Plaza Walking Tour

Historic Kansas City publishes a walking guide to the Country Club Plaza, built around seven ways of looking at the district and fifty things worth stopping for. Jonathan O’Neil Cole wrote the essay on community, titled A Place to Gather.

His argument is that the Plaza’s community is not a group of people but a sense of place. He quotes a close associate who put it better than a planner would: everyone in Kansas City owns the Plaza, and nobody really owns the Plaza. It is a revolving door, the place you go before you have children and the place you go at the other end of life.

The essay does not tidy the district up. It names the long running arguments over public safety, panhandling and large summer gatherings of young people, and says those arguments are exactly where the definition of community gets tested. Then it makes the case for what the place does anyway: joggers through the green spaces, a wedding party at the Nichols Fountain, the Art Fair each September, the lighting ceremony, protest rallies nearby, all in the same few blocks.

The conclusion is the one that carries straight into Pendulum’s own work. Districts built elsewhere to imitate this feeling usually fall short and read as fabricated. What holds the Plaza together is authenticity: a preserved original vision with modernism placed deliberately, not applied as a theme.

Source: “A Place to Gather” by Jonathan O’Neil Cole, in the Country Club Plaza Walking Guide, Historic Kansas City, pages 14 and 15.

The framework Pendulum uses to judge a venue as a long term civic and financial system is set out in S.C.O.R.E.