Kansas City
Saint Louis
Chicago
I gallivanted somewhat in August, visiting St. Louis and Chicago, and as always, snapping prodigious amounts of photos in the interim in Kansas City. Check out the entire set from the urban midwestern United States
Today, I wafted about the western portion of Kansas City, Missouri’s downtown loop, giddy and elated at the proposition of indulging in my guiltiest pleasure—high dynamic range photography, or HDR. Actually, what I’ve done is more properly known as tone mapping. To put it simply, these tone-mapped photos have been digitally manipulated to reveal as much detail as possible. The effect is somewhat surreal.
In this place photographed dwells the main Kansas City Public Library, converted lofts and condos, office uses, and the occasional fine (and sometimes not so fine) restaurants.
The Garment District, in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, is a geographically small part of downtown, but nonetheless exudes an enjoyable glimpse into the city’s architectural history. In this area, formerly used for clothing manufacturing, one now finds a Folger’s Coffee plant, among other industrial uses, plus lofts, offices, bars, restaurants, and a jazz club.
Check out the entire set.
Click here to view the whole set of snowy photos from Kansas City.
The antithesis of the Jane Jacobs-esque ideal of small, incremental, organic urban economic and development growth — the planned, micromanaged mega projects — now seem to be required in order to stimulate urban development. “Cities are once again planning with grandiosity,” declared the New York Times Magazine this week. “This year witnessed the return of what you might call big urbanism, with large-scale redevelopment projects sprouting nationwide.”
Tax incentives such as abatements and Tax Increment Financing are doled out left and right to stimulate development and economic growth, with much less emphasis now placed on the once requisite small business entrepreneur, who combined with his or her peers served to build the city. For an example, downtown Kansas City now has two large, managed construction projects approved. One covers nine city blocks, and the other, twelve blocks. These two developments serve as a wholesale replacement of the decay, neglect, and blight that has festered for decades in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. It seems that now, to get anything done and make any progress, a city has to give away its future tax revenue and budget in order to stimulate the “urbanity-in-a-can” mega developments.
I suppose the thinking among city leaders is of the old adage, “public investment begets private investment,” but I still have to wonder if the vaunted small incremental organic growth lauded by Jane Jacobs has become an archaic anachronism in this time of tax incentives and master planned, huge development projects spanning many city blocks all at the same time. Perhaps it is fateful recompense for a city that allowed itself to be nearly destroyed by the automobile.
Kansas City is amid its first major winterish weather event. The ice came first, then came the snow. I was planning on riding my bike to work this morning, but found that my bike lock was frozen, and was thus unable to unlatch my bike from the porch post on the back of my building. So I went around front and began scraping off my car to make the 1.6 mile trek to work. Upon arriving, one of my coworkers suggested that urinating on the bike lock would unfreeze it. Then, a more dignified approach to the dilemma struck me - I could simply pour a pot of hot water on the bike lock.
I find it odd though that everyone around me thinks it strange that I would consider biking in this weather. I would rather get in a bicycle accident than wreck my car.
Every Thanksgiving night, the Country Club Plaza district in Kansas City, Missouri sets aglow amid thousands of revelers. The older, faux-Spanish low-rise edifices are adorned with miles upon miles of Christmas lights.
The first iterations of what is now known largely as “The Plaza” were built in the 1920s in the formerly swampish southern nether-reaches of the city. The area today serves primarily as an upscale shopping and restaurant district, as well as a home for both condominium owners and apartment renters. Offices are now prevalent as well.
In Kansas City, Missouri hath dwelt a project that portends a riotous, semi-calamitous melieu of consternation for the benefactors, the commoners, and even the neer-do-wells. Here is the Nelson Atkins Museum of Fine Art in its known form:
Then, one day, the powers that be decided there simply wasn’t enough room for all of the art on hand, and thence architect of prominence Steven Holl was commissioned to design an expansion. You’ll either love it or hate it. Tool sheds and Butler Buildings… or revolutionary architecture.
Here I was gadding through the Westport Art Fair in Kansas City in mid-September. KC’s frequent art fairs and gallery crawls make it easy to get streetlife photos with relative regularity.
In September we had both the Westport Art Fair and the Plaza Art Fair, with the Plaza fair drawing national artists, and the Westport one retaining a more localized draw.
Here, the smoke from the meat grilling blends in well with the gray sky. I wouldn’t consume that cooking meat though, as I don’t care for foods that also look like phalluses.
Both sunrise and dusk photos are among my favorite kinds of urban photography methods, as I find they help convey the more inscrutable, inconspicuous facets of urban form and design that a city exudes, normally unseen in the usual daytime pictures.
Ubiquitous throughout midtown Kansas City, Missouri, are the endearing Colonnade style apartment buildings that comprise a great deal of the residential architecture in the city. They are most frequently found ranging from two to three stories, plus basements.
Montreal Apartments