“I might take a train, I might take a plane…”
Story and photos by Bob Schulman
“...I'm goin' to Kansas City, Kansas City here I come,
they got some crazy little women there and I'm gonna get me one.
“...I'll be standing on the corner, 12th Street and Vine,
with my Kansas City baby and a bottle of Kansas City wine.”
What Boomer hasn't rocked to Wilbert Harrison's great R&B chart-topper? I always wondered what it would be like on the corner of 12th and Vine. Pretty rough, I guessed, seeing this is the city that kicked out Prohibition in the 30s – leaving the streets wide open for rip-roaring bars, honky tonks, gambling dens, jazz joints, bawdy houses and the like.
So when I was invited to a convention of travel writers there, I came up with a scheme to get a picture of myself on that immortal corner with -- you guessed it – my Kansas City baby (well, a stand-in). And of course I'd be holding a bottle of – right again – Kansas City wine.
First, I rounded up two fellow writers for accomplices. There would probably be scads of low-lifes hanging out on the corner, and they surely wouldn't be happy to see outsiders there. So we made a plan: We'd rent a car and drive to 12th and Vine; then, my KC honey and I would dash out of the car and stand under the street signs while the driver snapped some pictures. Click, click, click, and we'd hop back in the car and zoom away – all in 30 seconds, tops. Before the denizens of those dingy dives even knew we were there.
A cool plan, but things didn't quite work out that way. Actually, not at all.
It began falling apart when I briefed Diana Lambdin Meyer, a travel writer based in KC, on what we were going to do. Lambdin Meyer, who helped put the meeting together for the Central States Chapter of the Society of American Travel Writers, asked, “Why would you want to do all that?”
She said she'd set up a bus for writers who wanted to take pictures at 12th and Vine. A busload of writers? We've never be seen again! “Don't worry about it,” said Lambdin Meyer.
And sure enough, there was nary a lowlife in sight when we got there. Just other tourists.
Some years ago, we found out, the city dads cleared a six-block area of dives and dumps and made it the KC Historic Jazz District – complete with a landmark on that much-sung-about corner. So now, instead of walking into a sort of Midwestern Gomorrah, visitors find 12th and Vine in the middle of a park covered with lovely green lawns dotted with daffodils.
And what happened to all the rest of those downtown honky tonks, brothels and gambling dens? They're now hip boutiques, upscale coffee shops and tony art galleries, sprinkled along blocks of sheet-glass-fronted office buildings.
Jazz and ribs
But not everything's gone from the days when “Boss Tom” Pendergast ruled the roost here during Prohibition (which he simply ignored). It's said there were 50 jazz clubs along 12th Street alone, and there's still plenty of them around the city. What's more, Miles, Duke, Cannonball, Monk, Dizzy, Trane, Red, Max, Philly, Billie and their friends live on at The American Jazz Museum a few blocks away from 12th and Vine.
Among top attractions of the district, the museum features a working jazz club called the Blue Room right on the premises. Nearby, visitors are greeted by a 17-foot-high bronze statue of jazz great Charlie “Yard Bird” Parker. It's so lifelike you can almost hear him blowing “Dark Eyes,” his favorite tune.
Besides a lingering feast of sound there's another feast still around from the good old days: barbecue diners, over a hundred of them, from rib joints to fancy restaurants.
Carolyn Wells, executive director of the Kansas City BBQ Society, said different parts of the country famous for their grilled delights – such as the Carolinas, Texas and Memphis – specialize in different types of barbecue. Some go for chicken, some ribs, some beef brisket. In other differences, some use dry rubs, others baste on sauces, others use both.
Around KC, which claims to top the list when it comes to barbecue honors, there's no question about finding your favorite dishes. This city, Wells explained, is “the melting pot of barbecue...if it moves, we'll cook it.”
Among popular BBQ spots in KC are Jack Stack, Arthur Bryant's Barbeque, Oklahoma Joe's and Gates & Sons. At the latter, George Gates II told us his grandfather, then a porter with the Rock Island Railroad, founded the restaurant in 1946. Originally called Dixieland BBQ, the enterprise is now a chain of six Gates locations in the area – collectively going through millions of pounds of beef and pork a year.
Beyond a goldmine of stories in KC, we hit journalistic paydirt in some nearby towns, too. Out in “Jesse James country,” for instance, we found nuggets such as the farmhouse where the Confederate-guerrilla-turned-outlaw and his family lived (and were once bombed by Pinkerton detectives) and the bank his gang robbed (the first daytime bank heist in the U.S.) in nearby Liberty.
Guides said sights like these are particularly enjoyed by foreign visitors, who rate them up there with the Disney parks on their must-see lists.
Closer to KC is an immense, 750,000-sq.-ft. outdoor shopping mall edged by a NASCAR speedway. It's called the Legends of Village West, and it's packed with about every kind of mall-type shop and restaurant you can think of. Maybe even some not so familiar, like Landry's T-Rex Restaurant with its prehistoric dinosaur theme accented by high-tech light and sound shows.
I tried to imagine Thomas Joseph “Boss Tom” Pendergast munching on a “Dino Burger” amid erupting volcanoes and the roars and groans of ancient mega-critters prancing around the room. I didn't have much luck.
Staying there: Hotels.com/Expedia lists 26 top-rated hotels in the area including our meeting's host property, the twin-tower Marriott Kansas City Downtown (www.marriotthotels.com/mcidt).
More info: Visit the Kansas City Convention & Visitors Association at www.visitkc.com
