Urban Blight Tour 08.......Midtown.

Mention Midtown Kansas City and it will automatically evoke a response, a perception, an opinion. Say what you will it is the most diverse area in the city. It is also one of the most blight ridden areas around. Unlike KCK or neighborhoods east of Paseo, midtown doesn't have a high number of vacant and dilapidated homes. What we do have is an overabundance of, empty , condemned, and dangerous apartment buildings. Commercial buildings that have long been passed over by commerce. Click on the small pictures to enlarge.

Midtown also has more than its fair share of registered sex offenders. Thirty one baby rapers and tree jumpers in an area that encompasses a couple of square miles. For some reason we also have an overabundance of crazy people. Take the intersection of 39th and Main for example, at any given time you are likely to see some crazy modern day John the Baptist railing from his pulpit, even if his pulpit is a trash can next to the bus stop shelter. There is an old woman I see around the area often, hair dyed a bright orange red, lipstick smeared from under her nose to her chin. There is the Plasma center on Broadway, one of my readers once commented that they felt like they were in a video game every time they drove that stretch of Broadway. Wack jobs, crack heads and morons, darting out in to traffic, walking slower as your car approaches, as if they are daring you to hit them.

The churches cover their stained glass windows with Plexiglas, yellow from time, the color and beauty of the artisan glass obscured from the outside. Life is cheap in certain parts of Midtown. This particular building , one of my pet peeves , a den of scumbags and vipers, the building should be torn down, all evidence of its existence erased. The bright and oddly placed fiberglass umbrellas mark the building like beacons. Mothers leave their toddlers alone here while she goes to sling dope or sell her ass, she leaves her kids to fend for themselves. They find her stash and end up in the hospital from ingesting crack cocaine. When dusk approaches you will always find 3 or 4 raggedy popcorn pimps and small time drug dealers in front of this cesspool. You can see street walkers who long ago lost any semblance of attractiveness. They come and go, about the business of spreading god knows what disease or virus, neglecting their children, chasing the glass pipe. What you rarely , if ever see in front of this building, is the police. This place is 3 blocks from the police station on Linwood, I have yet to see a cop car posted out front of this shit hole, to discourage the scumbags who use it as a base of operations.

These two buildings directly across from the police station where Federal Halfway houses. When I got out of the joint, I spent 6 months here. the feds eventually shut the place down, not sure why. And this building, one of, if not the first Russell Stovers candy stores in the city. It has been everything from a tobacco shop to a bonding agency. Now it sits waiting for some new tenant, some new business, that will almost surely fail, just like most new businesses from Troost, east.

There are still traces of what once was a thriving commercial and retail area. Much of Midtown is booming, 39th street west of the Trafficway is thriving, the neighborhoods clean and over priced. The farther east you travel, the more blighted and stagnate the area becomes. Even the old historic signs, like ghosts of better days, are being slowly erased. My family and friends wonder why I stay, why anyone capable of getting out would stay. There are moments I wonder about that myself. The truth is, I cant imagine living anywhere else in the city. Dirty, dangerous, rundown, Midtown is all of those things, but it's home.