Goin’ to Kansas City for museums and Big 12 football

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BY TOM UHLENBROCK / St. Louis Post-Dispatch

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Twin 20-ton limestone sphinxes on the plaza of the renovated Liberty Memorial use their wings to shield their eyes from the horrors of war. That horror was brought home poignantly by a tiny red offering left at the front of the massive memorial.

I walked up the grassy incline to inspect the speck of red and found a single rose standing in a plastic water bottle with a white tag attached. Written neatly on the tag was this message, left for a casualty of yet another war: “Gone from this earth, but not forgotten. My Si. Love, Dad.”

The Liberty Memorial was dedicated by President Calvin Coolidge in 1926 in honor of those who died in World War I. It was called the Great War, but the memories have dimmed over nearly a century. Who remembers which nations were on each side of the battle?

The memorial, which includes a 217-foot stone tower on a hill overlooking Union Station, was nearly forgotten and collapsing in on itself before Kansas Citians approved a half-cent sales tax to begin a major restoration in 1998. Six years later, they approved a bond issue to add a museum in the cavernous space below the plaza.

On Saturday, that museum will open as the first American and only national museum dedicated to World War I. With some 49,000 artifacts, its collection is second only to Britain’s Imperial War Museum. Most of those artifacts — posters, uniforms, weapons, artillery pieces and many vehicles that were taken from battlefields — have remained in storage over the years. Only about 5 percent ever have been on public view.

The opening of the museum celebrates the end of one of several major construction projects in Kansas City. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art will mark the highlight of a $200-million expansion with the opening of its new Bloch Building in June. The $800-million Power & Light District in nine square blocks of downtown and the $276-million Sprint Center and National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame are both scheduled for completion next fall.

Construction cranes, earthmovers and street closings are a sign of the booming times that will make KC even more attractive for residents and visitors. First on the agenda is the grand opening of the impressive National World War I Museum.

The designer of the $26 million project was Ralph Appelbaum, who also worked on the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tenn., and the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Ark.

A glass bridge across 9,000 red poppies takes you into the museum. When you walk back out, you’ll know why the poppies are there.

The bridge leads into a 60-seat theater where a 10-minute movie explains the march to war in Europe. “They had these colorful uniforms; many hadn’t changed since Napoleonic times,” said Craig Antonic, who showed me around the museum. “But industrialized warfare weighs in, and they basically mow each other down.”

Among the exhibits are uniformed mannequins fighting in a muddy trench that is 85 feet long. There’s also a battlefield littered with the detritus of war, and a 32-foot deep, walk-in shell crater. “It’s from a Paris gun, a gun that shot 7.5 miles,” Antonic said. “From the time of muzzle till the time it landed was three minutes. They had to calculate the spin of the Earth because the Earth moved by the time it landed.”

The exit from the museum crosses the bridge and the 9,000 poppies, one for each 1,000 casualties of the war. Why red poppies?

“After the war, on the Western Front, the vets were going back to the battlefield and not finding scorched earth, but these tremendous fields of poppies,” Antonic said. “They’re a very hardy plant, and the first to come back in this no man’s land. They’re a symbol of hope.”

Red poppies, and a single red rose, made powerful statements at this war memorial.

The Power & Light District at the edge of the downtown skyscrapers will include restaurants, shopping, entertainment venues and an outdoor pavilion called Kansas City Live. Among the residential and office space is the new $120 million world headquarters for H&R Block, which opened last summer. The project saved several of the architectural golden oldies in the district, and I was staying in one of them.

When the President Hotel opened in 1926 as one of downtown KC’s original grand hotels, it was the first in the city that could make its own ice, up to 8,000 pounds a day. The hotel was closed for 25 years, but reopened last January as the Hilton President following a $45 million restoration. Posters advertising its venerable Drum Room restaurant and lounge boast of some of the stars who appeared there, including Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.

For dinner, I headed to a spot popular with a slightly less mature audience.

The Legends at Village West is a $250 million development that grew on the prairies of Wyandotte County, Kan., into that state’s largest tourist draw. A 30-minute drive from downtown KC, the 400-acre development has more than 80 restaurants, and I was looking for one with a giant T-Rex skeleton gracing its exterior.

Steven Schussler founded the Rainforest Cafes, and sold the retail concept in 2000 to form Schussler Creative Inc. Schussler Creative has joined with Landry’s Restaurants on a new themed chain, T-Rex: A Prehistoric Family Adventure. The first T-Rex opened this summer at the Legends and has proved to be a monster hit, in more ways than one.

A roaring, animated, life-sized T-Rex stood over the hostess station, and the Shark Bar was covered by a gargantuan moving purple octopus. I asked the woman who led me to my table if this was a kids’ restaurant. “Slightly,” she replied. “But you’d be surprised how many adults come in and enjoy it. We had a business luncheon this afternoon.”

I was seated in the Geo-Tech room, which had a meteor shower on the video screen every 20 minutes. The tail ends of a prehistoric mother and her offspring were at my side. A sign identified the beast as a parasaurolophus, a duck-billed, crested lizard that stood 8-foot-tall at the hip and roared like a whale, which it did every couple of minutes. Animated ants the size of beagles crawled up the wall, and ladybugs that looked like red helmets with black polka dots flapped their wings. Other rooms had waterfalls, real fish swimming in aquariums and animated creatures that made all sorts of primordial noises — to the delight of the wide-eyed children in abundance. With all the commotion, some of the youngest ones had a stranglehold on the parental neck.

The dinner entrees included T-Rex ribeye ($27.99), Meteor meatloaf ($13.49) and Primitive pot pie ($12.99). My server said her favorite was the Mammoth mushroom raviolis ($12.99).

In relative terms, Kansas City’s Union Station is a veteran among the city’s renovation projects. The 1914 landmark reopened in 1999, thanks to $250 million raised through a bistate sales tax, the first of its kind in the nation. But with passenger rail traffic no longer bustling, the station hopes other attractions keep the paying public coming.

KC Rail Experience is a new permanent exhibit that uses vintage rail cars, historical artifacts and 20 talking “ghosts” to re-live the golden age of the passenger trains. An opening video explains that Kansas City grew as a major urban center because the railroads chose it, instead of adjacent rivertowns, for the first bridge built across the Missouri River in 1869.

The station’s finest hour was during World War II, when 95 percent of everything moving by rail in America, including soldiers, came through Union Station.

Among the talking ghosts is a jazz musician who says, “Man, ain’t no place like Union Station. A city has a rhythm, and this is the best place to hear it.” A nearby ghost conductor yells, “Katy Flyer for Kansas City Union Station — all aboard!”

Upstairs, near the station’s main entrance, is a new restaurant, the Harvey House Diner, which pays homage to the Harvey House restaurants that once operated in many train stations, including this one. The diner looks much the same as the original in the historic black-and-white photo on the wall.

The Burlington Northern burger had peppered bacon, big-eye Swiss and grilled onions, all for $4.49. The only disappointment was the waitresses weren’t wearing the crisp black-and-white uniforms of the “Harvey Girls” who brightened the first restaurants.

Kansas City already is known for its barbecue, jazz, fountains and world-class shopping. But it’s becoming a stronghold for museum hoppers, too. Two of my favorites are the Museums at 18th and Vine, which includes the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and the Arabia Steamboat Museum, which displays 200 tons of pre-Civil War artifacts recovered from a sunken steamboat.

But my last day was spent exploring two that are new to me.

The Shawnee Indian Mission was closed for three years but reopened on Sept. 13 after a $1.2 million project that restored three two-story brick buildings used as a manual training school to teach Native children trades, such as farming, blacksmithing and wagon making, from 1839 to 1862. The mission also served as an early territorial capitol, a supply point for pioneers heading west on the Sante Fe and Oregon trails, and a camp for Union soldiers during the Civil War. The mission is in Kansas, about a half mile from the Missouri line, and was a joint venture between the U.S. government and the Methodist church.

“It was on Shawnee land, and the vast majority were children whose parents sent them here to learn English and white man’s ways to be successful in life,” said Alisha Cole, site administrator. “One of the things they complained about was the hard-soled shoes. Think about the comfort of a moccasin compared to a leather shoe.”

The mission has exhibits that explain how the children, most of them from the families of tribal leaders, learned English, history and music, as well as trades like blacksmithing and carpentry.

“Kansas became a state, and more Europeans moved to the area,” Cole said. “They moved the Indians out — most went to Oklahoma. The mission closed in 1862.”

My last stop was the American Royal, which is in its 107th year of hosting livestock shows and rodeos. “Our rodeo on Oct. 26-28 is the final stop for the cowboys before the national finals in Las Vegas,” said spokesman Al Davis. “The professional cowboys who come here are the original extreme athlete. Strap yourself onto a 1,200-pound bull and see who wins.”

For the less adventurous, the American Royal also has a museum where you can see a stuffed steer, a handsomely tooled leather-and-silver saddle with a matching pair of revolvers and boots. And don’t miss the skeleton of Roughneck, the hog.

“He was a grand champion Hampshire Herdsire,” said guide Jenny Stuerzel. “He was extra big, had an extra rib on each side, 16 instead of 14. That’s a lot of bacon, ham and pork.”

If you go

T-Rex: The cafe is at 1847 Village West Parkway in The Legends at Village West in Kansas City, Kan.  www.trexcafe.com; (913) 334-8888.  Hours: 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, open until 11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. The cafe has a “Build-A-Dino” licensed from Build-A-Bear Workshop. The Paleo Zone has an admission of $2.50 with a sand fossil dig for children and other activities.

Hilton President: 1329 Baltimore, (816) 221-9490; www.presidentkansascity.hilton.com. There are 213 guest rooms and suites with a fitness center, business center, meeting rooms, gift shop and complimentary parking.

American Royal: 1701 American Royal Court adjacent to Kemper Arena. (816) 221-9800; www.americanroyal.com.

National WWI Museum at the Liberty Memorial: 100 West 26th St., (816) 784-1918; www.libertymemorialmuseum.org. Admission: $8 for adults, $3 to take the elevator up the 217-foot memorial tower for a terrific view of the city; $10 for both. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday.

Union Station: 30 West Pershing Road, (816) 460-2020; www.unionstation.org.

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art:  4525 Oak St., (816) 751-1278; www.nelson-atkins.org. The new minimalist Bloch Building is scheduled to open June 9, adding 70 percent more display space at the Nelson-Atkins.

Shawnee Indian Mission:  3403 West 53rd St., (913) 262-0867; www.kshs.org/places/shawnee. Admission: $3 for adults, $1 for students. Hours: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, and 1-5 p.m. Sunday. Open by appointment only in December, January and February.

Kansas City Convention & Visitors Association: (800) 767-7700; www.visitkc.com.

Huskers heading

to Arrowhead for

Big 12 Championship

 On Saturday, Kansas City will open its arms to the University of Nebraska and the Husker faithful as they attempt to win their third Big 12 Football Championship. Kickoff is set for 7 p.m.

 This will be the fourth time that the leagues’ championship game will be decided at Arrowhead Stadium.  Kansas City has hosted the championship more than any other city.

Arrowhead Stadium is located in the eastern part of Kansas City and is most easily reached from Lincoln by taking I-435 South from I-29.

For tickets visit www.ticketmaster.com/big12  or call (800) 676-5488. For information about group tickets, parking, stadium questions, hospitality or any other issue visit www.kcchiefs.com/collegefootball. For a list of Kansas City hotels and other attractions, visit www.visitkc.com/big12football.

Arrowhead also offers recreational vehicle owners an overnight stay for the game. Arrowhead Park, located on the west side of the stadium but inside the Truman Sports Complex, provides an overnight RV parking area for those traveling to Kansas City for the Big 12 game. A celebratory pep rally will be held Friday evening at the park. Each school will have its own section and band performing. Parking is limited and early reservations are advised. Overnight parking at Arrowhead Park costs $90 for one night and $150 for a two-night stay, Friday and Saturday. Visit www.kcchiefs.com/collegefootball for reservations.