December 8, 2003

A Downtown Waiting to Happen

After a man took a smelly dump on the floor of the Missouri Valley Room on the third floor of the Kansas City Public Library, I removed myself to the second floor, where I found a solitary desk for one person in the stacks next to Sigmund Freud and Norman Vincent Peale. A notice was glued to the desk:

I had just had enough with anal compulsiveness so I grabbed the copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People to take my mind off of the excretion. As everyone knows, the first rule for making friends and influencing people in order to manipulate people to make a fortune for oneself is, "Don't criticize, condemn or complain."

"Just imagine what this world would be like today if human beings did not complain about anything," I suggested to myself, then thought it would be a dystopia instead of a utopia. "But never mind! It's time to practice The Power of Positive Thinking."

Mind you, I have had a few complaints about Downtown Kansas City since I arrived; everyone who resides downtown had the same complaints long before my arrival, therefore I do not believe I am delusional. Sometimes I have a peculiar ulterior motive for complaining: I want people to keep flying over or driving around the city. You see, I actually love Downtown Kansas City and I would like to scare people away because it is a city waiting to happen; it is a city for people who love cities yet hate crowds. Wherefore when I say that Downtown Kansas City is a one cow town - that cow is kept on the top of a tall column where few people see it - a downtown which will not bustle for another twenty years, you might say that I am an optimistic pessimist.

What happens when a city really happens? Try living in the ultimate city, New York City, particularly Manhattan, for your answer. I have lived in other cities, but not for long, for the ultimate city takes the cake. Each time I pulled up stakes and moved back to what I believed was the only real city in the United States. Each time I returned to the Big Apple the first thing I noticed was that everyone seemed to be complaining about one thing or another - and they had a sense of humor about it. Each time it took me three years to become a New York jerk.

I loved New York City each time I lived there, but in the final analysis I could not stand the crowds. It was not the automobile traffic that got to me - I burned my driver's license in 1986 - it was the pedestrian traffic. There were just too many people walking every which way, coming right at each other with their heads down, and so on and so forth. I proposed that people not be allowed to walk the sidewalks without a walker's license, and that monitors be posted with cattle prods on every block to shock people into staying to the right, among other things to keep order.

I was not the only person complaining about the growing crowdedness as the years passed me by. An old man who retired to drink several hours a day in an Irish pub told me that the crowding had become horrendous since 1935.

"People don't pack together like this because they love each other, sonny," he said one day, then he suddenly started crying in his beer.

"Hey, man, don't cry, it's not that crowded," I said.

"It's the Armistice."

"The Armistice? Excuse me?"

"They were surrendering, they had their arms up in the air, but we mowed them down with machine guns, we murdered them, we murdered them..."

Almost everything in Downtown Kansas City is out of the way. Many people say there is nothing happening, nothing to do downtown, but that is not true, not at all. Downtown Kansas City has its happenings and doings. But I am apprehensive about revealing its secret merits lest fools rush in just like they rushed into Manhattan. Yes, as crowded as it was, Manhattan had its uncrowded nooks and crannies, pleasant places to hang, fascinating things to do without people crawling all over you. Then came the Yuppies - please pardon the expression - the term became politically incorrect because of their lemming-behavior. Every secluded neighborhood haunt was eventually "discovered" by the Yuppies and overrun by them. A line would form in front of a place, and Yuppies would say, "Hey, there's a line! Let's get in it."

Downtown Kansas City ain't like that, and I'm glad of it. The young urban professionals have fled; they have become Suburbies. Now Downtown Kansas City is for people who love cities but can't stand crowds.