An Afternoon in Westport

At the corner of Pennsylvania and Westport Road sits Kelly’s Westport Inn, residing in the oldest building in Kansas City, MO.  What was once The Albert Boone Store back in the 1800s now houses one of the more recognizable watering holes in town.  Cattycorner to Kelly’s sits Beer Kitchen, a recently opened taproom of specialty beers.  The contrast between the two could not be sharper.  But it is perfect for this setting:  Old meeting new, relics meeting up-and-comers. 

And the meeting isn’t limited to the buildings and businesses.  In just a short amount of time quite of few people come to recognize others in the area, bumping

into long lost acquaintances.  The handshakes and hugs are genuine.   A mixture of generations sit around this patio of McCoy’s Public House, occupying a third piece of the intersection. 

This intersection is not unfamiliar to me either, a member of Generation X, sitting between a Millenial and an undisclosed generation (it isn’t my place to ask).  Many a night of my younger years were spent barhopping and carousing this area.  My favorite spot in the city to people watch is the fourth corner, at Harry’s where the best Martinis in town are made and consumed.      

But those Martinis are not consumed by me much anymore.  In the decade that has transpired since then I have come to view Westport as a sort of jumping off place for my adulthood.  A place where my maturity moved me west and south into to career and family and stability.

I could always count on this intersection to feel alive on a Friday night, intoned and imbibed with culture teeming from the very bricks of the buildings.  Loud voices of youth that ran amongst the crowded establishments of sociability have quieted to courtesy of discourse across a lunch table.  I do not see the same mixture of cross-culture involvement quite as much 2pm but then, I am not looking through the eyes of a 20 year old anymore. 

I see the follies of my younger years and am happy that I can use my credit card to pay for my visit, not a wadded up bill that was the last in my pocket, if I had happened to remember to pay at all before leaving to go toward wherever the visit was to push me.