People & Places >>

• Best Place to Meet the Opposite Sex
  First Fridays
  Nothing has upped Kansas City's hip quotient quite as much as First Fridays, the monthly event that funnels thousands of people into the city's gallery district downtown. And it's not just local art that visitors can appreciate. After all, thousands of men and women roam the Crossroads, going... More >>
• Best Crushworthy Local Celebrity (Female)
  Emily Aylward, KMBC Channel 9
  It's late on election night. Some former military man named "Taff" just won his Johnson County political heat. Now hundreds of Kansas City males who usually would be ogling Brooke Burke, sexy host of Wild On, are instead eyeballing Emily Aylward, Channel 9 news kitten. She looks a bit tired from... More >>
• Best Crushworthy Local Celebrity (Male)
  Rex Hobart
  Rex Hobart's sexiest attribute is his voice. Smooth and subtle in range and tone, it can go from a velvety twang to keening regret while singing about love and loss. His onstage presence is just as charismatic; when he's in Western gear, with his slicked-back dark hair and blue eyes, it's Sexy... More >>
• Best Eyes
  Lara Moritz, KMBC Channel 9
  Even if we were to don scuba gear and plunge into the clearest Caribbean surf, we'd never find a blue as bright as the blue in Lara Moritz's eyes. Perhaps it's the physics of the cathode ray that makes her glassine peepers glow the way they do. Perhaps it's a divine glitch from way back in her... More >>
• Best Voice
  Cynthia Newsome, KSHB Channel 41
  If we've got to hear bad news, we'd prefer to hear it from Cynthia Newsome. She has the ideal broadcast voice. It's smooth and soothing yet serious and assertive. This is news, after all. Newsome seems to know we don't need our information all hyped up with the contrived, urgent tone consultants... More >>
• Best Local Ego
  Steve Rose -- Columnist, Sun Newspapers
  After he sold his family's chain of suburban newspapers to a Texas-based company, Steve Rose insisted that his twice-weekly column remain on the front page -- where his late father always had his own Memo column -- as part of the deal. When one of the succeeding publishers tried to move the... More >>
• TV Weatherman We'd Most Like To Get Caught in a Monsoon With
  Don Harmon, WDAF Channel 4
  More engaging -- and better looking -- than most of his fellow TV weather wonks, Channel 4's broad-shouldered, dimpled Don Harmon shares his offscreen life with girlfriend Monica and their golden retriever, Madison. But unlike Channel 41's Gary Lezak, who trots his canines out for every photo... More >>
• Best Monkey Spanker
  Scott Lynn of Virtumundo
  Scott Lynn started designing Web pages when he was a lad of sixteen at Shawnee Mission Northwest High School. Genius struck only a couple of years later when he came up with Punch the Monkey, an incredibly successful Internet ad with an oscillating monkey, linking to Lynn's Web page at... More >>
• Best Nuns
  Sisters of Loretto
  Back in 1901, the Sisters of Loretto founded the Loretto Academy, a school that encouraged its students to think critically and take social responsibility. Today, only about ten members remain in Kansas City, along with ten co-members, who are not nuns but share a passion for education and... More >>
• Best Little Guy
  Jennifer Larson
  Park Lane apartment dweller Jennifer Larson didn't know anything about the concept of tax-increment financing before last winter, when she learned that the Blackwell Sanders Peper Martin law firm wanted to use TIF to bulldoze her building. Then Larson and her husband, Ed, educated themselves and... More >>
• Best Power Pissing Match
  Jonathan Kemper versus David Fenley
  David Fenley, chairman of the Blackwell Sanders Peper Martin law firm, angered a lot of people in the spring. That was when he announced his company's plan to abandon downtown and use tax dollars to tear down the Park Lane apartments and build new offices on the Plaza. Among those pissed off by... More >>
• Best Prank That Went Wrong
  Feist fake listings
  Abortion pranks? Funny. Phone-book foolery? Winner. Combine the two? Instant classic. Yet when a Feist Publications employee sprinkled fake listings throughout her company's yellow pages this year, an uproar ensued. Turns out one of the families facetiously listed under "Abortion Provider" heard... More >>
• Best Sign Alterations
  Walgreens
  We salute the architects who designed the Walgreens at 39th and Broadway for putting the sign that advertises sale items at ground level -- a bold move considering that it's in a neighborhood teeming with bars and impish drunken wordsmiths who cleverly rearrange the letters and make our inner... More >>
• Best Use of Anti-Goth funds
  Joe Mick, Youth Outreach Unit in Blue Springs
  Judge not lest ye be judged, right? Well, screw that. In Blue Springs, the quasi-police squad known as the Youth Outreach Unit convinced the U.S. Congress to shell out $240,000 so city officials could wipe the Goth off their kids' psyches. But even that wasn't Christian enough for Y.O.U.... More >>
• Best Defense of the Right to Bare Arms (and Asses)
  Gaea Retreat Center's victory over its nosy neighbors
  We cheered last April when the folks who run the Gaea Retreat Center north of Tonganoxie finally prevailed over busybody neighbors who had instigated an all-out witch hunt against them. The 168-acre retreat had been a nudist center for forty years, then a Baptist Bible camp. In 1992, it became a... More >>
• Best Voice of Reason Regarding Anthrax
  Domenic Serrone -- Deputy Chief of Special Operations, Kansas City Fire Department
  Last fall, as anthrax fears consumed the nation, a few Kansas Citians started acting really, really stupid. People called the city's haz-mat team to investigate suspicious powders on the floor at home-improvement stores (sawdust), in their own garages (a kid had been playing with flour) or on an... More >>
• Best Four-Legged Columnist
  Bunny the News Hound, Northeast News
  Her column might not offer the most biting news about what's going on in her neighborhood, but Bunny the News Hound is as reliable as a best friend. Each week, she fetches little treats of information from her backyard, the historic northeast area of Kansas City. Her column in the Northeast News... More >>
• Best Radio Stunt
  The Morning Buzz with Kenny and Afentra, KRBZ 96.5
  No, we're not honoring 96.5 for its April Fool's Day joke, when listeners woke up to find that the station had somehow become KGAY and was playing only disco songs by the likes of Donna Summer and the Village People. That stunt grabbed headlines, but another one regularly has us in tears. In... More >>
• Best TV News Quip
  Katie Horner, KCTV Channel 5
  A couple of weeks before Christmas, Kansas City was still basking in unbelievably warm weather -- the kind of unusual atmosphere that puts everyone in a weird mood. Retailers were praying for cold days to remind everyone to do their shopping. Kids were asking Santa for snow. Finally, in... More >>
• Best Local News Feature
  KCTV Channel 5 storm photos
  There's nothing like storm season to make television stations hang themselves on ropes threaded with embellishments. Come spring, the slightest mention of a tornado sends news directors scrambling for the best severe-weather reporting. Well, call off the contest, because Channel 5 has a gimmick... More >>
• Best Reason to Read the Tuesday Star
  "Looking Back" in the business section
  On Tuesdays, The Kansas City Star prints its financial section in a tabloid format with a feature story on the cover. But the most interesting item is always a little blurb on page three, where the paper recaps what was in the business section that week ten years ago. It's a fascinating look at... More >>
• Best Star Humbug
  Columnist Steve Penn
  Steve Penn's deadpan take on dated subjects and insignificant issues is hilarious, even though he's serious. In the past year, Penn has bemoaned the "new" hip-hop trend of sagging pants; labeled trees the city's "number one priority"; devoted a column to why black men need to eat their "veggies... More >>
• Best Kansas City Star Impression of The Onion
  "Corn dogs still a favorite for fairgoers," August 12
  Monday may be the week's slowest news day, but that doesn't mean The Kansas City Star should have buried a space-filling feature on the popularity of wieners. The August 12 story, on the back pages of the metro section, was headlined "Corn dogs still a favorite for fairgoers." One passage, which... More >>
• Best Correction
  New York Times, May 9, 2002
  This from The New York Times corrections page, May 9, 2002: "A front-page article on Sunday about a disagreement over altering the flow of the Missouri River referred incorrectly in some copies to an interview in the office of Senator Christopher S. Bond, Republican of Missouri, who opposes... More >>
• Best Debaters
  Shawnee Mission East
  This year, two debate teams from Shawnee Mission East High School did something no other Kansas debate team had ever done: They finished first and second in the state championship. Led by coach Paulette Manville, debaters Brian Nye and Scott Stinson nabbed the top trophy; Andrew Ardinger and... More >>
• Best Petition
  Recycled Sounds
  When the city of Blue Springs won a quarter-million-dollar grant from the federal government to "study" the Goth culture corrupting its children, Recycled Sounds owner Anne Winter reacted with the same revulsion felt by so many others who remember their own dark adolescent days. "We were all... More >>
• Best Economics Lecture
  Michael Moore, March 25
  Michael Moore was promoting his latest book, Stupid White Men ... and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation, when he stopped by the University of Missouri-Kansas City on March 25. Brought to town by economics professor Stephanie Bell, Moore delivered a left-wing charge to 700 starved... More >>
• Best Way to Really Love Your Country
  Out-of-town utility crews
  In January, when a historic ice storm cracked the entire city and 300,000 people lost power for as long as nine days, Kansas Citians got their own little version of the sort of nationwide outpouring we'd seen a few months earlier in New York City. Though our disaster was nothing like New York's,... More >>
• Best Place to Get Your Licks
  The Show Me Philatelic Center
  One of only a dozen or so such centers in the country, the Show Me Philatelic Center is a stamp-lover's dream. Tucked in a cozy corner of the post-office building across from Union Station, the center stocks every stamp the U.S. Postal Service sells as well as collectors' books, posters,... More >>
• Best Sign
  Tension Envelopes
  Tension Envelopes doesn't sell its products to the public, at least not directly. Instead, it sells customized envelopes in bulk to companies and organizations. So it's pretty fierce that the Kansas City-based company draws attention to its downtown office building with that giant red sign... More >>
• Best Bird Bath
  46th and Broadway
  Each weekend, thousands of people descend upon the Plaza to shell out big bucks for their favorite Banana Republic pants and Starbucks Frappuccinos and Pottery Barn place settings and Cheesecake Factory cheesecake. For half a century, the Plaza has been a symbol of high-end consumerism, a Kansas... More >>
• Best Downtown Revitalization Project
  The return of the American Hereford Association bull
  It's just a plain, simple fact: The presence of a giant fiberglass bull in the skyline made Kansas City the coolest city on the face of the planet. Anyone who thought otherwise had obviously slept through that college lesson on postmoodernism. The basic gist: Being uncool is cool as hell if you... More >>
• Best Garage
  The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
  Kansas City is crazy about parking garages. After a visit to the new one at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, we understand why. In most cities, parking garages are a necessary evil -- labyrinths of low-hanging concrete that are, at least, less ugly then endless acres of cracked asphalt parking... More >>
• Best Statue (1 Comment)
  Bernard Powell Memorial Fountain
  In 1979, when Bernard Powell was murdered at age 33, he'd already spent twenty years as a civil-rights activist, having joined the NAACP at 13. In March 1965 -- the year he graduated from Central High School -- young Powell joined Martin Luther King Jr.'s march to Selma, Alabama. In the late... More >>
• Best Watering Hole
  Carl J. DiCapo Fountain
  Located in Kessler Park on the picturesque Cliff Drive in Kansas City's north end, the Carl J. DiCapo Fountain used to be the site of a spring where local residents came for their water. In 1989, the city's Parks Department installed the fountain -- but what they really made was a lovely,... More >>
• Best New Watering Hole
  The Concourse Fountain
  The new fountain on the concourse at George E. Kessler Park isn't a technical marvel like the Henry Bloch Fountain that started shooting and spiraling water last year in front of Union Station. It's not a sculptural beauty like the Plaza's J.C. Nichols Memorial Fountain. But the Concourse... More >>
• Best Place to Be on the Fourth of July
  Penn Valley Park
  Politicians and bureaucrats can't stand the fact that we can buy big-time, hand-exploding firecrackers on both sides of the state line. Every year, they try to figure out a way to snuff our fiery patriotism. But we can always rest easy knowing that their worry-wart efforts are futile against... More >>
• Best Place to Meditate
  Rime Buddhist Center
  So you have no clue what a bodhisattva is. Ditto for sutra, paramita and dharma. (Isn't she that bohemian chick on TV who married an uptight corporate type on their first date?) That's OK. You don't have to be a Buddhist -- or even particularly enlightened -- to take advantage of the Rime... More >>
• Best Church (1 Comment)
  St. Therese Little Flower Church
  Tucked amid the sturdy bungalows of the Blue Hills neighborhood, the stone-sided St. Therese Little Flower Church looks impressive but hardly like a political powerhouse. Compared with Emanuel Cleaver's church, with its multimillion-dollar expansion hulking a few blocks away on the Paseo, St.... More >>
• Best Church-Sponsored Activity
  All Souls Unitarian Universalist Build Your Own Theology workshops
  The cool thing about All Souls' Build Your Own Theology workshops is that when you finish the ten weekly sessions, you have your very own credo. You can frame it, you can iron it onto a T-shirt or you can post it on your Web site. But the whole point of the workshops is figuring out what you... More >>
• Best Community Center
  North Kansas City Community Center
  Paid for with money that North Kansas City earns from its "riverboat" casino, the North Kansas City Community Center is a 96,000-square-foot hulk of recreational Shangri-la. People drive from as far away as St. Joseph to do laps in its pools, go Wheeeeee! down its serpentine slide or just float... More >>
• Best Way to Romanticize Kansas City for Out-of-Town Guests
  Self-guided Hemingway tour
  All great cities have an air of romance: think of Paris and the Eiffel Tower, Buenos Aires and the tango, Kansas City and ... cows. But Kansas Citians can hijack some of the allure of Spain, France and Africa by exploiting our town's cameo appearances in Ernest Hemingway's works. Papa was just... More >>
• Best Bureaucrat
  Andi Udris
  We're not sure whether to call Andi Udris a bureaucrat. He's head of a weird agency that's funded by public money but is independent of City Hall. As president and CEO of the Economic Development Corporation, Udris oversees the Tax Increment Financing Commission (it decides which developers get... More >>
• Best City Hall Department
  Capital Improvements
  It's no secret what everybody wants out of City Hall: a better city. A good city needs smooth roads, uncracked sidewalks, a sewer system that doesn't stink. And to do all that, a good city needs plenty of money and fiscal discipline. Unfortunately, Kansas City has neither. But it does have a... More >>
• Best Pickup Joint for Liberals
  Wednesday Night Peace and Justice Teach-ins
  Single people won't find any Ashcroft-loving, death-penalty supporting Republicans at the Wednesday Night Peace and Justice Teach-ins. No, this is the pickup joint for lonely- (bleeding-) heart lefties who wear alpaca hats and read The Nation. Standard come-ons won't work -- you can forget "Hey,... More >>
• Best Relic of Kansas City's Glory Days
  The Athenaeum
  In 1914, the 800 members of the twenty-year-old Athenaeum Club were busy bettering their community through arts, social work and charity. They needed a home. And though the stretch of Linwood Boulevard just west of Troost was still part of the suburbs, it was closer than one of their other... More >>
• Best City Employee
  Lifeguard Christal Camp
  Who says you can't fight City Hall? After eleven years working as a lifeguard for Kansas City's forlorn swimming pools, teaching thousands of kids to swim -- and spending all of this summer getting underpaid for it -- Christal Camp organized thirty of her fellow lifesavers. They walked out on... More >>
• Best Politician
  Charlie Wheeler
  Charlie Wheeler's campaign literature featured a silhouette of himself -- a slightly stooped senior citizen wearing his trademark cap, spectacles and bow tie. His slogan ("Integrity. Intelligence. Experience. Common sense for Missouri.") was straightforward and, well, commonsensical. With his... More >>
• Best Place to Dust Off Your High School Spanish
  Comedor Español
  Hablas español? The Comedor Español conversation group meets the first martes of the month at various Spanish, Latin American and Mexican restaurants in the metro. Just like in Señora Westheimer's class in the days of ayer, there are all levels of skill and dedication. Expect to be initiated... More >>
• Best Reason to be a Tourist Downtown
  Hotel Phillips
  Downtown might be dead in the eyes of most Kansas Citians, but the Hotel Phillips makes it worth visiting. This gorgeously remodeled art-deco hotel, with its plush beds and lovely, modern rooms decorated in elegant, neutral tones, is a great spot for a romantic getaway. It's within walking... More >>
• Best New Law
  Bike KC
  In August, an intrepid crew of wheeler-dealers finally convinced the Kansas City, Missouri, City Council -- among them bike antagonist Ed Ford, who could clearly use a little exercise -- to pass Bike KC. From now on, new or rebuilt streets in Kansas City are supposed to be bike-friendly. In the... More >>
• Best Kansas Citian
  Alvin Brooks
  The last year has been a tough one for Mayor Pro Tem Alvin Brooks. This past February, his nephew shot and killed his son-in-law. But in his grief and anger, Brooks didn't waiver in his convictions about crime and punishment. Instead of spouting the rhetoric of revenge that so often follows... More >>
• Best Place to Eavesdrop
  Starbucks at Barnes & Noble
  Maintenance order: Gas leak on second floor of Plaza Barnes & Noble renders coffee-shop patrons unable to determine when they're talking too loud. Received numerous reports of conversations about liberal politics (by old men wearing loafers but no socks), biological principles (by clusters of... More >>