A Morning in Kansas City

June 8, 2011: We started with coffee on our terrace:

Breakfast at Winstead's:

At the Nelson-Atkins Museum: The monumental Shuttlecocks (1994) were commissioned from Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.

We visited the Liberty Memorial (1926) and the National World War I Museum (2006). The Liberty Memorial stands 217 feet above the terrace and 360 feet above Union Station.

Four guardians surround the tower; the two sphinxes are monumental:

The neo-Egyptian temples on either side of the memorial house World War I exhibits and most of the extant portions of Le Pantheon De La Guerre. This monumental painting (402 feet long and 45 feet high) was painted in Paris during and immediately after the war. It was exhibited as a cyclorama at Chicago's Century of Progress Exhibition (1933-34).

On the left was an exihibit on the Germans and, on the right, the battlefield map for Armistice Day:

View of Union Station and the downtown skyline from the terrace of the Liberty Memorial:

From the top of the 217-foot Liberty Memorial:
View to the south:
View west into Kansas and the Kaw River Valley:


One enters the museum on a bridge over a field of poppies:

This is an exceptionally good museum. The first half covers the conditions leading to the war and the trench war stalemate of the European powers; the second half covers America's entry into the war, the end of the war, how the war changed people and how the aftermath led into World War II. A field trip would convey more history than a semester in a classroom.

We went into Union Station to mail a letter. The station was the site of the Kansas City Massacre (1922), which "made" the FBI.












The J.C. Nichols Memorial Fountain by daylight: