FROM THE EDITOR
14
KANSAS CITY NOVEMBER 2022
Katie Henrichs ART DIRECTOR
This month’s cover was illustrated by Art Director Katie Henrichs. It’s her last issue with the magazine, and she’ll be missed.
Taylor Drummond EDITORIAL INTERN
This month’s Loop section opens with a piece about the redevelopment of the Kaw riverfront by editorial intern Taylor Drummond.
Natalea Bonjour PHOTOGRAPHER
Both the crocheted skirts that open the Sway section and the portrait of Corey Green in the Sway section were photographed by Natalea Bonjour.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOANNA GORHAM AND VICENTE MARTÍ
A
few hours before the annual Plaza Art Fair, I found myself walking the streets of the century-old shopping district with a pen and a few crumpled pieces of paper. This month’s cover feature is something we’re calling Kansas City Geographic, a slightly off-kilter look at the city’s unique landmarks and landscape. I was taking notes to make an updated version of a sixty-year-old map of the Plaza we unearthed from deep in the library’s archives. I needed to survey every storefront noted on the old map so our hardworking art director could make a new map of the Plaza—the Classic Cup is basically the only thing that remains roughly the same—which you’ll find on page 56. It’s part of a package of stories that I hope will bring some surprise and delight to even the most knowledgeable locals. I know from talking to people about journalism and our magazine that many of them picture us holed up in a coffee shop lost in our thoughts, possibly while wearing a beret. It’s in fact far more likely you’ll find a magazine writer with a rain-spattered notebook, possibly while dodging golf carts and forklifts. It’s a vocation that requires natural curiosity above all, but then the drive to take that curiosity out on the pavement—observing, taking notes, talking to people. It’s probably not a coincidence that most good journalists I’ve known are at least a little obsessed with the area they cover as a physical space—that is, geography. Every newsroom I’ve worked in had a few maps hanging on the wall, usually full of color-coded tacks from past projects. A surprising number of reporters shun GPS and like getting a little lost if it means they see a corner of their coverage area they’d missed before. Us editor types are forever begging our art teams to make maps for print, a nettlesome task no graphic designer I’ve yet worked with seems to particularly enjoy. Which brings us back to the Country Club Plaza, a neighborhood I’ve been fascinated with since first stepping foot in Kansas City. It’s a place I can happily spend hours just walking around, looking at all the rich detail and odd juxtapositions of the streetscape. I don’t think there’s anywhere else in the world quite like it: a Spanish Revival shopping mall dotted with intricate tiled artwork where a Cheesecake Factory exists in an architecturally significant historic building. I feel the same way about the legal oddities of a city with a state line running right through the middle of it and the cement statues installed by J.C. Nichols throughout his developments on the city’s south side, two other topics we address this month. The Kansas City Geographic package was a passion project for me and is surely one of the more unusual things we’ve done. But I hope some of that enthusiasm will be contagious and that the way we’ve presented the city’s unique landmarks and landscape will capture Martin Cizmar your imagination or, at the very least, teach EDITOR IN CHIEF MARTIN@KANSASCITYMAG.COM you some fun new trivia.
C O N T R I B U TO R S
