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Downtown KC Photos

But for now I want to link to the pictures I took on Sunday and tell you a little about the weekend. On Friday I met Sam, Ric, and others for First Friday, in the Crossroads district downtown. There are a lot of galleries and some studios that open up for the evening, and for a brief period of time KC proper seems like a city, rather than a collection of buildings. Last Friday there was a big stage set up near 19th and Wyandotte with a choir singing stuff, though they didn’t seem terribly enthusiastic.

One of the places we went to was this cool printing shop that had a big collection of old presses and the like. From the look of things they were still in use. They had atypical Kansas City postcards, and a wall covered in custom band posters detailing all of the bands that came to KC and Lawrence that I failed to see. I’m going to have to try harder in the future.

Our group ended the night at a restaurant called Pangaea, which is on 39th street just a little ways west of Southwest Trafficway. Good food and great presentation there. I was impressed.

I didn’t really do anything on Saturday that I can recall.

On Sunday I went downtown in the early afternoon and walked around a lot with two cameras and a light meter. The few people I did see also walking around seemed a bit shady, but no one bothered me or anything. I saw the current state of construction of the Sprint Center, which is no longer a giant hole in the ground. The Power & Light District is going up right across the street from that, and even though I’m cynical I am holding out some hope that they can help bring downtown up a bit.

I also made it to Union Station and the Liberty Memorial for the first time in what might be more than three years. I’m not entirely sure but that seems right. The nice thing about Union Station is that it seems just about impossible to take a bad picture in there. The trick with photographing the Liberty Memorial is to avoid taking the normal pictures: the entire Memorial from a distance or a shot looking up to the top of the tower. Neither gives a good impression of how massive that pillar really is.