This week's Crown Center feature contains excerpts from a Calvin Trillin piece printed in The New Yorker in 1974. Trillin, a Kansas City native, took a skeptical view of what passed for progress in these parts in the early 1970s. He considered Crown Center to be symptomatic of a disease he called "dome-ism," the worshipful belief cities held in massive projects, such as Houston's Astrodome and the 73-story Plaza Hotel in Atlanta.
Trillin was not the only visitor to take a dim view of Crown Center. Looking through old Kansas City Star articles, I came across the words of a critic who entered Crown Center and felt "as though I had wandered into someone else's very large, private (and corporate) courtyard when they weren't at home."
The observer was Allan B. Jacobs, the former director of city planning in San Francisco. Jacobs went on to write a couple of books and teach at the University of California at Berkeley. His criticism of Crown Center appeared in Urban Design International in 1980. Donald Hoffman, the Star's art and architecture writer, relayed choice quotes from Jacobs' original.
Jacobs found Crown Center to be confusing. It didn't help that he arrived on a Sunday, and the doors to Crown Center Shops were closed. Finally, he found Crown Center Square. "The spaces are immaculate, in this way not unlike those vacant lots near Downtown. ... Everything is well-placed. ... In short, the space is formal, clean, predictable."
The article was titled "They're Locking the Doors to Downtown." To Jacobs, Crown Center seemed like a bubble. "It was as if the whole complex had been lifted and kept separate from the city as a whole," he wrote.
Crown Center represented a massive reorganization of the urban fabric in Kansas City. The development cleaned up a grubby section of town. But Jacobs worried about the cost of the public realm falling into private hands. Marginal characters and marches for causes were not allowed on Crown Center's carpeted streets, Jacobs surmised.
"The new Downtown is controllable," he wrote. "The new Downtown is under single ownership."
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