Is Westport on its last legs?
Nope, times are definitely tough, but it’s more like a changing of the guard. More than a half dozen businesses either have – or are about to bite the dust in KC’s original entertainment district – but a new generation is ramping up to sally forth in the post COVID era,
“Westport is just in a transition period,” explains longtime Westport landlord and businessman Bill Niro. “It’s actually upgrading a little. You know, we’ve still got the Buzzard. Harpo’s and Kelley”s, but we’ve got a big country bar coming in taking the space of the Foundry and the old Hurricane. The southwest corner of Westportand Broadway is going to be the new, big gay club in town called Fountain Haus. And we have Throwback KC and Bridger’s that are both primarily black dance clubs. But you know what? The whole live music scene is now gone from Westport and that’s unfortunate.”
The latest post COVID casualties include the Riot Room, Joe’s Pizza Buy the Slice and Westport Saloon.
A new country bar is taking over the Riot Room space, and it appears that an offshoot of Joe’s KC BBQ will take over the Joe’s pizza space (that ripped off Pyramid Pizza in the same location with near identical twisted pizza crust and jars of honey for dessert, opening into Kelley’s.
A potential bidding war may erupt where Westport Saloon is concerned.
“The very day they announced they were closing at the end of the year I had two calls asking about the space,” Niro says. “And now I have at least three people interested in it.”
Unfortunately, Westport still has to vie party supremacy with downtown’s Power & Light District.
Speaking of which…how has the P&L fared the past 20 or so months?
“I dunno,” Nigro says. “But the city’s still putting in $1.5 million a month, so what do you think? The city manager told me that that will continue until 2040.”
The latest…
“We just this week got out from under the mask mandate, and Kansas hasn’t had one for a long time,” Nigro says. “Unfortunately, we also have dropped our customer service in a big way, and throw that in with COVID and some crime issues and nobody wants to come down lately.”
Add to all that, the racial complexities that continue to haunt Westport financially.
“The city forces us to hire (expensive) civil rights monitors to allow us to check people for guns,” Nigro says. “And I want to know why we’re the only ones who have to do this. They don’t even do that at City Hall.”
Throw in some rainy day flooding that can take out six to eight cars at a time near the old America’s Pub and an influx of homeless types and things can get prickly at times.
“I told the city manager last week, ‘You know what,’ ” Niro says. “I’ve been coming to these same city meeting for 10 years and we have the same problems and I’m getting sick of it.”
Hopefully not, but that clearly is a question worth pondering after more than a decade of battling downtown’s taxpayer-funder Power & Light District, being forced to pay usuriously high rates for minority oversight of its summer entry checkpoints, fending off homeless folks and 20-plus months of COVID.
Bottom line: it’s been a rough year for KC’s “original” entertainment district.
Power and Light has been a boondoggle for the most part because The T-Mobile/Sprint Center failed to get a anchor tenant. You know that team then mayor Kay Barnes promised if we build all of this stuff? Truth is while sports fans hang out at P&L before and after and event. For some odd reason concert goers don’t. And concerts have become the anchor tenant of that building.