This Week in Kansas City: week two in KCK, five steel poppies, and a preschool run by teenagers

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

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.

Last week this column led with a storm that stripped northeast Kansas City, Kansas, and the room at The Village Initiative on Quindaro that spent the first day doing two jobs at once. This week the room was still open.

By Saturday, the fourth day of cleanup, volunteers were handing out burgers, hot dogs and groceries in the lot, and Selena Overton-Gant was singing while she cooked, per KCTV5. Her church, Roswell Church of Christ, was destroyed in the storm; the congregation held Sunday service in a hotel in Overland Park instead. “That’s in my heart. That’s what I woke up with this morning,” she told the station, and then the line the week gets remembered by: “if this is what it takes to bring us together, amen.” Rachel Russell of Justice for Wyandotte counted fifty to seventy-five volunteers a day, some for an hour, some for the whole day. Into the next week, per FOX4, the Village Initiative was still at it: diapers for the kids who needed them, food for everyone else, day after day after the cameras had mostly moved on.

If you want to be part of week three: there is a free concert this Sunday, August 30, from 2 to 5 p.m. in the Wilson’s Pizza parking lot at 1801 Quindaro Blvd., per FOX4, with three DJs, a “Bring Back the Block” banner, and a fundraising goal of $1,500 for storm victims. That is a modest number on purpose. It is the kind a block can actually hit.

At the entrance to the Overland Park Arboretum, by the LongHouse Visitor Center and looking out over the pond, there are now five stainless-steel poppies standing twelve to twenty feet tall. The sculpture is called “Growing Kindness.” It was dedicated August 21, cost $1.1 million raised through private donations, and was fabricated with the help of Zahner, per the Johnson County Post; KSHB 41 was there for the dedication.

The poppies were the favorite subject of Jeff Hanson, an Overland Park painter born with neurofibromatosis who lost most of his sight at twelve to a tumor on his optic nerve, and who, that same year, in the middle of chemotherapy, started selling watercolor notecards from a card table in his family’s driveway to raise money for the Children’s Tumor Foundation. He painted in thick, bright acrylics he could see. He painted for Elton John and Billy Joel. By the time he died in 2020 at 27, his art had raised about $7 million for charity; by what would have been his thirtieth birthday, the total his foundation credits to him had passed $10 million.

Here is the detail worth the whole item. His parents, Julie and Hal Hanson, did not want a memorial. They named the sculpture after the idea instead of the person. “It will represent what he believed in, not him the person,” Hal Hanson told the Post. Go stand under it. It works.

KSHB 41 got the first look inside the American Royal’s new $375 million complex near 118th and State Avenue in KCK, and the first phase opens September 10, invitation only that day, then the public: a Royal Showcase Horse Show September 12–13, the World Series of Barbecue September 30 through October 4, and the fall livestock show October 9–25. The opening phase is 390,000 square feet of barns and exhibition hall: 3,774 cattle ties, 1,528 horse stalls, eight temporary arenas, or, if you rearrange the furniture, twenty-nine volleyball courts. Construction started in 2023, stalled on money, and what was supposed to take a year took three; more phases run through late 2028.

The honest clause, and it is a big one: $155 million of the $375 million is STAR bonds, sales-tax dollars pledged to the bonds instead of the state’s general fund, which is to say your money by another route. Do the division and the number gets friendlier and more demanding at the same time: the public put up 41% of this complex. No share certificate comes with that, and no dividend. What it does mean is that 41% of a $375 million project is the largest single stake in it, and anybody else holding a stake that size would have terms in writing: dates on the calendar, seats in the room, a price for the neighbors. That is the reasonable thing to want here: public days that are genuinely public, a resident rate on the horse show and the barbecue, and room in those barns for the 4-H kids, the school groups, and the club teams whose families paid for the roof over them. First phase opens September 10. Forty-one percent of it is yours.

Two more you can walk into now or soon. Danny’s Burger Shack, the Northland burger place that started as a food truck in 2022, is open in the old Bar West space at 7174 Renner Road in western Shawnee, per the Johnson County Post; co-owners Joe Sessel and Mark Denton say the first weeks were “overwhelming” and the wait times are the price of a burger that is pressed when you order it. In northern Overland Park, Ken Pham is opening Pho & Boil in September at 7702 Shawnee Mission Parkway, the former Smoke Town BBQ, with eight-to-ten-hour pho on one side of the menu and Cajun shrimp, crab and seasonal crawfish on the other, because his family ran a Vietnamese restaurant in Texas and has people in New Orleans. “This is right in the middle of everywhere,” he told the Post. He is correct about the intersection.

Anjin, the twenty-seat Japanese pub at 1708 Oak Street in the Crossroads, made Bon Appétit’s 19 Best New Restaurants in America, per KCTV5, the same year it was a James Beard Best New Restaurant finalist. The magazine’s line was about a cabbage salad “erupting” out of a small glass bowl, with fried anchovies, furikake and wafers of dashi caramel. Udon, rotating yakitori, shochu and sake; Thursday through Sunday from 5:30, Mondays until midnight. Twenty seats. Plan accordingly.

Charles Bey of Smokey Bey BBQ in Liberty beat 43 other pitmasters to win the Made for KC BBQ Championship, per KCTV5, and the prize is a real one: an eighteen-month run in Concourse B at KCI, opening around March 2027, plus a branded line of rubs and sauces. The contest is run by Vantage and OHM, the airport’s concession operators, with the Kansas City Barbeque Society. Previous winners include The O.G. Bandits and Meat Rushmore of Lee’s Summit, so there is a lineage now. The Stare keeps a standing record of KC barbecue, and this is a name to watch for in it.

Northeast News answered last week’s El Pollo Rey item with the neighborhood’s own case. Juan Bautista, who started at Garozzo’s at sixteen and opened Carmen’s Cafe in Brookside in 1999, has been grilling tacos al carbón over open fire from the El Indio truck at Independence and Chelsea since 2015. When the old Aaron’s building collapsed down the Avenue, he bought the former El Taco at 5200 Independence Avenue, kept the staff, and opened KC Tacos and Wings inside, with the truck still parked out front. Per Bryan Stalder’s piece: you don’t have to cross the state line for the smoke.

From Dos Mundos, a recipe becomes a company. Chorizo KC (KC Chorizo Co. on the label, per Tere Siqueira’s story) began with Carlos Dominguez’s father making chorizo the way it is made in Camargo, Chihuahua, for relatives and friends. Carlos and Sara Dominguez turned it into a USDA-certified Kansas business, which Carlos calls the hardest and most important milestone they’ve hit. You can taste it at Dos Reales in Shawnee and Overland Park and Los Alamos Cocina on the Westside, or take it home from El Paisano and Franklin General Store in Shawnee and Supermart El Torito II in KCK. “More than a recipe, for me, it represents a family tradition, moments shared with my dad.”

The weekend, per Sarah Sipple’s KC Sipps column in The Pitch: Dolce Bakery in Prairie Village is selling book-themed baked goods through Saturday (Fourth Wing is involved); Carne Diem in Briarcliff marks two years on Saturday with $2 cheeseburgers from 11 to 3, a dollar of each going to Children’s Mercy; and the Daiquiri District soft-opens at Martini Corner on Saturday at noon. The counter-note, kept on purpose: Session Taco in the Crossroads closes Sunday after nine years.

The Oak Park Lab Preschool in the North Kansas City School District is enrolling now for an October start, per KCTV5. It is free. It is taught by Oak Park High School students in a year-long Child Development course, who write the lesson plans, run the classes, and watch what happens, under teacher Amy Hines, who describes it as real-life, hands-on experience “they may not have experienced otherwise.” The families get preschool; the little kids get a first practice at leaving home for a morning; the teenagers get the beginning of a career in teaching or pediatric nursing.

The part that stopped us: this has been going on for more than fifty years. It is not a pilot. It is an institution that happens to be run by seventeen-year-olds, which is a sentence Kansas City should say out loud more often. 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. Corrections: corrections@kcstare.com. Know something good happening in KC? tips.