Quindaro the Pearl of Kansas City, Kansas...or not

I have been working in KCK for the past week. I have mentioned before that my "Job" consists of driving up and down every street in a designated area, tracking wireless signal strength. Included in the every street description are cemeteries, parking lots, alleys, anywhere a car will go, so go I. So my area this week included Quindaro, State, and Minnesota, from 5th to 38th. Trust me when I say that the area surrounding Quindaro makes 39th and Prospect look like Mission Hills.

On more than a few streets there were more houses boarded up or burned down than occupied homes. It is a bleak , filthy mostly forgotten part of our city, save for the crime related news stories. There were streets that reminded me of pictures of Chernobyl after the meltdown, or war photos from some foreign country. I intended to take a camera with me, but I kept forgetting, although I may go back just to take a few shots of some of the things I saw.
I drove through one of the cemeteries that dated back to the early 1800's. I am neither religious or particularly sentimental, but what I saw as I drove through this solemn ground both saddened and angered me. Many of the tombstones were so old that they were indecipherable, whatever words once etched into the stone were worn away with time. Surrounding some of these markers was an array of discarded tires, trash, bottles and brush. Stones were knocked over, reduced to shards, insuring that whoever was laid in that plot was lost as well. Even the resting place of the dead isn’t safe around there.

As I wound through the neighborhood streets I came across several makeshift memorials. You know, the kind you usually see at the site of a fatal car crash. Usually a cross, some balloons, stuffed animals, placed by some relative to mark the spot of the tragedy. The difference here was that these weren’t crash sites, they were on residential streets, one was across from an elementary school. I have no way of knowing who these memorials were for, but its a safe bet that many of the victims were young. It is also a safe bet that they were mixed up in guns, drugs, gangs and violence. A lot of people might say that they got what they deserved or they put themselves in the position that led to their deaths. Maybe there is some truth to that, but dying on a street corner before you are old enough to buy a beer or to drive, regardless of the circumstances, is a hard thing to make sense of.

Even more striking than the tragedy and oppressive air that hangs over these slums, are the little islands of hope I came upon. I would be driving down a street lined with boarded up derelict houses and abandoned cars, then out of nowhere there would be a blast of color. I suppose you could chalk it up to bad taste, or color blindness, but there were houses in the middle of all of this mess, painted in the brightest loudest colors I’ve seen. A bright pink house, a lime green bungalow, a blue one with bright orange trim and a purple door. Sure the colors were gaudy and a little tacky, but amidst all of the shit that surrounds them they sparkle like jewels.

Anywhere else I would write it off to really bad taste, but not there.

I imagine that these small brightly colored homes are the residents way of fighting back. Giving a bright pink and blue trimmed finger to all of the day to day garbage and despair that must come with living there.