This Week in Kansas City: the night the lights went out in KCK, and the neighbors who showed up

Welcome back to This Week in KC, The Stare’s weekly recap of the stuff that actually makes this a city worth living in.

A note on the date: this edition is retropublished. It covers August 15–21 and was assembled and published on August 25. The storm still happened, the neighbors still showed up, and a week gets its page in the record whether or not we were at our desk for it.

Each section carries a counter: how many stories fell into that corner of local life this week, across the KC newsrooms we read. The bar shows how it stacks against the others. It’s not a ranking by volume. It’s a ranking by new to you.

An overnight storm went through Kansas City, Kansas midweek and took thousands of customers’ power with it. KSHB 41’s Alyssa Jackson spent Wednesday afternoon in northeast KCK, where a homeowner’s description of the debris (“it looked like it snowed”) is the line the whole week is going to be remembered by.

What happened next is the reason this is the lead item and not a weather brief. The Village Initiative, at Quindaro and 27th Street, spent the day full of people who needed help and people who had come to give it, per KCTV5, the same room doing both jobs at once. The American Red Cross opened a shelter Wednesday. The Unified Government extended hours at the KCK Yard Waste Center so the branches piling up at the curb had somewhere to go.

That is the correct order of operations for a bad night: neighbors first, institutions right behind them holding the door open. Power restoration was still in progress as this edition was assembled; the numbers moved daily, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise by printing one.

Johnson County spent the week collecting pizza. Pizza Tascio, out of Missouri, opened its first Olathe location, its second in the county, with a third still to come. PaPPo’s Pizzeria & Pub, nearly fifteen years after starting in Missouri, finally opened in Overland Park, its first Johnson County address. Two Missouri pizzerias making the same trip in the same week is either a coincidence or a leading indicator, and we’ll know in about a year.

Also opening: LEGO at Town Center Crossing in Leawood, which is a nicer sentence if you don’t mention that the store left its longtime home at Oak Park Mall to get there. We mentioned it last week when Oak Park filed to reinvent itself as a mixed-use district, so we’ll mention it now: the mall’s reinvention has a scoreboard, and this is a point against.

In downtown Mission, Sully’s Pub turned fifteen and shut its doors for a renovation, and then had to spend the week telling people it had not closed. Matt Jones opened the place in 2011 by, in his telling, sweeping it up and turning on the open sign. The birthday facelift is the opposite of a closing announcement, and now it is on the record as such.

Coming attractions: Anthropologie picked Bluhawk in Overland Park for its third KC-area store. A local boutique marketplace is moving into the old Rock & Brews space at Prairiefire. Out in Platte City, Purina Animal Nutrition leased the last 397,000-square-foot building at Platte International Commerce Center. No storefront there, just the kind of square footage that quietly decides where people work.

The New York Times named El Pollo Rey, at 901 Kansas Avenue in Kansas City, Kansas, one of the 41 Greatest Mexican Restaurants in America.

For twenty-four years the wood smoke near 7th Street Trafficway and Kansas Avenue has done the advertising. Per KCTV5, business is booming now that the rest of the country has the address. Everyone here already knew. That is the entire pleasure of a list like this: watching a place that never needed the validation get it anyway.

Elsewhere on the plate, The Pitch’s KC Sipps column counted the week’s hot dog and donut festivals plus three notable openings across the metro, which is a sentence that requires no further comment.

The Beacon and KBIA-FM won a national Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative reporting, for “Dumped in Berger”, a six-month investigation by The Beacon’s Ceilidh Kern and KBIA’s Harshawn Ratanpal. We noted last week that we were worried about a Kansas City paper. It is worth saying just as loudly when local reporting here wins the national thing.

In the Northeast, Holy Cross Catholic School (121 N. Quincy) opened an expansion its students’ grandparents would not recognize, per Northeast News: a parish hall turned into a school building that intends to be there for the next few generations too.

In Olathe, the district opened Compass, its first alternative learning program for K–8 students, a different path for kids with behavioral and social-emotional needs, built to send them back to their home schools rather than away from them. A principal’s line to KSHB 41 does the summarizing: “This has been a need for a very long time.”

Overland Park is reopening its property tax relief program with roughly $44,000 left in the 2026 account, which means the money exists and the deadline is the only thing between an eligible resident and it. Check the city’s page if that might be you.

KCKCC opened its $67 million downtown campus at 7th and State on August 17. The honest clause, from KSHB 41’s own headline: it opened amidst turnover and uncertainty next door, where a neighboring social services center’s future is unsettled. A new campus and an unsettled neighbor are both true at the same corner, and a recap that printed only the first one would be doing PR.

At the Kansas City Public Schools back-to-school convocation at Hy-Vee Arena, in front of about 2,000 colleagues, Joevenn Neo, an ESL teacher at Lincoln Prep Middle School, won two years of rent-free housing at the Midland Lofts. “I did not expect any of this,” he told KCTV5. “Quite shocked, I still am.” He also mentioned he doesn’t drive, and that downtown’s buses will do fine.

Here is the part worth naming: the giveaway, now in its eighth year, is sponsored by the Kansas City Power & Light District and The Cordish Companies, awarded through the district’s Education Foundation. Two years of free housing as a teacher prize is a genuinely lovely thing to win, and it is also a quiet measurement of what housing costs a Kansas City teacher. Both readings are correct. We’re printing both.

The rest of the file: Mercy & Truth Healthcare Ministry in Shawnee received a combined $225,000 from AdventHealth and the Ronald D. Deffenbaugh Sr. Foundation to expand its clinic. The KC Current and United Way packed 2,000 school supply kits for metro families, the back-to-school run continuing straight through from last week. KC-themed World Cup flags, carrying chants for Algeria, Argentina, England, the Netherlands and the United States, sold to benefit Ronald McDonald Houses. In Excelsior Springs, Eden Village ran a comedy show to raise money for housing, on the theory that a fundraiser people actually enjoy raises more than one they endure.

One more that took a fight. In Olathe, the Starfish Project Foundation finally has a new home, approved by the City Council in a chamber packed with supporters in red. That approval came after months of debate and a protest petition against it. The ending is warm; the road to it was not, and the neighbors who objected were at those meetings too. Both facts belong to the same story.

A dog found on the streets of Kansas City is now playing Bruiser in Legally Blonde at the New Theatre and Restaurant in Overland Park.

“That’s our Bruiser,” per KCTV5. From a street to a stage in one lifetime. See you next week.

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This Week in KC is assembled from coverage across the Kansas City newsrooms The Stare reads daily; each item is credited to the outlet that reported it. This edition was retropublished on August 25, 2026, covering August 15–21. Corrections: corrections@kcstare.com. Know something good happening in KC? tips.