The Most Overlooked City...

Want to talk about your favorite places besides Kansas City? Post any development news or questions about other cities here.
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warwickland
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Re: The Most Overlooked City...

Post by warwickland »

I must say, i've never heard of people having winter homes in KC. summer homes up north, sure. I mean, are they Kansas Citans with summer homes in Minnesota or Twin Cities folks with winter homes in KC? I guess pre-airline, peak-rail that could make some sense. There were probably fantastic rail connections between Minneapolis and Kansas City. St. Louis and Minneapolis/STP arent connected as well and the rail (and roads) follow the river very closely, and inefficiently. It's like an extra 3 hours to St. Louis. New Orleans and Minneapolis are nearly equal travel times from St. Louis...
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warwickland
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Re: The Most Overlooked City...

Post by warwickland »

BTW, IS there an amtrak line to Minneapolis/STP from KC?

edit:

dat damn chicago hub! KC to Minneapolis would be a super line, via some college towns and DSM...

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warwickland
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Re: The Most Overlooked City...

Post by warwickland »

heres a sort of region-grouping/future high speed rail connection map from the NYT:

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https://static01.nyt.com
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Eon Blue
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Re: The Most Overlooked City...

Post by Eon Blue »

brewcrew1000 wrote:I kind of agree with what warwickland is saying. Minneapolis to Chicago or Milwaukee is about the same distance as Minneapolis to KC but people from the Twin Cities are always going to Milwaukee and Chicago while KC is treated as this distant far away land.
I really don't think it helps that 90% of the general population thinks KC is in Kansas and most people probably think Podunk when they first think of Kansas.
Is the perception of Missouri any better nationally than that of Kansas? Brownback/creationists/Dorothy et al versus Ozark Hillbillies/meth/St. Louis decay et al.
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Re: The Most Overlooked City...

Post by warwickland »

on balance, i don't know, but people are more willing to be nuanced about it, i think, than for kansas. theres just far more metropolitan history in missouri. it was just quirk of geography that kansas got joco, a favored quarter suburb. it always mystifies me when people wrap joco into the kansas vs missouri discussion - kansas never could have generated a county like that on its own...it was born out of metropolitan missouri (going back to my point).

kansas gets the meth jokes, too, and everything missouri gets made fun of for with the exception of urban decay/deindustrialism.
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Re: The Most Overlooked City...

Post by Highlander »

Eon Blue wrote:
brewcrew1000 wrote:I kind of agree with what warwickland is saying. Minneapolis to Chicago or Milwaukee is about the same distance as Minneapolis to KC but people from the Twin Cities are always going to Milwaukee and Chicago while KC is treated as this distant far away land.
I really don't think it helps that 90% of the general population thinks KC is in Kansas and most people probably think Podunk when they first think of Kansas.
Is the perception of Missouri any better nationally than that of Kansas? Brownback/creationists/Dorothy et al versus Ozark Hillbillies/meth/St. Louis decay et al.
We spend a lot of time talking about perception here. Living around the US and world, my own take is that the state of Missouri doesn't really conjure up a mental image in most people's mind around the world. Kansas does. And while many have never heard of Missouri, everyone has heard of Kansas. I tell people I'm from Kansas City Missouri, and they just say - he's from Kansas. I'm often introduced as the guy from Kansas.

In the US, I'd say Kansas has a more favorable image than Missouri despite recent events fostered by Brownback's idiocy. Branson and the Ozarks (great beauty in the Ozarks but distinctively redneck) reinforces the hillbilly/redneck/meth image while Mizzou entering the SEC hasn't helped the image either. The last thing I ever wanted to see was Missouri regarded as southern but it's gone that way (on my recent floating trip in SE Missouri, I saw a plethora of confederate flags proudly hanging from private homes :x :x ) - so I am very good with the association of KC with the state of Kansas.
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Re: The Most Overlooked City...

Post by brewcrew1000 »

Geographically most of Kansas City, should be in Kansas, the border should not be an arbitrary line, the state line should have followed like the Blue River and went a south western direction and tapered off around Martin City then run the border down that way. Kansas City MO just fits geographically better with Kansas, East Jackson County feels like its own separate metro because of geographic limitations while most of Kansas and Non-Northland Parts of KCMO flows right with Kansas
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Re: The Most Overlooked City...

Post by flyingember »

brewcrew1000 wrote:Geographically most of Kansas City, should be in Kansas, the border should not be an arbitrary line, the state line should have followed like the Blue River and went a south western direction and tapered off around Martin City then run the border down that way. Kansas City MO just fits geographically better with Kansas, East Jackson County feels like its own separate metro because of geographic limitations while most of Kansas and Non-Northland Parts of KCMO flows right with Kansas
Even your line is arbitrary. You still pick an arbitrary point to base a straight line why would it change direction at Martin City and not keep following the Blue River to where it's formed by the junction of today's Wolf and Coffee Creeks? Junctions tend to make easier boundary points.

And the Kansas River was used to form the straight line, being a junction point at the time.

There's plenty of examples of rivers separating parts of a city. KCK is split in two with the KS River to this day. Try to cross near Bonner Springs. If Kansas can be on both sides of a river, why can't MO be on both sides of the Blue River?

Logically there should have been four states meeting at KC if your idea worked out.
1. between the Blue and KS Rivers heading down toward and/or including parts of Oklahoma (think of KS/OK being skinny but tall)
2. between the KS and MO rivers, basically doing the same thing where a state goes from KCK to Omaha)
2. one north of the MO River encompassing northern MO
4. MO south of the MO River through to about the Ozarks
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Re: The Most Overlooked City...

Post by aknowledgeableperson »

brewcrew1000 wrote:Geographically most of Kansas City, should be in Kansas, the border should not be an arbitrary line, the state line should have followed like the Blue River and went a south western direction and tapered off around Martin City then run the border down that way. Kansas City MO just fits geographically better with Kansas, East Jackson County feels like its own separate metro because of geographic limitations while most of Kansas and Non-Northland Parts of KCMO flows right with Kansas
When Missouri was admitted as a state in 1820 the western state line was a straight line north/south from what is now Iowa to what is now Arkansas based on where the Kaw River met the Missouri River. In 1836 there was what was know as the Platte Purchase which pushed that western boundary north of the Missouri River to the Missouri River up to what is now Iowa.
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Re: The Most Overlooked City...

Post by FangKC »

Prior to Missouri being admitted as a state in 1821, there was an attempt to draw the border of Missouri 60 miles further west into what would later be the Kansas Territory, which would have resulted in the Kansas suburbs being in Missouri, and the KC Metro all being in one state. However, it failed. One of the reasons was the concern in Congress of Missouri being too large physically. At the time, Missouri was larger than any state other than Virginia (which later had West Virginia separated from its' original mass). Of course, this was before the admittance of much larger states--California, Texas, and Alaska. So that argument became pointless.

After 1850, there were four attempts to again change the border, but these attempts would have placed most of what would become KCMO south of the river in the state of Kansas. The new border would have been the Blue River.

This would not have solved the problem of our divided metro area. Had this happened, all the Northland, Independence, Blue Springs, Raytown, Lee's Summit, Raymore, Belton, and Grandview would have still been in Missouri.

Had people known future problems the KC Metro would encounter, the 1818 proposal to push the Missouri border further west would have been the best solution. It would have put the border about half-way between Lawrence and Topeka. All the KC Metro would have been in one state. KCMO would probably have almost twice the population of today as it could have annexed westward.

http://kcrag.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=18 ... ge#p502898
aknowledgeableperson
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Re: The Most Overlooked City...

Post by aknowledgeableperson »

Of course one of the issues of the day was slavery. From reading with Missouri being a slave state it seems people from the South wanted to make the state bigger to give slavery a bigger footprint.
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Re: The Most Overlooked City...

Post by brewcrew1000 »

FangKC wrote:Prior to Missouri being admitted as a state in 1821, there was an attempt to draw the border of Missouri 60 miles further west into what would later be the Kansas Territory, which would have resulted in the Kansas suburbs being in Missouri, and the KC Metro all being in one state. However, it failed. One of the reasons was the concern in Congress of Missouri being too large physically. At the time, Missouri was larger than any state other than Virginia (which later had West Virginia separated from its' original mass). Of course, this was before the admittance of much larger states--California, Texas, and Alaska. So that argument became pointless.

After 1850, there were four attempts to again change the border, but these attempts would have placed most of what would become KCMO south of the river in the state of Kansas. The new border would have been the Blue River.

This would not have solved the problem of our divided metro area. Had this happened, all the Northland, Independence, Blue Springs, Raytown, Lee's Summit, Raymore, Belton, and Grandview would have still been in Missouri.

Had people known future problems the KC Metro would encounter, the 1818 proposal to push the Missouri border further west would have been the best solution. It would have put the border about half-way between Lawrence and Topeka. All the KC Metro would have been in one state. KCMO would probably have almost twice the population of today as it could have annexed westward.

http://kcrag.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=18 ... ge#p502898
I think it would have solved the problem because the Northland and Eastern Jackson County would most likely acted like Metro East in St Louis or the Cincinnati Suburbs of Kentucky. Missouri has its large city in St Louis, they didn't need to try to create some kind of growth in Western Missouri. If anything Springfield, Columbia and Jeff City probably would have gotten more state focus than these suburbs. Kansas is pretty much just letting Wichita rot so the new focus is JoCo
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Re: The Most Overlooked City...

Post by warwickland »

Highlander wrote:
Eon Blue wrote:
brewcrew1000 wrote:I kind of agree with what warwickland is saying. Minneapolis to Chicago or Milwaukee is about the same distance as Minneapolis to KC but people from the Twin Cities are always going to Milwaukee and Chicago while KC is treated as this distant far away land.
I really don't think it helps that 90% of the general population thinks KC is in Kansas and most people probably think Podunk when they first think of Kansas.
Is the perception of Missouri any better nationally than that of Kansas? Brownback/creationists/Dorothy et al versus Ozark Hillbillies/meth/St. Louis decay et al.
The last thing I ever wanted to see was Missouri regarded as southern but it's gone that way (on my recent floating trip in SE Missouri, I saw a plethora of confederate flags proudly hanging from private homes :x :x ) - so I am very good with the association of KC with the state of Kansas.
i guess i'm not really following you, here. KCMO is KCMO. additionally, i'll eat my hat if there arent confederate flags all over SE KS. i have seen confederate flags nearing the I-80 corridor in northern illinois...i spend a lot of time traveling around the rural midwest and they are ubiquitous almost to chicagoland. its become a "country/rural pride" symbol of an underclass, as much as one of division, slavery, the south, etc.

i'm pretty sure that i have seen early missouri maps with the western border far enough west that it would have taken in most or all of joco.
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Re: The Most Overlooked City...

Post by warwickland »

i just read fangs post...it must have been a proposed border i saw, then.
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Re: The Most Overlooked City...

Post by warwickland »

it would have been better for everyone obviously had joco /kck been included in missouri. lets not kid ourselves, kansas is far from being a metropolitan-minded state, whereas missouri could very well be had it had another 3/4 of a million or whatever metropolitan residents. lets not play games with state-identity and outrages over confederate flags in far-rural areas.
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