Am I the only one who finds Crown Center/Union Station more interesting than The Plaza?

[kcstreetcarfan]

I like them both for different things.
They are both unique and very large Disticts that any city would be proud to have.
I once researched the amount of office space in Crown Center and was amazed to find it was larger than Cleveland's Tower City complex!

[MarketStEl]

Originally Posted by westender

I grew up as a Plaza kid, and I remember fondly the grand opening of Crown Center.

The Plaza is of course wonderful, and it is certainly a product of its generation, the 1920s. It was designed to serve as the commercial center for the large, new J.C. Nichols Country Club development (extending south and west to Brookside and Mission Hills). It has since morphed into a second downtown for Kansas City, and if managed well, it will always keep the Westport-Midtown side of the city vibrant. It's a special place, and its charms are smaller scale -- the scale of the shop, the cafe, or the hotel boite, as designed for its intended audience.

Crown Center is something else entirely, also wonderful, and also a product of its generation, the 1970s. Edward Larrabee Barnes, the American champion of late modernism, in all of his Yankee Episcopalian glory, hit it out of the park with Crown Center. Go to one of the upper floors of the San Francisco Tower and note the way the concrete is planked like Vermont beams with recessed "hardware" details. The lobby of the main Crown Center hotel (fka the Westin) incorporating the limestone hill -- amazing. And there is much more: The American Restaurant, Halls, Union Station, the streetcar, the freight house district.

They are both great jewels, and Kansas City should thank its lucky stars for these assets.

(emphasis added)

You and I are probably contemporaries - I spent lots of time on the Country Club Plaza (and J.C. Nichols' later, sister shopping center in the city, The Landing) and remember Crown Center in the process of becoming as a teenager.

But it looks like you haven't been back recently: The American Restaurant closed last year. (I do remember having a swell New Year's Eve dinner there when I took my ex back to "meet the folks" at Christmastime 1984.)

Crown Center is about as close as any other American city comes to New York's Rockefeller Center, right down to its being bankrolled by one very wealthy family (whose sons all attended the same school I went to from 7th grade on).

It and the Country Club Plaza share one attribute that set them apart from every other suburban mall and every edge city we've built up until very recently: The buildings and the streets take the forefront and the parking lots are hidden away. (An equally impressive feat in the case of Crown Center's garages: They're all interconnected - yes, you can drive from the garages to Grand Boulevard's west to the ones to its east via levels beneath the street.)

The Country Club Plaza, I'm sure you all know, is the first planned shopping center in the United States. It's the reason the Urban Land Institute's highest honor bears J.C. Nichols' name (well, that and the fact that the Nichols family endowed the prize). I tell people that the great shame of our postwar suburban expansion was that we knew at the dawn of the Auto Age how we could get cars and cities to play nice with each other - then promptly forgot it all. Those New Urbanists who promote "neotraditional" town planning have dusted this stuff off, and most of the people who build what I call "Instant Urbanist" developments, like this one in Philadelphia's Southern New Jersey suburbs, are picking up where Nichols left off.

I'm glad that Halls survives - had the Hall family been more interested in luxury retail beyond Kansas City, we might have seen Halls stores in luxury malls where we find Nieman Marcus instead - but its fate since I left town shows the effect of online retail (and maybe suburban growth in JoCo) on brick-and-mortar retail. I see that the current Halls occupies just one floor of the three-story building it occupied completely when Crown Center opened; that store, btw, replaced the original Halls in the 1100 block of Grand Avenue (now Boulevard). Halls also had a Plaza outpost; that closed - what? five? 10? - years ago.

About Crown Center as a whole, I'd say this: the Hall family has long believed that Kansas City deserved the best of everything, and this was the physical manifestation of their belief. You could say that the Halls cared enough to send us their very best.

[kcbluesprings]

Originally Posted by rwiksell

I remember hearing about some of the original criticism of Crown Center, that it was built so "far" from the Central Business District. The rebuttal was that it would cause the neighborhood in between (from I-670 to Pershing) to flourish, essentially doubling the size of downtown.

Although this didn't happen in the timing or fashion it was anticipated (I think they imagined more skyscrapers) we can see now how the Crossroads district has boomed. Who knows exactly what role Crown Center played in that, but, when paired with Union Station and Liberty Memorial, it serves as a wonderful southern anchor point for "greater downtown KC".

The last few years for the Crossroads and the Crown Center area have been exciting, to say the least. While I don't expect any major high-rises to go up in that area, We've seen a number of infill projects, hotels and apartments take place. The rail line has generated all kinds of activity. In 10 years, we may see a completely different area.

As far as Crown Center vs The Plaza, I believe that Crown Center is waaaay more kid friendly, and thus, the choice of destinations for parents.

[Diamond03]

Out of the two, Plaza is definitely better. I find Crown Center to be pretty boring. I wish Crown Center had stores similar to the Plaza, not just kids stores.

But Downtown is the best