Madnessmatrix | Eric Bowers Photography

Three handheld RAWs // HDR // Shutter: varied // Aperture: f/6.3 // Focal Length: 15 mm // ISO 100

Back for a bit respite of urban cityscapes again between the rare rural photos I’ve had on the site recently.

I’m always rhapsodizing how about how much I love the Garment District area around 8th and Broadway - and here it is again. This was precisely the subsequent shot from this one from a few days ago.

I had originally brought my camera gear with me to this restaurant because I was eating lunch there anyway, and I wanted to see if this nice older Vietnamese lady who is a veteran of the Red Dragon House restaurant would let me snap her portrait. She’s a shy one and I could tell she would have rathered I not, so I stuck with the architecture shots. But, you might be able to see her in this photo if you look through the window underneath the sign.

I’ve been eating lunch and carry-out at the Red Dragon in downtown KCMO on a semi-frequent basis for the past ten years, since I was eighteen years old working in one of the Commerce Bank office buildings part time during my senior year of high school. The lady I speak of was there then, and has been working seven days a week almost always since. I always tell her if I win the lottery, I’m buying her a vacation. And she’ll always smile and politely refuse - explaining she is just more comfortable staying home. She came to Kansas City in 1980, the year I was born incidentally. And it seems she’s going to stay here, as am I, although I still really dig vacations to other places.

From a perspective of the urban health of this section of downtown, going by how you can often pull right up in front of Red Dragon or very nearby and get a parking spot right on the street, it might seem the area is dead, and an urban area can be observed as being healthy by the difficulty of parking. The harder to park, generally the more dense the population and the more intense the land usage. In this environment, the streets and sidewalks thrive, and although parking may be difficult, it doesn’t matter all that much since so much less of life requires the use of a car in the first place.

So much of the Garment District was torn down and ended up as surface parking lots that it makes any city/architecture enthusiast wretch, but I think what’s left of it won’t be leaving us anytime soon, as it at least has some mainstay tenants like the afore-mentioned Red Dragon House, along with a Folger’s Coffee plant, and I believe some inconspicuous office for DST if I’m not mistaken. I’ve had issue with both companies’ nosy, busy-body security guard staff intruding on my rights to take photographs, but such is life in a paranoid culture.

The larger corporations like this that inhabit the Garment District of Kansas City today may help out a lot just by the fact that they haven’t decamped to the suburbs, but they could lend a hand for another generation in this city by redeveloping all the infernal surface parking they are sitting on. Then, eventually we might have a real city staring us in the face again.