Green Lady Lounge in Kansas City

Posted on by Thor

The Green Lady Lounge (1809 Grand Blvd Kansas City, Missouri 64108) has live jazz 365 days a year. The place definitely isn’t green, the walls are all blood red. When Pam Schwartz and I entered,we had to wait for our eyes to adjust to the dark before finding a table. We got there just before the musicians arrived and set up their instruments.  The Tim Whitmer Quartet was on the bill for the night. They epitomize Kansas City’s Swing Jazz legacy. The drummer was the first to set up. But unfortunately when the other players pressed into the small staging area, I lost sight of him. At the Green Lady there is never a cover charge and seating is open.

Each table had an artificial LED candle, Pam secured me a second candle so I could see the sketch page. Even with the flickering light it was impossible to see colors or values for that matter. The first brush stroke of red looked like pure black in the low light. In some ways painting under such conditions is thrilling since I only get to see what I did once the event is over.

The Steamboat Arabia Museum

Posted on by Thor

In Kansas City in the Farmers
Market area, there is a museum devoted to a steam ship that sank on the Missouri
River back in the 1850s when the Louisiana
Territory was opened for
settlers. My early relative, Dr. Augustus Thorspecken was part of that movement
West.

The Arabia was a steam ship
that was packed full of supplies for the general stores that needed to be
outfitted on the river. When a tree falls in the river, the trunk would sink
and flow down river a bit creating a deadly spear just under the water. The Arabia struck one of these trees and quickly sank. Passengers
rushed to the end of the boat above water. The one life boat was taken by the
crew who quickly paddled away fearing that the water boilers might explode when
they hit the cold water. When the boilers didn’t explode they sheepishly
paddled back and started saving passengers.

The track of the Missouri river
would change each year based of the flooding and flow of silt. A family became
obsessed about finding the wreck which might not actually be in the water
itself. They searched the surrounding land and in a corn field their electro-manometer
found metal as they walked up a row of corn. Each time they hit metal they put
down a flag and soon they had the outline of the steamer.

They got permission to excavate the site and pumped out the
water as they dug below the water level.  Old reports showed that the Arabia
had been found once before and the treasure hunters gave up after only finding
a box of boots. The treasure most people hoped for were the many gallons of bourbon
that was being transported in wooden barrels. The booze was never recovered but
inside the ship was like finding the 1850s equivalent of a Wal-Mart. Every day
of the excavation was like Christmas. They found china ware, utensils, clothing,
hardware, and every conceivable daily necessity for life on the frontier. There were
plenty of beads which were intended as trade items with the Indians.

A mule was tied up on the bow of the steamer. An account of
the day said that the owner tried to save the mule but it was so stubborn that
it would not move towards safety. When the ship was found that mule was found
to be still tied to a column of the boat. The more than 100 year old lie was unearthed.

At first the excavators thought they would sell off items to
profit from their find, but then they realized they had to keep the collection
all together as a museum. Only a fraction of the items have been preserved and
they are still conserving items to this day. The family owned a refrigeration
business and that is where everything is stored until it can be preserved. In
an incubator several dozen shoes were being treated and other items were in
storage containers pumped full of nitrogen.

I simply sketched the steamer boats paddle wheel which had
been restored. Original pistons and cylinders powered the wheel. Wandering the
museum I got a good feel for what life on the Midwest
frontier might have been like. This ship that sank and was preserved in the anaerobic
slime has become a true time capsule of what life was like in the 1850s.

T-Rex outside Union Station Kansas City

Posted on by Thor

I decided to take a trip to visit the Nelson Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City. I took the free trolley to its southern terminus at Union Station. Outside the station was a T-Rex sculpture. Tourists would stop to take selfies with the dinosaur. The Kansas City Science Center was inside the station and dinosaurs were on display. Look at the muscular legs on that dinosaur. Visible in the background of the sketch is the tower of the World War I Museum.

There was another exhibit of small gauge railroad displays which filled a large back room in the station with quirky and odd towns with railroad trains circulating the circumference. Some displays were of idealized small towns but others had dinosaurs wandering the streets and or mermaids and penguins in the waterways. One village was made entirely of Legos. It was an odd assortment of worlds.

From the station there was still a several mile trip to the museum. I decided to try and rent an electric scooter. These scooters are scattered throughout downtown Kansas City. You rent it and then just leave it wherever when you are done with it. To rent it you scan the URL code with your phone. I found three scooters across the street from the station. It took half an hour to get all the info into my phone. The scooter was like a skate board with handlebars. It was fun to use to start reaching 15 miles per hour. There was a bit of a learning curve, to figure out how to balance on it. After about a mile, I was up to speed.

Then I started scooting up a hill. Now in Florida there are no hills, so I wasn’t surprised that the scooter started to struggle going up the hill. I had to start pushing off with my foot to get to the top of the hill. Why was I paying for an electric scooter that didn’t have enough power to get up a hill? I came to the conclusion that the scooter battery had died. I left it parked at the top of the hill and started walking the rest of the way to the museum.

The remaining walk turned out to be much longer than I suspected. I walked through the full length of several long parks and through a ritzy neighborhood. I was exhausted by the time I got to the museum. Then I hiked every hall of the museum to see all the art. By the end of the day I had a severe case of museum burn. There were several Vincent Van Gogh paintings, and quite a few Thomas Hart Benton paintings. It was an impressive collection.

I decided I could not walk all the way back downtown, so I used Uber for the very first time. It was nice to finally relax in the back seat seeing all the neighborhoods I had just explored on foot. Pam and I used the scooters again another night to explore all the murals that are scattered around Kansas City. Pam showed me how to check the battery level before we rented the scooters and they lasted the duration as we explored up and down the alleys.

Union Station Kansas City Missouri

Posted on by Thor

Pam Schwartz and I took a trip to Kansas City recently. She was invited to speak at an The American Association for State and Local History Conference. While she attended the conference and worked in the hotel room on Orange County History museum business, I explored on my own.

Kansas City has a free trolley system and the end of the line is Union Station.

Across the street from Union Station is the National WWI Museum and Memorial. In 1919 two and a half million dollars was raised from a community based fundraising drive to honor the men and women who served and died in the war. The center piece of the monument is a 217 foot high tower surrounded by four guardian spirits (Courage, Honor, Patriotism, and sacrifice.

Inside a memorial hall, a large mural covers a wall that has life sized portraits of some of the war’s most infamous generals and leaders. The mural titled, The Pantheon de la Guerre is just a section of a huge mural that was painted in the round that used to be several football fields in width. This mural was forgotten over time and sold for scrap where a local artist discovered it and insisted it needed to be preserved.

You enter the museum over a glass bridge that crosses over a field of blood red poppies. The poppy field references a poem called Flanders Fields about the poppies that grew over the graves of fallen soldiers after the war. The museum itself houses an amazing array of World War I memorabilia.

Trenches are part of the display and as one woman stuck her head in a hole to peak inside to see manikin soldiers huddled inside, a soldier started whispering in her ear which completely freaked her out. The east gallery covers the years from 1914 to 1917 and the West Gallery covers the years from 1917 to 1919. Display cases stacked full of items were rather difficult to decipher but on a whole it was an impressive collection.