next year I just might.

Coffee

Each downtown coffee shop has its strengths: fancy pastries (and cocktails) at Thou Mayest, rotating single-origin coffees at Kaldi’s, three kinds of cold brew at P.T.’s, an impressive display of man buns and mustaches at Quay. My vote, however, goes to City Market Coffee, which still offers a $1 fill-it-yourself option even after 20 years in business. And yes, there are 16-ounce bottles of robust homemade cold-brew concentrate.

Delivery vehicles

Don’t bother trying to motor up and down Walnut Street, where trucks servicing Cosentino’s and Power & Light bars line both sides of the street, making visibility bad and driving perilous.

Entertainment

So many more options exist now than a decade ago. You can see a movie at the Alamo Drafthouse or Screenland; play video games at Up-Down or Screenland’s Tapcade; go to a concert at the Midland, RecordBar, the Brick or Green Lady Lounge; hear the symphony or an opera at the Kauffman Center; or see a play at the Missouri Rep’s Copaken Stage or the Living Room Theatre.

Even if you’re over the whole Prohibition-revival thing (speakeasies? still?), especially as a backdrop to sell $14 drinks, cocktail culture has helped to spotlight renovation — or even lead to it. (Look no further than the Kansas City Power & Light Building and Pickwick Plaza.) A good place to brush up on local history is the Missouri Valley Room at the Kansas City Central Library. A few local blogs tackle the subject as well, including squeezeboxcity.com and author John Simonson’s paris-of-the-plains.blogspot.com

Interact

From the guy at the library who tried to sell me a piece of meteorite to the checker at Cosentino’s who’s ever-ready to talk jamband concerts, downtown isn’t short of conversationalists. Many are worth engaging with, though it’s advisable to know where the nearest nail salon is; a lot of the people I meet seem to be trying to get to a pedicure.

Jimmy John’s delivery people

You’ll see these guys running around wearing black T-shirts and schlepping sandwich bags.

It doesn’t look like fun, but their speed and endurance are impressive. (And if you want to see a grateful smile, meet one of them in the lobby instead of waiting for him upstairs.)

KC Pride T-shirts

For someone who grew up in Kansas City in the 1980s, the explosion of wearable local pride in recent years can be a bit baffling. Still, there’s no denying the design ingenuity at play on the racks at Normal Human (1815 McGee) and Raygun (1803 Baltimore), or even at the new Power & Light Rally House.

Library

The Central Library (14 West 10th Street) offers a nearly daily stream of author events,

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Urban Living

Amado Espinoza and We Are the Landscape perform in Oppenstein Brothers Memorial Park.

friendly chime make KC feel more like a real city. On the other hand, technical issues or someone’s stupid car lead to regular delays.

Until further notice, my rule remains “if you can’t see it, don’t bother waiting for it.” In the meantime, there’s always the bus, which isn’t free but is more reliable.

Trucks

Food trucks, to be specific. You’ll find them throughout downtown sporadically, and all over the place on First Friday. Some are delicious (Bochi Wings) and others look like they’ve seen better years (the one with the dirty, faded painting of a gyro on the side).

Walking

You can walk in any direction from the Power & Light District and be in a distinctive neighborhood within minutes. Explore the Westside, the City Market and the Crossroads, or head a little east for Ilus Davis Park, in the shadows of City Hall and other government buildings, but not a lot else.

Xenopus

Any of various aquatic, tongueless, clawed frogs of the genus Xenopus of southern Africa. These are not native to downtown Kansas City, but if we ever get a professional lacrosse team as a Sprint Center anchor tenant, bingo: team name or mascot.

A southward view of Power & Light, in the nighttime fog

public speakers, historical exhibits and cultural programming. An exhibit of photographer Mike Sinclair at the library, for instance, showcased not only his own work but also photographs by homeless people whom he had provided with cameras to document their daily lives. The result was an illuminating slice of art and life that you wouldn’t see at a conventional art venue. The library is also an oasis for families with small children, with a well-appointed kids area on the third floor, a friendly staff and weekly storytimes.

Mexican

There are days when no amount of caffeine, junk websites or even productivity can make me feel like myself. On those days, I require something stronger: Mexican food. Los Tules (1656 Broadway) is the best sit-down option. Chipotle and the City Market’s Burrito Bros (a local version of Chipotle) are popular options. The best Mexican food downtown, however, is at Wrap It Up, a family-owned lunch counter in the City Center food court. Wrap It Up serves delicious tamales (on Monday), chorizo and tacos al pastor, as well as Americanized favorites like quesadillas and hard-shell tacos.

Nature’s Own

Health-food stores can burn a hole in your chip card, and I’m hesitant to endorse one over another. But I have enjoyed the organic treats and on-tap kombucha at the new Nature’s Own location in the City Market, at 310 East Fifth Street.

Oppenstein Brothers Park

A humble patch of concrete and green space,

this tiny park still has a big-city feel, with trees, fold-out tables and chairs and the occasional food truck. Art in the Loop project holds concerts here during the summer, and the park is occasionally a jumping-off point for protests or rallies. Also one of the few spots to take your dog.

Pedestrians

Pedestrians in Kansas City sometimes seem like they have no regard for their own safety.

I see people look at the light, see that it’s red, look down the street, see that cars are coming, and then decide to cross anyway. And those are the ones who aren’t communing with their phones.

Q

In 2015, Plowboys Barbecue admirably filled the void left when Danny Edwards got pushed out of Power & Light. Plowboys is too filling for me to mess with during the workday, but that long line of business-casual bros ain’t there for nothin’. Burnt ends served on Wednesdays and Fridays.

River

The river feels a lot farther away than it actually is, and it makes a good change of scene during a lunch or exercise break.

Stroll to the end of the Town of Kansas bridge to watch the planes, trains and occasional barges, or walk a bit more to get to the Riverfront Heritage Trail for some of the best views of the city.

Streetcar

Admit it: You like the streetcar. My kids love riding it, I use it to hop to the City Market or Union Station, and its covered stops and

Underground

Talk to people who worked downtown in different decades, and you’ll hear interesting stories of speakeasies, street art, Mardi Gras parades, concerts at unofficial venues and other such off-the-radar high jinks. Outside the pages and website of this publication, Informalityblog.com and KCdiy.info are fine places to keep abreast of art shows, events and concerts you might not hear of otherwise. Night Blooms Darkroom, Bookstore and Coffee, a short walk from downtown at 529 Southwest Boulevard, regularly holds avant-garde events in the evenings.

VisitKC.com

Meanwhile, well above ground, VisitKC.com (formerly the Kansas City Convention & Visitors Association) maintains a comprehensive list of events, attractions and resources taking place across the metro. A good site to look at when hoping to impress or accommodate out-of-town friends or family.

YJ’s

A cornerstone of the Crossroads artweirdness before that was officially a thing, YJ’s emerged from artist David Ford’s studio complex. An all-night, alcohol-free outfit staffed by artists and musicians, YJ’s features sandwiches, homemade pies, a variety of sodas and some of the best dirty rice in the region (served for lunch on Tuesdays).

Zoo Bar

This isn’t one of those places that calls itself a dive bar but actually has $10 Belgian sours glowing under dozens of flatscreen TVs — it’s a cash-only joint with graffiti on the walls, bars on the windows, and folks who will probably tell you their life story for the price of a pint (no taps, though). If you want a glimpse of Kansas City’s drinking scene pre–Power & Light, this is your spot. pitch.com | august 2017 | the pitch

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Urban Living

Laura Burkhalter, president of the Southmoreland Neighborhood Association jennifer wetzel

Bloc Parties

Neighborhood associations aren’t about busybodies and the burbs — they’re often KC’s real grass roots.

by Jennifer Wetzel

“If you don’t do it, who will?” asks Laura Burkhalter. She’s been president of the Southmoreland Neighborhood Association since 2015, so she knows something about the role that groups such as hers play in a city’s decision making and self-promotion.

And she knows the short answer to her rhetorical question: probably not anyone else.

Picture a neighborhood and you typically think of houses and homeowners. But neighborhoods also include renters, retail and other businesses, nonprofits, schools, places of worship, public-works infrastructure and more. Among that diverse array of what leaders like to call “stakeholders,” neighborhood associations build consensus from within, then rely on volunteers — often residents elected to positions of responsibility — to advocate for the best interests of

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their part of the broader community. There are planning and zoning challenges in every area, for instance, which require a given neighborhood’s residents and businesses to strike certain balances.

Sometimes the effort to find that equipoise reaches the news cycle. So it’s been for Southmoreland, where preservationminded residents had long fiercely opposed efforts by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art to enlarge its footprint. “If you don’t say something and assume that everyone has good intentions, then something really tragic can happen in terms of historic preservation,” Burkhalter says.

Last year, the Nelson released to the public what it called its Master Development Plan — including a proposal to tear down five Southmoreland homes on the historic register in

order to accommodate expansion. Southmoreland residents voiced strong objections, and the neighborhood association — working with the nearby Rockhill Neighborhood Association and other neighborhoods — took their challenge to the city.

The Kansas City Missouri Planning Commission then instructed the Nelson to work with the Southmoreland and Rockhill associations to work together. A series of meetings followed over the next six months — eventually leading to a mutual agreement to change the zoning of the five houses for adaptive reuse. The shells of the houses will be maintained, while the interiors may be reconfigured, allowing the Nelson to gain more office, storage and other space. There was much mutual congratulation for having come to an amicable arrangement. Burkhalter says she hopes that other institutions will look to the Nelson-Southmoreland negotiation as an example for how to find common ground.

For all the publicity of that resolved conflict, though, Burkhalter points to another issue as having been her neighborhood association’s most important implementation: security. The association hires off-duty Kansas City police officers to patrol the area for a certain number of hours each month, paid by business owners and institutions in the neighborhood (with funding also coming from individuals). “When we look at crime compared to other neighborhoods, ours is relatively low because of the security presence,” Burkhalter says.

Hers is a high-profile part of town, but Burkhalter says that neighborhood associations aren’t just about protecting expensive property or settling duels between deeppocketed entities. “You’ll be surprised how much of a difference you can make,” she says.

“There is a lot of work to be done [everywhere] locally. It is a great way to meet your neighbors and find out what is going on.”

Wondering where to look for information on your neighborhood? Check with the Center for Neighborhoods, (4747 Troost) developed by the University of MissouriKansas City Department of Architecture, Urban Planning + Design in partnership with the state of Missouri. The center provides residents and community representatives with access to data, maps, community resources and legal aid.

“Neighborhoods are place-based and geographically-specific — that shapes challenges we see from neighborhood leaders working all over the city,” says Jacob Wagner, associate professor of urban planning and design at UMKC and faculty director at the center. The staff there work to promote education and connectivity among neighborhood leaders.

One issue of consistent focus at the center, Wagner says, is racial profiling. “Neighborhoods are permeable — you can walk through them,” he says. “How do you learn

to talk about neighborhood safety and who belongs in the neighborhood?” The center aims to counter the paranoia and disrespectful language that sometimes crop up in online platforms such as Nextdoor and Facebook. The staff at the center serve as moderators for residents to talk with one another in a calm environment about safety and the issues surrounding racial politics.

Dina Newman, the director at the Center for Neighborhoods, came up with the sisterneighborhood approach. She describes one example: “The Oak Park neighborhood is paired with downtown. Totally different, but each has their own issues and, surprisingly, some of it is the same. As they begin to talk with each other and then become advocates for one another and attend each other’s meetings, they begin to find commonality.”

Jacob Wagner and Dina Newman at UMKC’s Center for Neighborhoods

Sarah Snodgrass, a resident and member of the Oak Meyer Gardens Homes Association, says that, among the benefits of being involved with the center, “it helps you get to know your neighbors, and you are aware of city happenings.” She adds: “Beautification and landscaping are projects that we can accomplish. It also sets a standard that neighbors can live up to.”

For someone looking to make a difference, a neighborhood association can provide an accessible opportunity to do something — and see results. Whatever neighborhood you belong to, it almost certainly needs volunteers. Showing up is half the battle.

The Center for Neighborhoods: info.umkc.edu/cfn

the pitch | august 2017 | pitch.com

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7/21/17 3:48 PM

Woof

Off the Chain Bar K Lab is Stage 1 in its owners’ quest to build the better dog park — and it’s already great.

by April Fleming

Bar K founders Dave Hensley and Leib Dodell set out to create a better dog park.

They’re a few months from realizing their vision, but I say mission accomplished. The work-in-progress version of the business is already vastly superior to any dog park I’d visited before dropping by last month.

Bar K Lab (515 Liberty Street) is the temporary home of the full-on Bar K slated to open early next year: a sprawling, 80,000-square-foot private dog park — with a full restaurant, a bar and a coffee shop — in a space under the Heart of America bridge, between Berkley Riverfront Park and the River Market. In the 12,000 or so square feet of the rough draft, you see the promise of what is to come. Though Bar K will, in its final iteration, be an outdoor space first, the lab is indoors, in an old warehouse owned by Port KC (which also owns the land that Bar K is being built on). The location provides a safe and welcoming environment for dogs of all kinds, and it’s professionally staffed; that is, the people on hand mind the animals’ behavior and assist with necessary cleanup.

Play equipment includes a baby pool filled with tennis balls, a splash pool and all the ramps and stairs any dog could desire. Most days, there’s an all-dogs-welcome policy, but there also are dedicated nights for puppies, shy dogs and special-needs animals, offering a respite for those typically unable to bring their companions to typical dog parks.

Of course, there’s a bonus for bipeds: an affordable selection of beer, wine, cocktails and nonalcoholic drinks. The park-plus-bar atmosphere leads to a far more social climate than your average dog park, one where people don’t seem to have arrived with the sole goal of wearing out their dogs. On recent visits, I’ve met dogs and humans of all varieties: giant greyhounds and tiny pugs and bull terriers, Australian shepherds and Frenchies. Everyone seems sincerely to want to meet everyone else’s dog.

Consensus: pure fun. Seriously. It’s the greatest.

Memberships to Bar K lab are $115 a year, or $10 for a single visit (plus $5 for each additional dog). The membership price will likely increase once the permanent location opens. See barkdogbar.com for details.

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elvis

bar k’s lab space

founders hensley and dodell

Gilligan

potato

albert

Thor

the pitch | august 2017 | pitch.com

Photo Essay.indd 32

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Woof

Figaro

Rocky Rockstar

Dodell and guests

Albus (left) and Ringo

Bandito

chase

cookies (left) and friend

This dog wouldn’t say his name.

pitch.com | august 2017 | the pitch

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7/21/17 1:22 PM

BACK TO FOO’S!

event of the month

Nothing helps you ease back into school season better than a cool, creamy concrete from Foo’s. Pick your flavor, we’ll make it.

(There’s plenty of summer weather to be had.)

(Open daily for foolishness.)

The Mockingbird Lounge’s conTribuTion To MargariTa wars

To the Rim

Margarita Wars musters the blenders again in Waldo.

Margaritas can involve all kinds of ingredients — the Mockingbird Lounge makes one with blueberry- and-mint-infused simple syrup; District Pour House and Kitchen concocts variations such as “5-pepper” and “guava pomegranate; and Cacao wowed Taste of KC crowds with crickets-on-astick, so there’s no telling what wonders it might toss in the blender — but they’re always served cold. On an August night in Kansas City, no beverage attribute is more essential.

At Margarita Wars (Friday, August 18, at the Waldo Outdoor Pavilion, 74th Street and Broadway), those restaurants, plus 2015 winner K-Macho, Drunken Worm and On the Border (and more) will compete to serve up the chillest of the chilled cocktails.

Sometimes festivalgoers like to push themselves to their limits before treating themselves to a reward, and this year’s Margarita Wars lineup offers a recipe for Extreme Thirst: Start with a hot night, add some salty and/or spicy snacks from Pretzel Addiction, take things up a notch with the Habanera-fueled Fire from Pammy Sue’s

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Salsa, then sprint to the margarita samples for a well-earned quenching. Think of Homer Simpson dousing his scorched tongue with water at the chili cook-off, but with more flavor and fewer hallucinations.

Speaking of mirages, Don Julio’s truckbed bar may look like a tantalizing illusion, but it’s real. In addition to serving samples out of a vintage vehicle, Don Julio will be providing tequila for all the Margarita Wars participants. And for the beer-or-bust crowd, Dos Equis will also have a table. The beermarker’s website features a Dos-A-Rita recipe, so it’s possible you’ll see those prepared in person, but you can always put some triple sec, sour mix, coarse salt and lime wedges under your cap, just in case. Alternately, stuff your pockets with fruit and make a sangria starring PRP Wine’s Chevalier de Bayard. On this quest for refreshment, just follow your spirits guide.

Margarita Wars is presented by Don Julio and sponsored by Topgolf and the American Jazz Museum. Tickets are $25 (GA) and $35 (VIP); doors open at 6 p.m. for VIP guests and 6:30 p.m. for GA.

the pitch | august 2017 | pitch.com

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café

Monzie Leo Brummet shucks oysters at Mass St. Fish House & Raw Bar.

Net Gain

Mass St. Fish House & Raw Bar ups the fresh-seafood game in landlocked Lawrence.

zach bauman

by Liz Cook

Confession: I don’t have a lot of patience for the inviolate reverence that regional authenticity is supposed to be afforded in the culinary world. I like sugar in my tomato sauce and pepper jack on my cheesesteaks.

I’ve been known to eat hot dogs with — sorry — ketchup. And I don’t believe that New York City’s water contains magic bagel-boiling properties.

But until recently, I did believe in one snooty inverse of said authenticity: that regional truism dictating that one should never order crab legs in Kansas.

Fans of Mass St. Fish House & Raw Bar, an eight-month-old restaurant in downtown Lawrence, already knew better. On each of my visits to the place, its Massachusetts Street storefront buzzed with patrons clinking oyster hulls like champagne glasses, dissecting snow crabs with dedicated tools and sawing into scallops the size of their fists. If rules were being broken, these people were either blissfully unaware or happy to be seen flouting what is, well into the 21st century, an outdated convention.

Now, some of the restaurant’s traffic is owed to location. The restaurant occupies a piece of main-drag real estate that previously housed Bigg’s BBQ and Buffalo Bob’s Smokehouse. It’s not an obscure address. But since its hickory days, there have been a few stylish upgrades, and the split-level space

now feels both red-state casual and bluecounty cosmopolitan. Proprietor Ayrick Madeira and his staff uncovered the original limestone walls, imported driftwood-rugged tables and pews, and coated the walls in a trendy, deep-ocean blue. They added a shabby-chic showpiece, too: an enormous, diner-style letter board behind the bar that lists the craft drafts and the oysters du jour.

But it’s the quality of the fish that makes the restaurant worth a pilgrimage. Madeira, once a representative for Northeast Seafood, a Denver-based distributor, knows how fish should be sourced and shipped.

Mass St. overnights oysters from the coasts and receives small, daily deliveries of fish and shellfish.

It’s also the elegance of executive chef Kealan O’Boyle’s pared-down way with that fresh seafood. Consider the composition of a dish that makes a good metric by which to judge a place like Mass St.: the crab cake.

Heavy breadcrumbs and starchy fillers often mean there’s something to hide — which makes Mass St.’s an exhibitionist’s version.

On my first visit, the puffy cakes were delicate and loosely formed, spotlighting generous flakes of tender crabmeat seasoned to amplify, rather than bury, the flesh’s subtle sweetness. If you’re expecting a contiguous crab croquette, you’ll be disappointed, but for my tastes the cakes had everything they

needed: a brief meditation under the broiler to lightly crisp the edges, and a smear of remoulade to help forks scoop up errant crab.

Minimalists can order whole crab legs, oysters and lobster tails à la carte or sample all three in one of the raw bar’s seafood platters. You may shudder with a little sticker shock, but these are decent values. The Low Tide, the smallest and cheapest of the platters, is $30, but the portions are generous enough for a couple. The tray combines four oysters, half a pound of peel-and-eat shrimp (ruddy with old bay) and a half-pound of succulent chilled snow crab.

The oysters vary depending on the day, but the platters generally include both East Coast and West Coast offerings. On one recent visit, I sampled briny Chesapeakes big enough to shake hands with, and more delicate, slightly fruity Royal Miagis from British Columbia. No, the height of summer isn’t prime oyster season, but all four were clean, fresh and relatively springy.

The accompaniments were slight enough to satisfy a purist — lemon wedges and wee ramekins of cocktail sauce and mignonette — but we’ve established that I’m not a purist. Some hot sauce or horseradish would round things out.

The place has a carefully chosen selection of hot entrées, all of which foreground the flavor and freshness of the fish. O’Boyle,

a Lenexa native who previously worked at the Michelin starred Tru in Chicago, has a knack for delicate, finicky cuts. My table enjoyed the pan-seared Alaskan halibut, which crouched, Smaug-like, atop a small mountain of polenta. Though the polenta was a bit gluey on my visit, the fish had crisp skin, creamy flesh and a sophisticated flavor boost from sliced fennel and a sweet and smoky tomato jam. A pan-seared Idaho trout was no less skillfully cooked, accompanied by “roasted local corn succotash,” which was a little bean-shy, and lemon gastrique.

(O’Boyle sources a majority of his produce from the Lawrence area.)

My favorite entrée, despite a few reservations, was one called Pork & Scallops. The dish is a pebble’s throw from perfection, exemplifying the skill (but also the caution) O’Boyle brings to the kitchen. Three pan-seared New Bedford scallops were slow-dance tender, with a velvety texture that married perfectly with the plate’s supple, fatty hunks of pork belly. The pork was treated with the same reverence as the fish: The crust was firm and flavorful, the meat juicy and rich.

But all that richness needed bolder accents. A pale-yellow purée of vegetables looked pretty on the plate but added little to the mix but a gentle sweetness. Strips of carrot lent the dish vertical bulk but arrived lukewarm and underseasoned. And I detected very little heat in the moat — supposedly butter and chili oil — ringing the meats.

Amping up the spice — or even swapping out the neutral garnish of pea shoots for a more bitter or astringent herb — would push the dish the last few tiny notches to a 10.

It makes sense to be cautious about assertive flavors when the ingredients are this good. No one wants to pay an arm and a leg to not taste the fish. But when O’Boyle takes a risk, it nearly always pays off. Among my favorite examples of this is the tunapoke starter, a stout tower of cubed, fresh ahi (marinated in soy) tossed with cucumber, stippled with black and white sesame seeds and cushioned with whipped avocado.

When I sampled it, the raw tuna was soft and supple (and savory, thanks to that soy), with a generous portion of curled wonton chips providing a firm and flaky vehicle for the cold snap of flavor.

Another highlight: spiced hush puppies.

The corn-and-Fresno-pepper filling was moist, with an even crumb and zero greasiness. And the pineapple-and-jalapeño relish served alongside is memorable by itself, blessing all it touches with an intricately balanced blast of fruity sweetness and radiant heat.

The budget options on the menu aren’t quite as strong. The Mass Fish & Chips looked elegant, and the beer-battered hunks of soft cod were fried to a perfect walnut brown when I ordered the dish. But the “handcut fries” were a slight disappointment, chewy pitch.com | august 2017 | the pitch

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instead of crisp — a sign they languished under a heat lamp too long.

The Oven-Roasted Crab Mac was comforting, with a flavorful Mornay sauce, generous chunks of lump blue crab, and oversized pasta shells with good chew. But the mac skews saucy and runny, not gooey or cheesy, and I longed for more Grana Padano. To go with it, our server brought a side of smoked Fresno- and Calabrian-pepper hot sauce (and told us the restaurant would begin bottling it soon). The thicker, scarlethued sauce added a bright and tangy finish to the mac; think of it as a fruitier, bespoke version of Frank’s Red Hot. For now, I’d stick with the raw bar and the pricier fish plates — which the restaurant’s happy hour offers an economical way to sample. In addition to lower-price appetizers, oysters and crab legs, that menu has a few exclusive dishes, including one called Bubbles and Oysters — a dozen house oysters and a bottle of cava for $30.

The cocktails here complement the fish, skewing light and sweet. None of the drinks I sampled tasted especially boozy.

Sometimes this is to their detriment — I’m thinking of a flatly sweet rosé slushy and a medicinal-tasting Seafoam Flip. (I suspect the combined punch of the matcha-infused vodka and a eucalyptus tincture is to blame in the latter’s case.)

But bar manager Samantha Waeckerle and front-of-house manager Laura Klein have more hits to their names than misses.

I loved the War of the Roses, a pretty blend of Rhone Valley rosé, dry vermouth, whitepeach tea and rose water. The rose flavor was present but not overly strong, and lemon and lemongrass lent the drink a more complex nose. And I’d order the Witchcraft in perpetuity if I could. The light, balanced drink combines piny Strega with lemon, soda and housemade celery-and-fennel bitters.

The dessert menu is modest, but a couple of standouts are worthwhile. Skip the layered chocolate tart — while well-executed, the cake is less interesting than the candied orange peel that dresses it. Order the goat-cheese beignets instead and hold your tongue about their authenticity. Yes, they’re less beignets than they are powdered doughnut holes, but they have a crunchy brown exterior, a tender crumb and a mild earthiness that never overwhelms.

For a true indulgence, spring for the cobbler. The version I ordered smothered a thick-puffed turnover crust with housemade vanilla gelato (criminally creamy), fresh peach wedges and plump blackberries.

It’s not really a cobbler, but it’s so satisfying that even the most pretentious culinary fussbudget won’t care. Mass St. Fish House & Raw Bar — with its tulle-light drinks, elegant plating and fish that has no business being this good — isn’t for the gatekeepers.

It’s pure LFK, authentically itself.

From top: crab cakes, the War of the Roses and the Low Tide

Mass St. Fish House & Raw Bar

719 Massachusetts Street, Lawrence, 785-856-1081, massfishhouse.com

Hours

Lunch: noon–3 p.m.

Tuesday–Saturday Dinner: 6–10 p.m.

Tuesday–Sunday Brunch: 10 a.m.–3 p.m.

Sunday

Prices

Cocktails $7-$10 Appetizers $5-$18 Entrees $14-$39

Best bet: Sip a Witchcraft from the cocktail menu, share the Low Tide with your table as a starter, and order the Pork & Scallops just for you.

the pitch | august 2017 | pitch.com

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GET TICKETS NOW AT www.fedupfestkc.com pitch.com | august 2017 | the pitch

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drink

The Butterfly Effect

What happens inside the luxury-minded Monarch — opening this month on the Plaza — may well affect KC’s whole cocktail scene.

Schulte (left) and Cohrs prepare to take fancy to a new level. zach bauman

by April Fleming

The Monarch is not coy about its extravagance. The new bar — nestled between the rich Polsinelli building and the Plaza-posh Jax Fish and Oyster House — basks in its own gilded-lily glow, from the showpiece terrace outside to the Italian-marble centerpiece bar indoors to the 1,500 handmade plexiglass butterflies that hover overhead.

Set to open August 21, following months of insider conversation, thanks to the names behind it, the Monarch is meant to be KC’s first true luxury drinking establishment — luxury price tags included.

The bar is the vision of local architect David Manica, known internationally for his work designing large-scale projects such as the VTB Arena Park in Moscow and the new Chase Center in San Francisco, which will be home to the Golden State Warriors starting in 2019. He has said that, as his job took him abroad, he would return to KC remembering the high-end bars he’d visited in Europe and Asia. About a year and a half ago, he decided to design and build his own. In a kind of reciprocity with the tony destinations that inspired it, the Monarch’s fanciest fancy is its hyper-masculine private room. The Parlor, as it’s called, will serve vintage and rare spirits and wines (along with the bar’s regular menu) to high-rollers

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— “ballplayers and dignitaries,” Monarch folks say, with little discernible irony — who arrive via a private entrance. Internationally renowned bartenders, Manica says, will be flown in for special engagements.

In that space and in the main room, Monarch’s pristine design is also surprisingly practical. For example, cocktail servers will not ring in tickets to be filled at that big marble bar. A separate, mostly unseen prep area — Monarch calls it a “remote service well” — is where cocktails are mixed for patrons sitting anywhere but the bar. This is supposed to free up the bartenders on the floor to focus on service and showmanship for the customers directly in front of them.

That notion comes courtesy of Monarch’s formidably experienced bar and management team, Liquid Minded Concepts, whose partnership with Manica was announced in April. (Manica retains majority ownership.) Liquid Minded Concepts is an all-star squad of KC cocktail players, including Brock Schulte (formerly of the Rieger), serving here as bar director; Kenny Cohrs (Jax and Manifesto), Monarch’s hospitality director; and Mark Church (Grünauer and Julian), the general manager. LMC’s Brandon Cummins has also been working as a consultant. “Mark, Brock and I have all been part of teams open-

ing spaces,” Cohrs says, “but we’ve been here since this was a concrete box.”

In addition to overseeing construction alongside Manica’s team, Schulte, Cohrs and Church have also brought on another bigname talent to helm the kitchen: Theresia Ota, formerly of Jax Fish and Oyster House.

Ota, who left Jax in June, says she’d been planning to leave Kansas City because nothing here aligned with her goals. Monarch changed her mind.

“I am so excited about this concept because I get to create a small, seasonal menu of food that I want to eat, in a style that I like to eat,” says Ota, a native-born Hawaiian whose German- and Japanese-American heritage further diversifies her culinary influences. Among other items, her menu will include tonno arrabbiata (small, crispy risotto cakes with tuna tartare seasoned with lots of lemon, caper and calabrian chile), quail Scotch eggs (a riff on the classic dish that substitutes hens’ eggs and uses pork belly in place of sausage), and a caprese spiedini (essentially a caprese grilled cheese).

The plan is for food prices to generally stay at less than $20 a plate. (Cohrs describes the dishes as “napkin in hand” items. He says: “Think of going to a great cocktail party in Mission Hills.”)

“It feels like the pressure and the eyes are on the cocktails,” Ota says. “The level that these cocktails are bringing is serious. They don’t need serious food. I’m not trying to detract from the focus — I’m trying to bring an element of play. Success for me will be seeing customers calling off their dinner reservations elsewhere.”

The seriousness of the cocktails depends some on where you’re seated. In the main bar, you’ll see a menu of approximately 40 cocktails, including four on draught and another four bottled and sealed with wax tops (displaying, of course, the Monarch monogram).

Schulte, Cohrs and Church mean for this broad selection to showcase a variety of spirits, seasonal ingredients and preparations. Also in the main bar is a specialized negroni cart — a tip of the cap from Schulte, Cohrs and Church to Manica, whose favorite drink is the classic cocktail and who has talked about tableside drink service at bars he likes in West London. Expect riffs on the negroni centering on a house version that runs its proprietary mix through an ultrasonic homogenizer prior to serving. (This, the teams says, is KC’s first bar homogenizer; the idea, naturally, is to achieve superdeluxe smoothness.)

If you’re on the terrace, you can order anything on the bar menu but also have three outside-only draught options. The Watermelon Crawl, for example, features Russell’s 10-year Bourbon, Keemun tea syrup, lemon, watermelon agrodolce, South African Chenin Blanc and mint. The Wanderlust Julep is a blend of Appleton Signature, Château Arton Armagnac Fine Blanche, smoked Grand Marnier, cascara-infused Caffe Amaro and Cinzano 1757.

Inside and out, Schulte says he’s excited about the Monarch Planter’s Punch, which returns the rum punch to its Caribbean origins with Foursquare Rum 2004 and, among other ingredients, house-made tepache and Crane Brewing Company’s Orange Gose.

Cocktails outside and in start at around $12 apiece, with most $15-$20. Spendy, perhaps, but a fire sale compared with what can be had in the Parlor. Back there, people who love good booze and hate their money can really let loose; cocktails start at $30 to $40 apiece, thanks to a generous use of rarer spirits and wine. (You’re also paying for privacy and exclusivity.) “If someone wants Pappy van Winkle 20 and we have it, that’s just what it goes for,” Cohrs says.

The Monarch will probably have it.

Schulte, Cohrs and Church enjoy good relationships with an array of suppliers, and among the Monarch’s vendors are distillers and vintners earmarked just for the Parlor.

“We have an opportunity to bring in something to KC that right now we can’t get,” Schulte says. The results will reveal who in Kansas City, besides Manica himself, has been waiting — and saving up — for a place like the Monarch.

the pitch | august 2017 | pitch.com

7/21/17 2:45 PM

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7/21/17 4:20 PM

books

“We still live in a world where everything has a national flavor.”

Victoria Console

a way that conveyed how compelling it was. When people ask you what your book is about, how do you answer?

Console: I say it’s about traveling with my wife and young child in Romania. I sometimes feel obligated to add that the book deals with “awkward” or “difficult” experiences. This is funny because there was nothing awkward or difficult in writing about anxiety, addiction, shame, awkwardness or other difficulties. During the trip these were the contents of my rumination —rumination in the clinical sense of being trapped in a loop of anxious thought — and these subjects provided the most easily available — at times the only — available material for the writing. I don’t know where that sense of obligation comes from, unless from the vague idea that polite, respectable people don’t talk about problems. Maybe the respectable thing is to be focused on solutions.

A description of the book that I really like, on the other hand, comes from the writer and critic Michael Clune, who said that it was about thought, “the complex organization of individual thoughts and thought clusters.”

Study Abroad

Poet and teacher Cyrus Console turns himself into a different kind of writer with his Romanian Notebook.

by Jonathan Arlan

It’s the kind of homegrown coincidence familiar to Kansas Citians who spend time away from home. Months ago, in preparation for a trip to Romania, I bought a guidebook online. Long after I’d returned, I got an email from Amazon telling me I might also like Cyrus Console’s Romanian Notebook, published in March of this year. With the country still relatively fresh in my mind, I clicked the link, read the description (it wasn’t a guidebook, Amazon told me, but rather a memoir) — and saw that Console lives here and teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute.

I bought the book, and I found that Console, an acclaimed poet from Topeka, had written something powerful and enigmatic, for which memoir isn’t quite the right word.

Part travelogue, part journal and part window into the mind of a worried man, the book covers a monthlong trip to Romania the author took with his pregnant wife and their child. Right before they leave Kansas City, a test shows the fetus to be at an elevated risk for Down syndrome. Isolated by lan-

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guage and culture and anxious about the test results, Console finds a kind of comfort in recording his thoughts and observations in a notebook. The published version, in fewer than 200 pages of near-pristine prose, expands from a diary of his concern about the unborn baby into a rumination on language, writing, chess, Romanian food, pot, insects, addiction, time and regret. The Los Angeles Review of Books has called it “among the strangest, most compelling representations of human thought in contemporary literature.” It’s also gorgeous, funny and moving — unlike anything I’d read in a long time.

I contacted Console by email — he was back in Romania at the time — to ask him a few questions about his book, writing, and how travel can alter the way we think.

The Pitch: Several times when I was reading Romanian Notebook at a coffee shop, people asked what it was about and, because it’s about so many things, I had a really hard time describing it in

You write that in Romania you were behaving for the first time in your life “like a real writer.” Yet you’ve written and published two critically acclaimed books of poetry, you have at least two degrees in writing and you teach writing at the Kansas City Art Institute.

How is behaving like a real writer different from being a real writer?

In Romania I really felt like I had something to say, and it seemed like there was not enough time to write it all down. I think this happened in part because I became focused on recording experience rather than on conceiving or inventing something like a poem or work of fiction. As soon as my daughter went down for her nap, I would walk to the coffee shop, drink three or four espressos, and write furiously, as they say, for two hours. And because I had this project going, throughout the other hours I would pay particular attention to what I experienced. The day felt like one long mental note.

This quality of attention and focus, and especially this drive to write, were unfamiliar to me, and they fit with my fantasy of what a writer’s practice should be. But what my practice has generally been instead is feeling inspired or awed or moved by poems or novels or certain moments of being in the world, wishing to understand or absorb these things thoroughly enough to reproduce some part of them in writing, trying, getting my hopes up, failing, then feeling bad about the failure.

By far the largest part of the effort I’ve put into writing has gone toward waiting out or pushing through the long periods of feeling that it was impossible.

Is there something about traveling in a foreign country that allows — or maybe even forces — the mind to wander in a way that it doesn’t do at home?

Yes. In fact I think there are two kinds of alienation at work here. We still live in a world where everything has a national flavor. Being in a different country means a change of scenery so complete that force of habit does nothing to tune any of it out. Infrastructure, food, music, countryside and the inescapable messaging of advertisers are all experienced as if for the first time, whereas it’s very hard to see anything wondrous in the versions of these things that invariably exist at home. It makes me think about the saying “as plain as the nose on one’s face,” which I have always taken to mean that the speaker perceives something as obvious as the nose on the listener’s face. But the deep truth of the cliché involves the other nose, the speaker’s. The nose is the only part of the body that is always in the visual field. It is the only part of the visual field that never changes! And it takes real effort for us to see it at all.

But even stronger than the effect of being in a foreign visual field is that of being in a foreign language. My most moving experiences as a reader and writer have taken place during extended stays in Mexico and Romania — times where I’ve felt truly and gratefully alone with my native English.

Have you always kept a journal?

I have tried to start a journal many times, but the Romanian Notebook is the only effort that went anywhere. As a poet, I usually keep a notebook, but I see that as a different thing, mostly just a collection of phrases. I think the most powerful journal entries I’ve read are the Kafka ones that are just a row of X’s.

Kansas City’s literary community seems to be gaining a bit of national attention at the moment with a handful of high-profile books by local authors and a growing number of writing programs and graduates. Where do you see yourself in that scene?

One of the best things about Kansas City’s writing scene is how it is integrated with the art scene. I’m glad to be a part of the Kansas City Art Institute’s excellent creative-writing program, a continual stream of talented and dedicated aspiring artists and writers. I’m also grateful for institutions like the Common Sense Reading Series, which regularly brings excellent writers to town, and the Charlotte Street Foundation, which provides support to artists and curators of all stripes, including those who work with words.

Who do you think has a strong voice in Kansas City right now?

Three poets who come immediately to mind are Hadara Bar-Nadav, Anne Boyer and Jordan Stempleman.

the pitch | august 2017 | pitch.com

7/21/17 1:24 PM

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KC.BCycle.com | 816.205.7056 pitch.com | august 2017 | the pitch

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7/24/17 11:09 AM

Art

The Bird Lady of the Northeast

Englezos: naturally patient zach bauman

Evie Englezos and her Sweet Destructor ceramics listen to the animals.

by Annie Raab

One July day, I returned to my apartment to find a large black bird crouched on my second-story porch. I carefully stepped around and went into the house to send a message to the only person I knew who could help me solve this situation: Evie Englezos.

“So, uh,” I texted. “There’s a raven on my porch and it’s not flying away. Doesn’t seem to have a broken wing but idk. What should I do?”

Her response was immediate: “I would probably grab him in a shirt, put him in a paper grocery bag and take him to Lakeside.”

She would know. Earlier that week, Englezos and I had spent an afternoon in her studio, in the upstairs room of a Northeast house close to the Jazz District. The space doubles as an aviary, and she was then in the process of rehabilitating 14 birds of three species (and one turtle). Certified through Lakeside Nature Center as a wildlife rehabilitator, Englezos cares for animals in the natural light of her ceramics studio, where she builds and creates for her brand, Sweet Destructor. The combination of studio equipment, makeshift cages and a garden enclosure for the soon-tobe-released birds makes her space arguably the city’s most unorthodox maker HQ. “I began rehabbing because of my first starling, Flugleman,” Englezos said when I visited her there. “Nine years ago, I found a featherless nestling in a parking garage, about to get pancaked by an SUV. I couldn’t figure out where the nest was, so I took it to Lakeside Nature Center, where I found out it was a starling. I knew nothing about birds, and they don’t take non-natives like starlings for rehab, so my partner and I raised him to birdhood.”

Flugleman died not long ago, and his cremated remains live in a flat urn, which

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Englezos made; she etched his image on its lid. (She tried to talk me out of viewing this homage, perhaps figuring I’d find it creepy.

In fact, it’s very beautiful.) Five starlings now carry on Flugleman’s legacy in the backyard aviary and will be released into the wild soon, but there’s also another pet starling, called Chicken. Most Missouri residents consider starlings a pest — they swarm in Hitchcockian numbers, their song is mostly noise, and they speckle everything beneath them. Yet Chicken, an iridescent specimen with an inquisitive and insistent personality, makes an apologetic case for its fellow muscicapidae.

“He likes to stand on my hands or near the wheel when I throw pots, and he sometimes pecks and dents them,” Englezos said.

These dents and pecks become part of the ceramic action, as much an element of the Sweet Destructor process as the ongoing interspecies banter between artist and animal.

Beside Chicken’s open cage is a stout mesh contraption containing seven fledgling robins perched on sticks, looking around in the bewildered way unique to baby birds.

“Hey, guys,” Englezos said to the other birds — two baby blue jays near the door.

They scream over our conversation until Evie squirts a syringe of mushed animal food into their open mouths. The rehabilitation process is not for the fickle or the irresponsible. “Each day I prepare baby-bird formula, plus fruit, worms, whatever makes up the primary diet of the species I’m raising. Depending on age, I feed them every 20 minutes to two hours until they’re eventually weaned. Some birds have special needs, so I’ll give medications or perform physical therapy. When they’re ready, I release them into the wild.”

Englezos attended the Kansas City Art Institute’s printmaking program, but her artistic practice is as much a byproduct of civic duty. “I went to vote four years ago and found out my polling place [Westport Roanoke Community Center] had a ceramics studio,” she said. “So I’ve learned from Michael Oliver [who teaches at the center].”

She also credits Rebecca Koop, of Back Door Pottery, as a mentor.

Englezos handles her ceramic pottery like so many baby starlings, she said: “with care and allowing for the natural character of the material to shine.” Her studio consists of a pottery wheel, a desk for building ceramic slabs, and shelves of completed and in-progress work. Her art’s most immediately recognizable characteristic is its repetitive use of a kind of evil eye — a lidless almond shape with a dotted iris in the center. It populates petite minimalist cups, rough-edged spoons and decorative dishes good for storing loose rings or coins. The icon is a universal symbol for sight and wisdom rather than a harbinger of more dire fates. In the absence of a storefront, Englezos sells her Sweet Destructor wares at places such as Hammerpress, Opal & Gold, Oracle, Skin KC and We Are Sincerely Yours. (On the Kansas side, she’s at Hand & Land, in Leawood, and Wonder Fair, in Lawrence.) She’ll be at We Are Sincerely Yours on Thursday, August 24, for a 6-9 p.m event called “Plant Tiny Cacti with Sweet Destructor,” which combines horticulture and shopping. That weekend (August 25-27), she and her goods head to Roost Market at Union Station.

Before I left her studio, I met its wingless animal: Chaz, an ornate box turtle that was

hit by a car and lost part of its shell. The shell is growing back just fine, at the usual turtle pace, and Chaz seemed content, in the usual turtle way, to share space with the other species in the room. Any printmaker would be attracted to the colorful striations of Chaz’s shell and the golden scallops on its legs. The turtle was moving toward the wall of finished Sweet Destructor ceramics, as though choosing a gift from the small cups and the salt pigs, with their markings made to resemble the animals under Englezos’ roof. I was reminded again how much everything here — art, environment, wildlife, commerce — is braided together in her practice.

My conversation with her was still on my mind even as I walked up my stairs to find that injured crow. I remembered her saying, “It’s funny how we base all animal intelligence on our own intelligence — like our intelligence is the only way to be. In a lot of ways, a bird is way smarter than any 3-yearold.” (Crows, you know, are among the smartest creatures in the air, practically diabolical.)

Using a broken branch, I coaxed the bird onto a perch and into an open box, where it remained until I rang the buzzer at Lakeside Nature Center.

“I’m glad Evie texted me. I was just about to leave,” said Jesse, one of the rehabilitators, as she transferred the bird to a safe enclosure inside a room I could not see. “We’ll take good care of him.” I believed her. The next wild, energetic crow I see in my backyard might well be giving me a message from Evie.

Sweet Destructor is on Facebook and Big Cartel

the pitch | august 2017 | pitch.com

7/21/17 1:25 PM

Art

Hand Made

KC’s one-of-a-kind art quarterly gets a gallery exhibition equal to its mission.

by Tracy Abeln

To call The Hand a mere magazine confuses the publication — now four years, 17 years and several hundred artists into its run — with one that doesn’t include a handy glossary. What its founders, photographer and teacher Adam Finkelston and printmaker James Meara, call a “magazine for reproduction-based art” is itself an art object.

So it’s fitting that The Hand marked its fourth birthday in July by opening an exhibition at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center (2012 Baltimore). Mudras, on view through August 26, includes 49 original works by 47 of the artists whose work has appeared in the quarterly’s pages since its 2013 inception.

“It’s the only magazine I know of that combines photography and printmaking and thinks about them in the same ways,” Finkelston tells me. The latter includes copperplate photogravure, photo etching, chemigram, mezzotint, cyanotype, lithography, monotype, and more — processes done by, you know, hand.

So The Hand showcases the mechanics of creation and reproduction. But it’s also about honoring what artwork looks like in person, which is why, in addition to curating submitted work into the quarterly publication, annual shows have always been part of Finkelston and Meara’s plans. Mudras is the first of its four exhibitions to appear in KC, though.

Finkelston walks me through the space, his enthusiasm palpable as he shows me the art, which is indeed striking up close. These are far from snapshots or even well-executed straight documentary or landscape photos.

And because the creation of each piece involves science and a range of terminology similar to what’s found in ceramics, I also get a glimpse of Finkelston as patient teacher. (He works with kids on darkroom techniques and alternative-process photography at Shawnee Mission East High School.) He wants viewers to wonder enough about the wall cards to go ahead and Google: “If you look up palladium print,” he says, “you will find it.” (Yes, there really is a two-page glossary in The Hand, outlining how the artists constructed their images.)

Each 50-page issue of The Hand includes a printmaking feature and a photography feature, generally interviews with artists. The editors start with an unthemed call for submissions, then sift the results for what they find compelling — “whether it’s in the simple line, the making of the piece, the image itself, or that it has some kind of narrative,” Finkelston says. They also do their own image sleuth-

ing, reaching printmakers and photographic artists around the world via social media, and looking especially for those who use alternative (sometimes called antiquarian) processes. The resulting fullcolor spreads teem with experimentation.

The product is a gorgeous throwback to the heyday of glossy art journals, and it shows the editors’ personal investment — in both time and money. And, they say, it’s paid off, with a growing list of subscribers and attention that has opened doors for them as artists as well as providing a platform for like-minded people to exchange techniques.

But being in the same room with the art remains a different experience. Finkelston, who says he was “blown away” by the Developing Greatness exhibition of the Hallmark Photographic Collection at the Nelson’s then-new Bloch Building galleries in 2007, understands this. He’s the first to admit that even the best-looking image on the bestlooking page can seem flat. “If things are handmade, it’s important how they feel, how they look, what the texture is like, how the ink layers look differently,” he says.

At Leedy-Voulkos, the strong selections include Mike Koerner’s “Tendrils No. 5,” a chemigram on wet-plate collodion made expressly for Mudras. Finkelston speculates that Koerner, who is also a chemistry professor, probably “just covered his hand in chemistry and developed” the results. What you see is a ghostly mosaic of radiating crystalline splotches, grouped into the shape of the artist’s hand like bits of glowing white lichen. The reflectiveness of the tin plate the image is printed on gives it light, and while the reproduction in Issue 17 of The Hand is pleasing, the life-size thing itself dances with living dimension.

In their seeming simplicity, Elijah Gowin’s cyanotypes belie the fact that this inexpensive, two-chemical process — the gateway drug to alternative processes, Finkelston says — takes years to perfect. Miguel A. Aragón shows just what that kind of mastery looks like in his arresting series of tinted cyanotypes, “Retratos de Pérdida por el Narcotráfico”: nine death mask–like portraits of people killed in Mexico’s drug wars.

Thayer Bray’s two lithographs with ink, “Her, Sitting (kneesuck),” in red, and “Him, Kneeling (Sad Panda),” in blue, demonstrate how excellent draftsmanship translates into the world of print, as do Aaron Coleman’s lithograph with chine collé (“The Dummy”) and Joshua Jay Johnson’s Albrecht Dreher–like

Thayer Bray’s “Him, Kneeling (Sad Panda)”

The life-size thing itself dances with living dimension.

“Nameless Deeds” etching with engraving.

Then there is Terri Cappucci’s small, brilliant gumoil print, “Loblolly Pines,” which depicts its title tree species. Cappucci is one of two people worldwide, Finkelston says, who have mastered this particular multistep process. It starts with the same chemistry as a gum-bichromate print but involves exposing a transparent image to the unpigmented potassium dichromate and gum arabic, then rinsing away the parts that do not harden up in the reaction, then washing over the faint matrix of the picture with oil paint. When it works, it’s uniquely beautiful.

“It’s part of our mission that people come see and appreciate art as a physical object and not just on a computer screen or even in a magazine,” Finkelston says. The Hand’s exhibition shows how important that mission is, and how rewarding to the viewer.

Mudras Through August 26 at Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, 2012 Baltimore, leedyvoulkos.com, thehandmagazine.net

pitch.com | august 2017 | the pitch

Art B.indd 43

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film

baby driver WILSON WEBB, SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT INC.

Driven

After you’ve seen summer’s most satisfying movie, you have some catching up to do.

by Eric Melin

One of the big movie stories this summer has been the unexpected success of writer-director Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver. While fifth movies in the Transformers and Pirates of the Caribbean sagas, and a Tom Cruise–led attempt to launch a new series (the Dark Universe), The Mummy, all failed to make back their blockbuster-size budgets domestically, Wright’s minor-key action-musical more than doubled its modest budget ($34 million) in the United States in less than three weeks. Outside our borders, it’s also a hit.

Ostensibly, Baby Driver is about a young man named Baby (Ansel Elgort), coerced into getaway-driver servitude by an Atlanta crime kingpin (Kevin Spacey). On the eve of the usual last big score, he falls in love with a diner waitress (Lily James). It sounds like the plot of every noir-tinged crime movie since the 1940s, but it is instead a canny reconfiguration of boilerplate elements, made special by the way it taps into our musicsaturated culture, using iPods and earbuds to fashion a seductive fantasy world.

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The soundtrack of Baby’s deeply interior life is woven into the narrative so thoroughly that it alters his reality (and shapes the viewer’s read of it). It isn’t just the high-speed car chases that seem to be choreographed to his playlists; it’s the background, too. Baby Driver demands repeated viewings — you want to keep mental track of the 70-some pop tunes Wright fetish-welds together, yes, but you also want to be alert to every bit of syncopation underscoring all those visual references. The movie isn’t deep, but it exists in a universe — a non-Marvel, non-franchise universe — inhabited by characters weighted with thematic purpose.

At first look, Baby Driver is the ultimate music video, long after the moment when everybody thought the form had peaked (give or take Beyoncé). Its real achievement, however, is that it works as pure cinema.

Wright takes full advantage of the simplest building blocks of sound and vision — using very little CGI — to carry out a concept so simple, it’s surprising that no one else has

‘The movie isn’t deep, but it exists in a universe — a non-Marvel, non-franchise universe.’

done it quite this way before.

Some have come close, though. The past 20 years don’t want for crime stories that combine an active camera with bodies in motion, and some of them even use music as a key fuel.

Run Lola Run (1998)

A pulsing techno beat propels Lola (Franka Potente) through the streets of Berlin as she races to find 100,000 Deutsche marks (this was the year before the Euro) in 20 minutes to save a boyfriend who is mixed up with some small-time gangsters. Director Tom Tykwer bends time and takes all kinds of chances, blending live-action and animation, using Polaroid flash-forwards to foretell alternate destinies, and giving Lola more chances to try again, like a video game. Run Lola Run was and remains a fun ride, but it also asks questions about how its characters perceive the world they live in — a theme at the core of the modern-but-anachronistic Baby Driver as well.

the pitch | august 2017 | pitch.com

7/21/17 1:26 PM

film

presented by

Drag Me to Hell (2009)

Baby Driver would be nothing without its furious kineticism — a past master of which is Sam Raimi. Drag Me to Hell is a horror movie, but it builds tension and surprises you with visual gags in ways that Wright also employs. As in the newer movie, the young protagonist (Alison Lohman) comes from a broken home and is struggling to become an adult. Unfortunately, she’s cursed by a shadowy goat demon, leading to slapstick comedy and unruly action. Worth revisiting after Baby Driver for its wicked sense of humor alone.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)

Wright has yet to surpass his own visual inventiveness here. This is probably the film that paved the way for Baby Driver more than anything else the Shaun of the Dead director has ever done. Like Run Lola Run, Scott Pilgrim uses the language of video games to tell its story: The title character (Michael Cera) must fight off a legion of ex-boyfriends (and one ex-girlfriend) to win the heart of his new love. But it oneups Lola by adding thought bubbles, comic book–style wipes, and onscreen “lives” and weapons that materialize as needed. (Scott also plays in a band, so, yeah, there’s music, too.) Wright uses that trickiest of genres — magical realism — and filters it through pop culture; the result proved too radical for audiences seven years ago. Maybe the world is ready for it now that Baby Driver is a hit.

Drive (2011)

This one is not fast-paced visually. Instead, Nicolas Winding Refn’s L.A.-set mood piece concentrates on the icy calm of its handsome getaway driver (Ryan Gosling). He, too, juices himself with music — in this case, 1980s synth pop — but the pace is slower (even if the scenes are intense). Drive is also a fairy tale of sorts, one that turns dark and drips with menace and style. When Baby Driver hits home video, the double feature programs itself — it’s just a question of whether you watch Drive before Wright’s film or after.

The Raid (2011) Dredd (2012) John Wick (2014)

One reaction to our present CGI glut — movies full of unreal action that’s impeccably constructed but impossible to follow — is the resurgence, the past half-decade or so, of the “pure action” movie. These three stylish crime stories rely mostly on in-camera movement and human stunt work for their kicks — which are plentiful. Baby Driver’s stunt coordinator has said that 99 percent of the high-octane stunts in that film are practical. Wright’s choice there follows the lead of these movies (and Mad Max: Fury Road, for that matter), and the results are a

huge boon. The worlds may be unreal, but the goings-on in them feel utterly tangible — and, when the movies are their best, so do the stakes.

Premium Rush (2012)

You bet your ass I’m talking about the Joseph Gordon-Levitt bike-messenger movie!

You probably didn’t see this breezy, trashy little gem, but you should: It gets a whole lot of mileage out of showing us its reckless young protagonist throw caution to the wind, weaving in and out of New York traffic like he’s invincible. Director David Koepp also has a nifty trick up his sleeve, visualizing the possible outcomes of riding, swerving or stopping at the precise moment his hero must choose which to do. Did I mention that he’s-everywhere actor Michael Shannon is darkly funny as a dirty cop on his tail? Premium Rush is just the kind of underdog you want to see succeed in a post–Baby Driver time: an entertaining, self-aware flick that does what it promises.

In local filmgoing news, the fifth Arts and Crafts Film and Beer Festival is happening at the Screenland Armour August 25-31, featuring a number of local premieres of new international indie features and made-inKC shorts, as well as performances by local musicians, special guests and a formidable array of craft beers.

The completely independent film festival has expanded this year to a full week of programming, including a live staged reading of the Coen brothers’ script for Raising Arizona with a local cast on Friday, August 25. Saturday is the award-winning craft beer festival, which benefits KC Pet Project. At press time, the organizers hadn’t yet confirmed every coup; keep an eye on artcraftskc.com.

Isn’t it funny how the movies we see in our formative years continue to shape us well into adulthood? (I still consider Strange Brew to be one of the greatest comedies of all time — seriously, right up there with Some Like It Hot and Duck Soup.) So I bet I’ll see a bunch of you August 19, when the Alamo Drafthouse puts on a 30th-anniversary cast reunion of the teen cult fantasy-comedy The Monster Squad. That’s the one in which a bunch of kids who idolize the Universal stable of monster movies have to grow up real quick and stop those same evildoers (Dracula, the Mummy, Frankenstein’s monster) from plunging the world into darkness.

Stars Andre Gower, Ryan Lambert and Ashley Bank are all grown up now, and they’ll be present to welcome the crowd in the theater and participate in a Q&A following the movie. Maybe someone can ask them just what Tom Cruise was thinking.

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pitch.com | august 2017 | the pitch

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Pitch ad 2017

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music

A Good Eye for Sound Aaron Alexander’s visually conceived, forward-thinking Memento Mori proves worth the wait.

by AAron rhodes

Two and a half years have passed since Kansas City, Kansas, rapper Aaron Alexander released Radiant Child, a mixtape full of bright and colorful hip-hop that sampled jazz and R&B records and heavily referenced neo-expressionist artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Two and a half years is an eternity in Alexander’s trade, and though he hasn’t been idle — he has worked steadily at building his local following — fans of that release have endured a long wait for the follow-up.

Now it’s here: Memento Mori, Alexander’s most polished, melodic work yet, studded with contributions by rapper DEV3N, R&B singer Mae C and the KCK jazz ensemble Stranded in the City. It’s the kind of recording with a shot at snatching the national spotlight and showing everybody what one of Kansas City’s best hip-hop acts can do. On the eve of the album’s release, I talked with Alexander about why he took his time making it, and what he learned along the way.

Alexander found himself thinking about life and death.

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Kansas City Pitch Weekly 08-01-17.indd 1

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©2017 SFNTC (3)

pitch.com | august 2017 | the pitch 47 7/12/17 4:32 PM

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The Pitch: How would you say that you’ve grown as an artist since Radiant Child?

As far as artistry, I’ve just gotten better at it. I just let myself get out of that “rap” box, ’cause I used to wanna be a rapper real bad. Everybody was going on that wave of, you know, melodies and things like that. And then I started liking melodies and things like that, so I’m just doing me. Radiant Child — that was more so trying to be a rapper, trying to be the best rapper, trying to have the best lyrics.

Now I’m trying to make the best songs — and I think I’m doing a pretty good job at it.

Have your influences changed?

Nah, I don’t really think my influences have changed. I was influenced by Kanye [West] and Frank [Ocean] and people like that, but it’s not really their style of music that influences me. It’s the fact that they’re willing to go and do different things.

What made you want to incorporate so much live instrumentation on Memento Mori?

The jazz thing was always kind of my thing. I guess it was just, “Why not have live jazz on there? Why not mix synthetic with authentic? It’d be cool.” So that’s what we did, and it came out tight.

Your recent video for the song “Faces” was received well. Are you someone who thinks about visual elements when working on music?

This is really my first video. I want my songs to make people see things, so I write visually.

I write to where people can feel a sensation, or feel something. I just kinda let the music manifest into the visuals. I often dream about the songs that I’m working on.

B-Will seems to be one of the producers you work with most.

It wouldn’t be no Aaron Alexander if not for B-Will. It’s like Drake and 40. You know, if there wasn’t 40 … I’m nice, but I wanna be next-level, and people have that person that, when both of them are together, magic happens. That’s me and B. He’s not just a producer.

He mixes. He’s heavily involved in the mixing.

How did you first get to know him?

He might’ve came my freshman year of high school. I didn’t know him that well then, but I wanna say around my junior year we got cool, ’cause he used to come to the band room and play the piano and shit, and I used to just freestyle over it. Eventually he made beats, and I was like, “This shit cool,” but one summer he leveled up on his production and sent it to me and I was like, “Damn, this shit is way more than cool now. Let’s link up and do something.”

And we did. It was a project and it turned into two, and I wouldn’t work with nobody else.

Why do you think you work so well together?

I feel like I’m good at telling stories, and he’s good at making worlds with his production. … He also has a very keen ear. It’s crazy. My ear ain’t that crazy, but I have a good eye. We help each other with our weaknesses, and that’s what makes it seem like we have no weaknesses.

I know that you’re a big fan of anime and that it’s had some influence over the project. Where can that be found on Memento Mori?

An anime I was watching kinda sparked the idea for the project. I guess you could say without the anime, there would be no project at all. I watched an anime [Death Parade] and I got to Episode 11. I watch ’em subbed, but it’s all in Japanese and cuz is talking and pouring this girl this drink and, “Something something something Memento Mori.” Stood out clear as day. I was like, “Oh, shit, that sounds tight as fuck.”

So I did a lot of research on memento mori, figured out it was a concept or a phrase, started researching it a lot and found my own interpretation on it and worked on the project. I feel like the whole thing behind Memento Mori — the process of life and death and everything in between — is beautiful, and I just wanted to make beautiful music to reflect that process. That show kinda provided me with an aesthetic, ’cause I feel like the show captured that aesthetic very well.

Your music is more hip-hop than anything else, but it also contains a lot of R&B sensibilities. Where do you think those come from?

I have a love for R&B music. The voice can be used to emote a bunch of things, and I think singing is the best way to convey emotion vocally. It definitely stems from listening to other R&B artists’ music. You have D’Angelo. I’m a big neo-soul person, so you have Musiq Soulchild, other neo-soul acts like Lauryn Hill and all that.

Lots of rappers right now are trying to gain followings by flooding the internet with new music all the time.

Why are you taking such a drawn-out approach with your music?

You only get one chance to make an impression. Say I put out a song and the song’s bullshit. I move on to the next thing. The next thing is the greatest thing in the world.

Nobody’s gonna listen to it. They’ll be like, “We listened to that one song. It was trash.”

I wanna make my music the best it can possibly be, so that takes time. I can’t just drop a bunch of songs and be like, “Maybe one of these will pop.” That’s just not the kind of artist I am.

the pitch | august 2017 | pitch.com

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jazz

Bird at 97

The 2014 21 Sax Salute Larry Kopitnik

KC’s Charlie Parker Celebration returns with an impressive program.

by Larry Kopitnik

Miles Davis once said, “You can tell the history of jazz in four words: Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker.” Parker was born in Kansas City, Kansas, raised in Kansas City, Missouri, and is buried in a cemetery off Truman Road, in Blue Summit. Clint Eastwood directed a movie about him. Alvin Ailey honored him with a dance. Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts wrote a children’s book in tribute to him. In New York City, his home has been designated a historic landmark. Yet in the years since his death, in 1955, Charlie “Yardbird” Parker’s hometown has torn down the house where he grew up and, other than a statue in the 18th and Vine district, has mostly ignored the man and his legacy.

In the early 1970s, musicians started gathering at Parker’s gravesite on his birthday — August 29, or the Saturday closest to it — to play his music. Forty years ago, in 1977, that gathering grew into the 21 Sax Salute, with this city’s jazz saxophonists and horn players converging on Lincoln Cemetery to celebrate the bebop architect. The salute had begun to fade in the new century, but it was adopted and given fresh prominence in 2014 as the centerpiece of a new event, the Charlie Parker Celebration. That first celebration lasted 18 days and honored,

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finally, the alto saxophonist whose extraordinary innovations with chords and harmony changed music and culture.

The past two years, the celebration has spanned a more manageable 10 days and has added an artist in residence, a guest musician who sits in each night with local ensembles or students. Last year, three-time Grammy winner Tivon Pennicott jammed in local jazz bars and in Lincoln Cemetery. His saxophone solos — sometime searing, sometimes romantic, consistently peppered with fresh and intelligent ideas — elevated the music. This year he returns, joined by a second artist in residence, keyboardist Sullivan Fortner.

Fortner was in town over Memorial Day weekend backing guitarist John Scofield at the Kansas City Jazz and Heritage Festival.

Relaxed but sharp behind the piano and Hammond B3 organ, he punctuated Scofield’s eclectic jazz and funk reinterpretations of country classics with energy and soul. The 30-year-old musician grew up in New Orleans, but his performing career didn’t start with jazz.

“I was playing a lot of church music, and I didn’t know very much about jazz other than New Orleans second-line music or traditional Mardi Gras music,” he says. “I didn’t really pay attention to it because it

“Charlie Parker’s music is so alive and so fresh.”

Sullivan Fortner

wasn’t of interest to me.” An acquaintance urged him to apply to the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts. “That,” he says, “was my introduction to jazz.”

Among his classmates at the school were Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews and Jonathan Batiste (now known as the bandleader on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert).

Batiste was performing with trumpeter Roy Hargrove sometime after college when he recommended Fortner. “They called me and asked, ‘Can you make a month of gigs?’” Fortner says. “That month lasted seven and a half years.” A contract with Impulse Records, and his first major-label CD, led to touring with jazz icon Scofield this past spring.

Fortner and Pennicott open the 2017 Charlie Parker Celebration at the Blue Room on August 17. Through August 26, together and separately, they will jam with Lonnie McFadden at the Phoenix, Bram Wijnands at the Majestic, Tim Whitmer at Green Lady Lounge, Project H at the Black Dolphin, Micah Herman at the Ship, Stan Kessler at Westport Coffee House, David Basse at Ironwoods Park in Leawood, John Belgen and Rod Fleeman at Chaz, and Julia Haile and Chris Hazelton at the Reserve Restaurant in the Ambassador Hotel.

Special events at this year’s Parker fest include a stage with music in Theis Park on Saturday, August 19. A week later, on August 26, KCUR 89.3 Fish Fry host and jazz historian Chuck Haddix conducts a history tour through the 18th and Vine district, stopping for an open house at the Mutual Musicians Foundation, a National Historic Landmark, followed by a bus ride to Lincoln Cemetery for the 21 Sax Salute. Afterward, participants are invited to a “chicken feed” — Parker loved chicken — at the Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Heritage Center. That night, a program at the Folly Theater, titled “2017 Jazz Experience: Rhythm Changes,” traces the history of jazz with Pennicott and Fortner.

That takes fans through the celebration but not quite to Parker’s 97th birthday, which this year falls on a Tuesday. That day, the KCUR radio program 12th Street Jump records a special show with saxophonist Bobby Watson at Musical Heritage Theater.

The history tour, the Folly show and the radio taping are each a $25 ticket. You can head to Lincoln Cemetery for the 21 Sax Salute on your own at no charge. It starts at noon. Saturday at Theis Park is free. Some of the club shows come with a cover charge. More details are at charlieparkercelebration.com.

Sullivan Fortner is looking forward to 10 days in Kansas City. “It’s a real honor,” he says. “To me, Charlie Parker’s music is so alive and so fresh. A lot of people like to say that Bird’s music was just the ’40s, or just the ’50s, that times have progressed and moved past that. But I don’t think that. I think that’s some of the most intelligent music that’s ever been created by man.”

the pitch | august 2017 | pitch.com

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the pitch | august 2017 | pitch.com

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MARKETPLACE LOCAL 1100

HOUSING/RENTALS

1102 Apartments for Rent KS-KCKS | $515-$615 913-299-9748 HEAT & WATER PAID...

NO GAS BILL! KCK25 ACRE SETTING. 63rd & ANN, 5 minutes West of I-635 & I-70 One bedroom $505; Two bedroom $620. No pets please. You CANNOT BEAT this value! Don’t miss out on this limited-time offer!

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816-444-3366

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Need Bachelor’s in CS or MIS plus 5 yrs. exp. Email resumes to Manasi.Pandya@crestwoodlp.com.

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3000 3040

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Legal Services

Simple, Uncontested + Filing Fee. Don Davis.

816-531-1330

Personal Services

CREMATION $695

Funeral Packages starting @ $1795 Affordable, Quality Funeral Services.

Golden Gate Funeral & Cremation 816-231-GATE

54

A less expensive way to help get the dental care you deserve If you’re over 50, you can get coverage for about $1 a day* Keep your own dentist! NO networks to worry about NO annual or lifetime cap on the cash benefits you can receive

CRIB ECO CHIC Clover. Hardwood.

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WANTS TO purchase minerals and other oil & gas interests. Send details to P.O. Box 13557, Denver, Co 80201

7000

$99 DIVORCE $99

7004 Musical Instruction/ Classes

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Piano, Voice, and Guitar lessons

Townhomes-Single Family Homes.

available from Professional musician and Instructor. Instructor teaches in a fun and meaningful context from ages 4 to the young at heart. Sessions are a half-hour and an hour. Students who sign up before September will receive $5 off. For more info. please call/text Kathleen (913)206-2151 or email:Klmamuric@yahoo.com

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9018 New Age and Psychics

816-221-5900

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www.The-Law.com

816-444-7600

Attorney - David M. Lurie

PSYCHIC enchantedcrissy.com

502

Westport Psychic Shop Superior Over All Psychics GRAND OPENING

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KC’s Finest and Most Established Massage Referral Hotline For over 25 years

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500

*Individual plan. Product not available in MN, MT, NH, RI, VT, WA. Acceptance guaranteed for one insurance policy/certificate of this type. Contact us for complete details about this insurance solicitation. This specific offer is not available in CO, NY; call 1-800-969-4781 or respond for similar offer. Certificate C250A (ID: C250E; PA: C250Q); Insurance Policy P150(GA: P150GA; NY: P150NY; OK: P150OK; TN: P150TN) 6096C MB16-NM001Gc

DON DAVIS ATTORNEY AT LAW

MUSIC/MUSIC ROW

9000

No wait for preventive care and no deductibles – you could get a checkup tomorrow Coverage for over 350 procedures including cleanings, exams, fi llings, crowns…even dentures

Auto • SR22 • Renters Homeowners • Business Insurance KCinsurance.com • 816-531-1000 1130 Westport Rd • Kansas City, MO 64111

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3046

Physicians Mutual Insurance Company

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4000

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Full time/PartTime Positions available For more info please call 816-753-9966

BACCALA’ STRIP CLUB NOW HIRING DANCERS Contact Frank 7pm-3am Mon-Sat 816-231-3150

To place a classified advertisement call Steven Suarez at 816.218.6732 or email steven.suarez@pitch.com

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