14 minute read
Editor’s Letter
Every Sunday—rain or shine or whiteout blizzard from Hateful Eight—I make pizzas in my backyard. It’s a tradition I started during the pandemic, but it’s also something I grew up with.
Every Sunday, my mom would have three dough balls covered in olive oil sitting out to rise on browned and battered aluminum pans. It goes back further than that. I’m a quarter Calabrian and my father grew up in Brier Hill, the Italian neighborhood in Youngstown, Ohio. As a boy, he would take my grandmother’s pies (like others in the neighborhood, she made a distinctive red-topped style with peppers boiled in Sunday sauce and just a sprinkle of Romano) down the block to the wood-fired community pizza oven. All of that is a long way of saying, with apologies to cousin Mike, this issue isn’t just business for me—it’s personal. I’m extremely passionate about pizza. I’ve made pilgrimages to many of the nation’s best, from Patsy’s of Harlem to Frank Pepe’s in New Haven, Buddy’s in Detroit, Flour + Water in San Francisco and Cosa Buona in LA. I lived by Bianco, Apizza Scholls and Ken’s Artisan, and I’m blessed to get a little feedback on my backyard pies from Ken Forkish’s recipe tester/copyeditor. So trust me when I say: Kansas City is currently having a pizza renaissance. When we started working on this issue, I had a conversation with Zach Bauman, the trusty local photographer who shot this month’s pizza package. Zach is a fellow pizza geek and Ooni owner. “I’m surprised you’re doing this—is Kansas City’s pizza game strong enough?” he said to me. So Zach and I started talking about our long list, which includes a lot of new places. We both came away marveling at all the great new pizza projects in the city— like the pie from the Devoured pop-up’s Jhy Coulter on our cover (page 62). I ate that pizza (literally, the one in the photo) and, as someone who makes pies every Sunday, left humbled. Watching Coulter effortlessly and intuitively work her dough before firing that pie in a consumer pizza oven like my own, and then tasting the result, showed me just how far I am from greatness. After a few days of quiet reflection on my inadequacies, I have recommitted myself to the cause—for my grandmother, for my daughter. As I said, we are witnessing a renaissance in KC pizza. No matter what style of pizza you prefer, and no matter how high your Martin Cizmar standards, there’s now a pie in this city that’s EDITOR IN CHIEF going to leave you dazzled. We’re excited to MARTIN@KANSASCITYMAG.COM play consigliere starting on page 48.
Zach Bauman
PHOTOGRAPHER Most of our pizza feature was shot by Zach Bauman, one of the city’s most prolific food photographers. Zach, a dedicated pizza geek, also helped our team pick the spots included.
Anna Petrow
PHOTOGRAPHER One other photo in the pizza feature comes from Anna Petrow, also an established KC food photographer. Petrow’s moody shots of St. Louis pizza were snapped while sampling pies with her pro-Provel husband, who wrote the piece.
Lauren Fox
WRITER This month’s profile of an Irish singer from Lawrence was written by Lauren Fox, a Notre Dame grad who is the second most-Irish writer on our masthead.
NUMBERS FROM THIS ISSUE
00
The type of flour used in
Kansas City’s best New York-style pizza. PAGE 52 9
Albums of Celtic-adjacent music that local singersongwriter Ashley Davis has made in her career. PAGE 28 5,500
Gallons of water pumped per minute by the Northland’s Children’s Fountain, the “largest fountain of its kind in America.”
PAGE 96
THIN AIR
Last month, our cover story focused on the disappearance of Angela Green, a woman who went missing from Prairie Village during the summer of 2019.
Her daughter, Ellie Green, and niece, Michelle Guo, continue to search for answers. The general response to our coverage of Angela’s case was a mix of fascination and heartbreak. Most wanted to know how a mother could vanish from a suburb in Kansas without a trace, and almost everyone who weighed in expressed sympathy toward Ellie and Angela’s family.
The Prairie Village Police Department wrote to us regarding Angela’s case, too—specifically, Kansas City’s Only Podcast’s discussion of the case. The PVPD defended the thoroughness of their investigation, including their use of crime scene equipment and technology.
This is such a fascinating but heartbreaking story. I hope her daughter gets answers soon. —Meredith Holland Thompson Please help this family find answers. —Shay Nikole I’m happy to see continued coverage on this case. Hoping for some closure for her daughter, Ellie. —@aykui777 I have been following this story for a little over a year and I too want answers for Ellie! She deserves to know what happened to her mother. —@dopamean01 During the podcast, the Police Department was mocked for spending a lot of unnecessary time to see if Angela Green went to China. I would argue that this is a testament to the thoroughness of our investigation. A second statement was made regarding the thoroughness of searching properties for evidence and not using cadaver dogs. The Johnson County Crime Lab was on scene during the search warrants and used equipment and technology far more reliable and effective than what could have been provided by cadaver dogs. I do thank you for taking the time to run this story and trying to bring attention to this case. The public’s help is always appreciated and, in many ways, needed in order to solve these types of cases. —Chief of Police Byron K. Roberson & Captain Brady Sullivan
SHOUT OUT
The issue includes an excerpt of Ripple: A Long Strange Search for a Killer, a new book by local author Jim Cosgrove. Big thanks to Cosgrove and his publisher, Steerforth Press.
BEHIND THE SCENES
Art Director Katie Henrichs dangles a rocketship air plant holder from rOOTS while photographer Samantha Levi captures the perfect shot.
CONTACT US Kansas City
P.O. Box 26823 Overland Park, KS 66225-6823 (913) 469-6700 EMAIL: editor@kansascitymag.com
I just started going HAM. It was stupid, but I really wanted to win. Honestly, I thought those giveaways were a scam.”
—JHY COULTER OF THE DEVOURED PIZZA POP-UP
LEADING THE CONVERSATION IN KANSAS CITY
FLOOD ON THE TRACKS
While locals obsessed over the sale of Cerner, an even bigger acquisition was quietly shaping the future of the local economy.
BY MARTIN CIZMAR
Tech gets all the ink—a local economist explains bigger changes quietly shaping the KC economy.
LAST FALL, one of Kansas City’s iconic companies sold for $30 billion after a brief bidding war. It was a homegrown company with thousands of employees which was, in many ways, synonymous with the city but with a footprint that stretches across the country.
No, we’re not talking about Cerner —we’re talking about Kansas City
Southern Railroad.
The railroad company, based here since its founding during the Grover
Cleveland administration, was bought by Canadian Pacific for $31 billion.
That news was buried on page six of the Kansas City Star and did not prompt a flurry of tweets from Mayor
Quinton Lucas.
It’s a sign of how the discourse around the city’s economy is a bit skewed, according to Chris Kuehl, director of Armada Corporate Intelligence, which provides strategic advice, economic forecasting and business analysis for corporate clients.
“We often overlook some of the more fundamental, long-lasting things,” Kuehl says. “People forget that Kansas City is a huge auto manufacturing town. They forget about aerospace. They forget about the transportation sector. Strangely enough, they forget about agribusiness. How do how you forget about agribusiness in the middle of the ag sector? But, you know, we tend to overlook things like that because other stuff seems sexier.”
The sale of Cerner, a homegrown medical records tech company that was acquired by Texas-based Oracle for $28 billion, made headlines for weeks, while the sale of Kansas City Southern, for more money, went under the radar, because, as Kuehl says “it’s a lot less glamorous to be a shipping hub.”
Kansas City—like so many midsized cities—often boasts about loose ties to tech. You’ll often hear local bigwigs refer to the Silicon Prairie, just like bigwigs in other mid-markets who make dubious claims of tech ties using cringey self-applied nicknames like Silicon Forest, Silicon Swamp, Silicon Mesa and (woof) Silicon Holler.
Kuehl, whose opinion we solicited after noting the changing face of retail in Johnson County, says that despite all the gloom about the sale of two
local tech companies, Cerner and Sprint, there are a lot of reasons to be optimistic about the local economy.
The strength of the KC economy is its diversity
While many cities seem to embrace being known for one dominant industry—steel in Pittsburgh or oil in Dallas—it leaves a place at the mercy of trade winds they can’t reliably predict let alone control. Kansas City has a lot of irons in the fire, which Kuehl views as a good thing.
“We’ve always been a diverse economy,” he says. “We get excited when we lose a Sprint or a Cerner through a merger, but we always tend to forget that we’re a regional headquarters city, and even as we lose some bigger company that’s headquartered here, we pick up six others that are going to have a regional headquarters here.”
While having a national headquarters is a feather in the cap, having a regional headquarters is better for having a dollar in the pocket.
“The headquarters are frequently here, almost out of a whim—somebody says, ‘Hey, I like it here,’” Kuehl says. “But with a regional headquarters, you sort of think it through and say, ‘I need something here, I’m always going to need something here.’”
The Cerner sale likely will work out well for KC
If Cerner had to be sold, the company that bought it could hardly have been better for KC in Kuehl’s view. Oracle is based in Austin, Texas, and has major operations there, in Nashville and outside San Francisco.
KC is close to its HQ and other operations and also centrally located, which is helpful since Cerner’s employees tend to travel to help sell their system and train new customers.
“Once it was thought of as being on the block, what was really worrying people was if a competitor bought Cerner,” he says. “That would have been a disaster because they would have moved all the operations to their home headquarters.”
Instead, Oracle, which had no existing products in the category, stepped in. “They’ve just bolted on a whole different business, which means they’re gonna leave it completely alone,” he says. “They didn’t buy Cerner to put them out of business. They bought Cerner to add to their business.”
The decline of retail is happening everywhere
We originally reached out to Kuehl to ask about the state of commercial real estate near Corporate Woods, around the former Spring campus in the center of Johnson County. The once-vibrant area has seen a lot of businesses leave.
That’s part of a national trend: Retail vacancy rates are at a seven-year high, according to Forbes, with shopping malls accounting for a huge chunk of that. But even the newest shopping plazas now look different, he says.
“Every time you look at a strip mall, you’re thinking, ‘Oh, wonder what store is going in there,’” he says. “There’s no stores. It’s gonna be an imaging center, an urgent care center, a dental center and a pet psychologist. There’s nothing to buy in there.”
KC is well-positioned for what’s booming: the warehouse business
Kansas City was already the nation’s second-largest rail hub after Chicago. The Canadian acquisition of Kansas City Southern Railroad will have a huge effect on the city. As a result of the merger, an estimated 800,000 to 2.5 million additional cargo containers per week will come into the middle of the country. “That won’t all come here, but it’s going to be all up and down the I-35 corridor,” Kuehl says. “The big change from a commercial real estate perspective is going to be warehouse and distribution.”
CHANGING TIDE
Two local mental health experts wrote a book to help kids and parents navigate the fallout of the pandemic.
BY MARTIN CIZMAR
IT CAN BE HARD TO DESCRIBE WHAT’S GOING ON WITH KIDS, who are now entering the third year of a pandemic that started as a few weeks of changes to their routines “to slow the spread.”
It’s taken a toll, say two Kansas City mental health experts who work with kids: Dr. Caroline Danda, a clinical psychologist, and Carron Montgomery, a licensed professional counselor and registered play therapist.
Given the achingly long waitlists for child psychologists right now, Danda and Montgomery have created a new book called The Invisible Riptide, which aims to help both parents and children navigate “the silent emotional tsunami going on in the world.”
The book tells the story of a young girl who’s feeling anxiety that she doesn’t know how to deal with. The goal is to normalize those emotional experiences and train kids on how to work through them.
The book’s illustrations were done by David Gentile, the retired CEO from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City.
We talked to Montgomery and Danda about the project and how adults can help struggling kids—and themselves—by shifting their mindset on mental health.
How did you get together to work on this project? Montgomery: We knew we had similar approaches and passion for our work. I loved the way she educates, talks to kids, schools and parents. I felt like together we could really spread the word. We passed ideas back and forth, and before we knew it, we were knee-deep in an important collaboration. We fuel one another with our passion and truly write together. You’ve mentioned that the illustrations all have symbolism—why is that important? Montgomery: When dealing with anxiety, you are often dealing with your imagination, so what better way to access feelings than through art and imagination. I wanted the art to offer readers images that were felt on a deeper level. David’s art is the perfect balance of sophistication but is also very approachable and not intimidating. It’s hopeful and inviting—the perfect introduction to mental health that also offers deeper meaning for people who are open to wanting to dive deep.
Metaphors give both adults and children the words they sometimes don’t have or don’t know how to express or make sense of. Metaphors create a safe intro and distance for people to warm up to uncomfortable topics or conversations.
You talk about how emotionally intelligent today’s children are, why is that the case? Danda: The younger generation is much more comfortable with their feelings and being able to ask for help. They’ve grown up with more information and focus on feelings through TV, videos and even schools, much like they are more comfortable with technology than the older generation.
There is still a stigma surrounding mental health, and some can still see it as a weakness. What we always tell people is smart people know they don’t know everything, nor do they have to. If you have a problem, you can ask for help. That’s part of the message of The Invisible Riptide. Stella wants answers, and Stella’s mom realizes she doesn’t know all the answers. So they go to see Ms. Tina, who helps Stella understand her feelings so she can move through them.
People often say teachers are having a tough time during the pandemic. What is difficult for them? Montgomery: Online school also impacted the learning curve, and many students are at very different levels. Kids and teens are also stressed and anxious, which impacts their ability to focus, learn and sit still. Even many high-performing students are so overwhelmed that they become frozen, unmotivated and unable to complete simple tasks.
Teachers are having to break things down more while managing the emotional climate of the classroom.
What’s the biggest thing you hope people take away from the book? Danda: The best thing about The Invisible Riptide is that it normalizes mental health, the mind-body connection and seeking connection and help. Talking creates connection and reduces guilt and shame.
