Goin To Kansas City? You'll Be Delighted!

We've barely been in Kansas City for a day now and I can tell you I'm already impressed.
Yes, we've been to many American cities (most of the big ones) but this one somehow never made our list.
Well, it's never too late to be surprised and delighted by a clean, efficient, friendly and fasinating place like Kansas City.
We're staying in the Country Club Plaza area and if you looked out our windw you'd think you were in California or Florida or some Spanish/Moorish outpost. The Plaza area is filled with the type of rococco architecture that you see above. The ornate towers, lamposts, tiles, public art and streetscape work together to create a beguiling atmosphere.
The entire 15-block district, with more than 150 shops and dozens of fine restaurants, makes Country Club Plaza Kansas City's premier shopping, dining and entertainment destination.
It was the first shopping center in the world designed to accommodate shoppers arriving by automobile.
Established in 1923 by J. C. Nichols and designed architecturally after Seville, Spain, the Plaza also comprises offices. The neighborhoods surrounding the Plaza consist of apartment buildings and upscale houses.
Country Club Plaza is named in the Project for Public Spaces' list 60 of the World's Great Places.
Nichols began acquiring the land for the Plaza in 1907, in an area of Kansas City that was then known as Brush Creek Valley. When his plans were first announced, the project was dubbed 'Nichols' Folly' because of the then seemingly undesirable location; at the time, the only developed land in the valley belonged to the Country Day School (now the Pembroke Hill School), and the rest was known for pig farming.
Nichols employed architect Edward Buehler Delk to design the new shopping center. The Plaza opened in 1923 to immediate success, and it has lasted with little interruption since that year. New Urbanist land developer Andres Duany noted in Community Builder: The Life & Legacy of J.C. Nichols that the Country Club Plaza has had the longest life of any planned shopping center in the history of the world.
The basic design of Country Club Plaza reflects classic European influences, especially those of Seville, Spain, yet it curiously does not include a traditional open plaza. There are more than thirty statues, murals, and tile mosaics on display in the area, as well as major architectural reproductions, such as a half-sized Giralda Tower of Seville (the tallest building in the Plaza). The Plaza also includes precise light fixture reproductions of San Francisco's Path of Gold streetlights. Other works of art celebrate the classics, nature, and historical American themes such as westward expansion.
It's a pure delight to roam through the streets of The Plaza and enjoy its unque atmosphere.
Of course, the whole thing is also a testament to the enduring success of capitalism, the idea that one man can make a Big Difference and the tradition of rugged American individualism.
Photos copyright 2010 by Dan Cirucci