Kansas City: The View from the Middle (NPR)

NPR's Day to Day profiles life in Kansas City: Kansas City: The View from the Middle. Though the piece carries a subtle tone of condescension, it offers a nice profile of a great city that we are growing to love with increasing intensity.

The term "middle" conjures up a host of pejoratives: middling, middle-brow and middle-of-the road.

But settle down in what folks on both coasts deride as "flyover country," and you discover something different: a political environment that celebrates consensus as much as conflict, a space where culture and business are comfortably intertwined, and a place where history and modernity don't just live, but thrive.

[...]

Kansas City is the embodiment of the middle. It's near the geographic center of the continental United States. It's the dividing line between a traditionally "blue" state (Missouri) and a traditionally "red" one (Kansas). And it's a sprawling — but human-scale — metropolis, with a reviving downtown and so many construction cranes that locals joke "the crane is the new state bird."

The first thing you notice as an outsider is the architecture. The way glassy modernist sculptures like the still-under-construction Sprint Center arena nestles amidst stately, century-old apartment buildings. Or how the city's colonnaded grande dame, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, has sprouted a funky new wing that glows softly at night.

You can read more, and listen to the show here. To read more about our efforts to plant a new church in Kansas City, check Reach Kansas City

Comments

[brad andrews]

Great to talk with you yesterday brother. Excited about what God has in store for our friendship and for the city of KC. Stay in touch...

[brad andr]

btw, your recently played list on the left is scary. love spoon - going to see them in columbia, mo oct. 2- aqualung, andrew bird, arcade fire, blonde redhead. in the future, we could just hang out and listen to music for all i care, savoring the 'common grace' of music