The Last Resort

Wake-up time at the Midwest Hotel is announced not by a buzzing alarm clock -- rooms at the hotel, long considered one of the biggest dumps in downtown Kansas City, do not have alarm clocks -- but by the sounds of the two-woman cleaning crew, whose shouting voices bounce off the concrete walls every morning between 8 and 9.

A solid three hours before checkout time, the women begin loudly turning over rooms, raising their voices to keep in touch with each other as though they were shouting from opposite ends of a sewer, their loud conversations seemingly conducted for no other reason than to converse loudly. If you'd prefer to snooze beyond 9 a.m. at the Midwest, you'd better be a heavy sleeper, comatose or dead.

I wake up to this phenomenon the second day of my stay, then again every day after. Not a morning passes that I don't half-expect one of my neighbors to leap into the hallway and explode with sleep-deprived, crazy-eyed rage at the ruckus in the hallway. It never happens. Instead, the occasional guest wanders out of his or her room with the meekest of requests, such as the middle-aged woman down the hall who asks one morning to borrow the hotel's Hoover on account of her boyfriend's demand that she be the one to clean their room. "I don't care," she explains, "but he wants me to vacuum."

The same woman returns to the hallway a few minutes later to ask the cleaning duo where she might purchase some underwear. Apparently, someone has suggested Dollar General, but she's hoping for something closer to a Kmart. The women direct her to catch the bus to Bannister Mall. She seems satisfied by this, and for the next half-hour, the cleaning women go back to screaming back and forth as television sets snap to life room by room. On all five floors, meanwhile, guests light up cigarettes, contributing to an odor more than eighty years in the making, a musty smoke with hints of human fluid. It registers especially pungent in the stairwell, which, it so happens, provides the Midwest's best view: A southward framing of the Main Street viaduct crossing over to Crown Center and Union Station through one window, and a southeastern glimpse of the Western Auto building and the Hyatt Regency from another.

The view from the outside looking in isn't so attractive. For years, police and prosecutors have considered the Midwest a drain on their resources, one of the more notorious drug and prostitution spots in Kansas City and a blight to downtown. Citizens routinely call the police to report drug deals both inside and outside the Midwest. Cops have conducted dozens of undercover investigations, many of them yielding easy purchases and even easier arrests. In the past six years, nineteen people (six of them hotel employees) have been arrested for selling drugs -- mostly crack -- inside the Midwest.

Prosecutors say they reached a breaking point earlier this year. When the Midwest once again resurfaced as one of the hottest spots of illicit activity in the city, they began compiling police reports, anything that had to do with narcotics in particular at the hotel at 19th Street and Main over the past decade. They discovered 26 instances in which citizens called to complain about drugs at the hotel. More to the point, they learned of 21 undercover operations leading police to successfully apprehend drug dealers at the hotel, only to see those dealers replaced by new ones.

"You have to understand, we're pulling police reports from many different agencies, from drug enforcement, street narcotics, Jackson County Drug Task Force," says Jackson County Assistant Prosecutor Kathryn Jermann. "So once all those reports came together and we looked at the scope of it and the number of employees involved, that's when we said, 'This is ridiculous.'"

Now the State of Missouri plans to hold the hotel's owner responsible. In the first case of its kind in Jackson County, prosecutors have slapped the Midwest with a "public nuisance" charge in order to seize the hotel from its proprietor of the past 35 years -- without compensation -- and then resell the property on the steps of the county courthouse.

After more than eighty years in business, one of the oldest hotels in Kansas City suddenly faces the prospect of closure, its reputation as one of the most notorious spots in Kansas City threatened by a legal wrecking ball.

So I checked in.

In the hallway, one of the cleaning women screams an unintelligible question to her counterpart.

"What?!" the counterpart screams.

"Are we going to get A-LONG today?!"

The second woman responds with a cackle, and her laughing is answered by laughter from the first. Their mutual guffaws merge at the center of the hall and ride back and forth until everyone on the third floor knows that it's the time to rise.

In room 305, I slowly creep out of bed, aware of every barefoot step I take, and yank the chain that turns on my bathroom light. For the record, I am a spindly white guy with wide-set blue eyes and thick, curly hair that grows from my skull like foliage on a maple tree. When I speak, I tend to mumble and trail out; people don't always hear me, so I'm often forced to ... I'm often forced to repeat myself. In other words, I don't intimidate anyone. My checking into the Midwest isn't an attempt to seem bad-ass. I am not bad-ass.