Power & Light

Last night, I made my first trip to Kansas City's Power and Light District. It was . . . strange. I'm not sure what else to say, except that I don't think I would go back again if I had the choice.

Power and Light was developed by Baltimore's Cordish company, a real estate and entertainment development firm. The heart of the District is basically a huge cement courtyard punctuated by beer kiosks and surrounded on three sides by a two-story building. The winged building houses multiple bars on its two levels, and its upper story supports a wide suspended sidewalk and a catwalk that connects the two wings together. The courtyard (known as Kansas City Live!) serves as a dance floor and is covered by a suspended roof raised maybe four stories high. The fourth side of the courtyard is closed by a stage area with a giant TV that continually broadcasts advertisements for KCP&L and the District bars.

It's a strange place, brand new and brightly lit and full of enthusiastic partiers dressed in their club finest, but it's also intensely manufactured. C., my boyfriend, described the District as a sort of alcoholic shopping mall. Each bar is themed: there's McFadden's, the Irish pub; Angel's Rock Bar, a music venue decorated in Avril Lavigne-style black and pink; Vinino's, an Italian restaurant and wine bar; etc. Each bar makes a few cheap decorative gestures in neon, pre-fab wall decor, seating arrangements, and lighting in the hope that this will be enough to substitute for something so elusive as character. As I peered into each bar, however, I got the impression that the distinction between each place was as murky the distinction between the Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister, and American Eagle.

For me, P&L felt forced, inauthentic, and surreal, yet the courtyard was packed with dancers. The crowd was mixed: there were Boomers and twenty-somethings, white folks and black (and Hispanic and Asian), herds of bachelorette parties and pairs of bachelors, couples and singles, the painfully fashionable and the painfully unfashionable, people having a great time and people having a terrible time and people who seemed simply overwhelmed by the crowd. For an attraction designed to appeal to anyone and everyone in Kansas City, it seemed like the design was doing its job.

C. says that if you build something, people will inevitably come, especially in Kansas City, a town known more for its past attractions (jazz and barbecue) than its current ones (struggling sports teams and effete community and cultural centers). Clearly, this rule has proven true at P&L, no matter how bland, impersonal, and mercenary the sprawl seemed to me as I leaned out over the crowd from the windy courtyard catwalk.

It's easy to call a place like P&L fake and tacky and exploitative, but it struck me as sad more than anything else. That sadness comes from the fact that it seems unequal to the real people who come out each weekend looking for a good time, looking to meet somebody new, looking to make a memory or to change their lives. In that sense, P&L is no different from any other bar or attraction that doesn't make the magic and excitement it promises. Perhaps it only seemed more poignant to me because of the brightness of its lights, the thousands of faces in its crowd, how far between the city's buildings its blaring music traveled.