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Then and Now

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Downtown Kansas City circa 2014

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Downtown Kansas City circa 1975

As any oncologist will tell you, not all growth is good. Sometimes, what a community might consider “progress” will turn out to be, years later, a collective “What Were We Thinking?” Moment. Case in point: The Truman Sports Complex. Thanks to several hundred million dollars’ worth of recent upgrades, Kansas City has some truly outstanding facilities for professional baseball and football there. But what might have been had the baseball stadium, in particular, been built Downtown 40 years ago? Could we have in place the kind of Downtown asset today that is helping maintain the vibrancy of a Denver or a Baltimore?
The flip side of that, of course, involves the calls that we got right. And, fortunately, we get many more of right calls than the wrong ones. In so many ways, Kansas City has forged ahead, drawing on the famed Kansas City Spirit immortalized by artist Norman Rockwell. We are, indeed, a sleeves-rolled-up community, and when we’ve needed to, we managed to overcome obstacles and get things done. No slice of the metropolitan area reflects that more than Kansas City’s Downtown, which has undergone an astonishing renaissance over the past 12 years.
Today, Downtown stands in stark contrast to the declining urban core it was when Ingram’s launched as Outlook magazine four decades ago, with a particular focus on boosting efforts to improve Kansas City’s greater Downtown.
Remember when Municipal Auditorium was the place for big-time Downtown events? While it still has a role to play, it’s been overshadowed by the development of the Kansas City Convention Center, the Sprint Center and the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. Rows of abandoned buildings or collections of seedy establishments gave way to the Power & Light District. H&R Block showed that a national company can create an iconic home, do right by itself and still be a good corporate citizen.
The following pages will allow you to skip past the incremental progress and see the truly big picture of Downtown Kansas City’s evolution over the past four decades. That steady, powerful progress may have been incremental in nature, but in toto, it has produced a remarkable change—one that should stand as a source of pride for all who call Kansas City home.