The Nation: A GRACIOUS TOWN IN THE HEARTLAND

People who have never been there think vaguely of flatlands, stockyards and Rodgers and Hammerstein. In fact, Kansas City is built upon gently rolling, wooded hills on the banks of the Missouri, its stockyards are all but closed down, and everything is not only up to date but often remarkably sophisticated. Andre Maurois was so taken with the place after a visit in the '40s that he wrote: "Who in Europe, or in America, for that matter, knows that Kansas City is one of the loveliest cities on earth?"

That may be an exaggeration, although Kansas City's fiercely chauvinistic boosters do not think so. Unfortunately, many of the 22,000 people swarming into Kansas City, Mo., next week for the G.O.P. Convention will not see the best of the town. The new 17,000-seat, $23.2 million Kemper Arena, where the Republicans will gather, is set like a snow-white spaceship in the bottoms along the Missouri, just next to the decaying old stockyards. Delegates heading for the hall will encounter such scenery as the Columbia Burlap Co. and the Sweet Lassy Feed Co. If the Republicans want to browse near by during a convention break, they will have to settle for Farm World, a shop specializing in serums, wormers and insecticides, or the Kansas City Vaccine Co., which sells animal vaccines and veterinarians' instruments. The best restaurant near the hall, a steak house called the Golden Ox, will be jammed, so visitors may find themselves staying inside the hall, settling for hot dogs. For those unfortunates, however, there will be at least one amenity. As a concession to the city's midsummer heat, the Republican National Committee agreed to allow the sale of beer inside the arena.

Kansas City (pop. 513,000) is spread out over 316 square miles. That spaciousness is one of its charms, but distances make it difficult for visitors without cars to inspect the place. Actually, like many Midwestern cities—except Chicago—Kansas City is two cities: downtown and elsewhere. The city is now laboring to restore the dreary 140sq. block downtown area, which is populated only during office hours and abandoned at 5.

The city that Maurois was writing about is elsewhere, outside the downtown area. Kansas City has 118 miles of tree-lined parkways and gracious boulevards and 7,211 acres of public parks. Kansas Citians have a fetish for fountains; it is almost a gaucherie for a developer to erect a building without one outside. The latest is a $150,000 concrete and steel-alloy fountain in Blue Valley Park. Some of the loveliest are in the Spanish-style Country Club Plaza, an opulent shopping and residential complex; it was the nation's first shopping center when Developer J.C. Nichols built it in the early '20s.