Anywhere But Here

The fate of Kansas City's most precious real estate lies in the hands of a polka band. Fortunately, it's not just any polka band. Brave Combo takes the old oom-pa-pa and mixes it with everything from sexy salsa to über-cool Japanese pop, a postmodern melange that sounds great when a listener is bubbly with beer.

And this Friday, when Brave Combo is scheduled to jump onto a temporary stage in a little-known park on the banks of the Missouri River, there'll be plenty of beer to slosh. The band is the marquee attraction of Kansas City's first "Oktoberfest on the Wasserfront," a three-day festival packed with bouncy music, jugglers, stilt walkers, organ grinders, fire-eaters, mimes, wieners and sauerkraut, along with gallons of balmy suds.

But don't be fooled by all the fun. This Oktoberfest is serious business. The polkateers' mission: help bring back Kansas City's long-neglected riverfront.

The city agency in charge of economic development along the river hopes that this weekend's partiers, between belches, will look around and notice where they are. This is, after all, the place where the earliest Kansas Citians unpacked their canoes, hung their shingles and multiplied across the bluffs and gullies to the south.

Pro-business-bureaucrats-turned-beer-bash-promoters hope the revelers will also appreciate the sweeping view of the mighty river, the gritty iron bridges and the downtown skyscrapers gleaming in the evening light. It's a view that makes Kansas City look like cooler towns that have developed their waterfronts. Nashville, Tennessee, for example. Or Davenport, Iowa.

"You gotta have a place that says, 'This is Kansas City. Yeah. This is it,'" says Leonard Graham, president of one of the engineering firms that helped build the usually deserted park where Brave Combo is set to play.

In years past, this land has been a dump for towed cars. Now, thanks to legalized gambling, it's home to a bucolic spread of trees and grass. But on most days, this slice of civic investment is as lifeless as the vacant lots surrounding the city's sewage plants.

What other city in North America could own more than 50 acres of prime riverfront property but wind up with an empty park?

The Idea

The park's evolution began fifteen years ago as a vision. Since then, that vision has been commandeered by the city's Economic Development Corporation, a big-business-promotion agency that is partly funded by -- and bows to the prevailing political whims of -- City Hall. Not one but two world-class urban-design firms have helped shape that vision, and legalized gambling was supposed to help pay for it. Still, the city hasn't been able to make it happen.

In 1987, a class of architecture students from the University of Kansas invited some of Kansas City's power players to join them for punch and cookies and gaze upon a nifty mock-up of downtown they'd spent all semester creating.

On the southern edge of their miniature Missouri River, the students had erected the tour de force of imaginings: Spirit Park, a broad swath of grass and trees stretching west from the Paseo Bridge to the Heart of America Bridge.

The pretend park was flanked by a dazzling aquarium and a "horticultural center." In the broad space between, they'd sprinkled fake trees and splotches of blue paint to represent cozy groves and pristine ponds. At its center, along the water's edge, rose a stage overlooking a grassy amphitheater big enough to host an event as grand as the Boston Pops' annual Fourth of July concert. Along the park's southern edge were condos, office buildings, restaurants and shops filled with people.

The students envisioned Spirit Park as a public space for all Kansas Citians, a place to host the Spirit Festival and a slew of other events throughout the year.

Richard Berkley, Kansas City's mayor at the time, was impressed. He invited the students' teacher, an architect named Glen LeRoy, to join the board of the Port Authority, a public body whose board of directors is appointed by the mayor. The Economic Development Corporation provides workers to help the Port Authority board oversee development along the city's riverfront.

LeRoy gladly obliged. "I've been something of a river rat for twenty years," he says now. "We exist in Kansas City because of the river. So how can we turn our back on it?"

Showing up for Port Authority meetings, LeRoy found himself allied with two men who had strong political connections -- among them George Blackwood, who would later become a councilman and mayor pro tem.

Few Kansas Citians had ever heard of the Port Authority. It had no substantial budget. Blackwood often joked about this, saying that as Port Authority chairman, he should have a boat, by God. So his colleagues gave him one -- a plastic bobber barely big enough to sail in a bathtub. One night they passed a stodgy resolution officially naming the toy "George Blackwood's Folly."

But soon after LeRoy joined the Port Authority, he and his cohorts got serious about the waterfront.

Since 1946, they learned, Kansas City leaders had considered more than forty plans for resuscitating the barren waterfront. Most notable was a 1950s push to locate a football stadium on the land between the bridges. It would have had a retractable roof.