KCRag Forum

KCPowercat wrote:So what other books can you recommend that you've read that deals with urban core/downtown type issues?

Richard Rhodes called the spread-out metropolis "Cupcake Land."

A place "well-scrubbed and bland," as the author described his hometown in a 1987 essay. A city once fueled by the sweat of farmers and the soot of locomotives now was defined by spotless kitchens, built-on garages and "pristine curb spaces... where cars in urban neighborhoods would be parked."

Rhodes, who would soon win a Pulitzer Prize for a book on the atomic bomb, profiled a polite but passionless place where standing ovations were routine. A place wary of risk takers. A place proud to conform and be average, where marketing companies flocked to test new products.

His critique was gross in its generalities and hardly appreciated by local boosters. But longtime residents could relate.

"Kansas City was a paradise once, or so it seemed to me when I was a boy in the years just after World War II," he recalled. The city of Rhodes' memory was a vigorous urban mass sprung from a rural landscape. Only the fine homes and manicured lawns south of the Country Club Plaza -- home to fiction's Mr. and Mrs. Bridge -- defied the hurly-burly Rhodes felt in his Kansas City.

"I could and did roam the city unescorted at the age of eight," he wrote. "Ladies hung washboards over the backs of chairs on sunny afternoons and used rainwater and vinegar to wash their waist-length hair; on summer evenings roaring with locusts, lawn chairs came out and people called across front yards. "And then the suburbs arose, Cupcake Land, and sweetened Kansas City's plain-spoken urban soul.... What the hell happened to my town?"

kcteen wrote: ↑Sat Jul 10, 2004 9:04 pm update: cant find a copy, but it was written by Richard Rhodes (pulizter winner from KC area). Here is something about the essay,

Richard Rhodes called the spread-out metropolis "Cupcake Land."

A place "well-scrubbed and bland," as the author described his hometown in a 1987 essay. A city once fueled by the sweat of farmers and the soot of locomotives now was defined by spotless kitchens, built-on garages and "pristine curb spaces... where cars in urban neighborhoods would be parked."

Rhodes, who would soon win a Pulitzer Prize for a book on the atomic bomb, profiled a polite but passionless place where standing ovations were routine. A place wary of risk takers. A place proud to conform and be average, where marketing companies flocked to test new products.

His critique was gross in its generalities and hardly appreciated by local boosters. But longtime residents could relate.

"Kansas City was a paradise once, or so it seemed to me when I was a boy in the years just after World War II," he recalled. The city of Rhodes' memory was a vigorous urban mass sprung from a rural landscape. Only the fine homes and manicured lawns south of the Country Club Plaza -- home to fiction's Mr. and Mrs. Bridge -- defied the hurly-burly Rhodes felt in his Kansas City.

"I could and did roam the city unescorted at the age of eight," he wrote. "Ladies hung washboards over the backs of chairs on sunny afternoons and used rainwater and vinegar to wash their waist-length hair; on summer evenings roaring with locusts, lawn chairs came out and people called across front yards. "And then the suburbs arose, Cupcake Land, and sweetened Kansas City's plain-spoken urban soul.... What the hell happened to my town?"