A City of Fountains

A little over a year ago I had major foot surgery, and as a result, I spent most of last summer migrating back and forth between our guest room and the couch. Thank the Lord and his prophetess Megan Rapinoe that the Women’s World Cup was entertaining, because outside of that, my June ’19 was quite a bummer. As I named constellations in the ceiling tile and counted the hours to my next vicodin, I got through it all in part by imagining all the fun stuff I was going to do when Summer 2020 rolled around.

Sigh.

To be clear, I’m not complaining or woe-is-me-ing to any great degree. Given the state I was in a year ago, I’m one of the few people on earth for whom May 2020 was less challenging than May 2019, even if my dreams of busting out of the house for concert-going and sports-shouting haven’t panned out. There’s nowhere to go, but at least I can walk there.

One thing I have done to pass the time this summer is sit next to fountains. Oft can I be found next to fountains old and new, functional and not, public and private, urban and Kansan, cloistered and vista’d. Perhaps I do some reading; perhaps I plan a class; perhaps I just watch the water circulate. It’s a nice enough diversion, and I live in the right place for it, because Kansas City is bananas for fountains.

Plenty of articles recirculate the claim that the KC area has “more than 200 fountains,” though the original source of this statistic is not clear. Still, the number passes the sniff test, and if anyone did a census that included things like fountains in people’s yards or the little waterfalls framing the signage of office parks, the number would undoubtedly be far higher. A visitor to KC who did only the most basic tourist stuff—shop the Plaza, stroll the galleries at the Nelson, take in a Royals game—might notice that they’ve rarely been more than a couple blocks from a fountain during their trip. And the thing is, while the Plaza is almost comically dense with fountains, the rest of the metro area, even down to residential neighborhoods, has an uncommonly high number as well.

The map of KC fountains maintained by the City of Fountains Foundation is impressive. It chronicles fountains as far-flung as the “Kids at Heart” Fountain in Lee’s Summit and, 43 miles north, the abstract unfinished-billboard-esque monstrosity that welcomes travelers to KCI. But if you know KC in any detail, you realize pretty quickly that when you look at the map of fountains, what you are really looking at is a map of money. There are more fountains west of Troost than east; more in Johnson County than Wyandotte; more in northeast Johnson County than Olathe. Even where fountains exist on the East side of KCMO, many of them (especially along the Paseo) were built roughly a century ago when the neighborhoods that hold them were wealthy and white. So the map of KC fountains is not only a map of money, but also a map of the history of money.

The architect of KC’s fountain disparities—as he was of so many of KC’s disparities—was the early-twentieth-century real estate developer JC Nichols. Residential neighborhoods throughout the KC metro have fountains, but the neighborhoods that Nichols developed in the 1910’s and 1920’s are absolutely teeming with them.[1] For instance, a walk down a one-mile entirely-residential stretch of 69th Street from Ward Parkway to Rockhill takes one past four fountains. And that’s just on the Missouri side—Mission Hills is even more saturated with fountains.[2] As the architectural historian Sara Stevens writes, fountains were an essential part of Nichols’ development strategy:

Nichols’s landscape architects also used another kind of design—statuary fountains—to sell buyers a vision of high-end suburban living. The neighborhood’s traffic-directing street layouts created small, postage-stamp sized parks, islands surrounded by roads. These Nichols turned into selling points by filling them with fountains and sculptures. He collected the art on trips to Europe, adding to the general cachet of the endeavor, and held receptions to unveil new acquisitions. More than mere ornaments in the landscape, Nichols believed these objets d’art established an aesthetic tone that reflected the street design, and helped build a long-term vision for the quality and financial stability of the area.

Fountains were not, however, the most important driver of Nichols’ economic success. That, without question, was the use of racially restrictive deeds to create exclusively white neighborhoods. Advertising signs for Nichols’ neighborhoods referred to them as “Protected Residence Property.” It doesn’t take much intuition to guess from whom the developer promised to protect the buyer. That coded language, which was printed on billboards in a larger typeface even than the phrase “Attractive Prices,” makes clear that the exclusion of African-Americans was a core selling point—perhaps the core selling point—of southwestern Kansas City during the city’s interwar boom. Nichols laid out the racial and economic divides that still shape Kansas City a century later, and tragically, his influence extended far wider. As Stevens points out, he was the founding president of the National Association of Home Builders, and his restrictive deeds the model that the Federal Housing Administration recommended to developers in the 1940’s.

Photo credit: State Historical Society of Missouri

I live in one of the neighborhoods that Nichols developed, and in spite of the fact that the restrictive deeds he used were finally made fully illegal 52 years ago, it is uncommon for me to see any African-Americans when I walk around my neighborhood. My neighborhood has a variety of public spaces scattered among its private residences, and more than anywhere else I have ever lived, people actually use those public spaces. But when Nichols designed those public spaces, he did so in a way that aggressively policed who gets to count as part of “the public,” and that legacy is still visible today. And yes, one could state truthfully that anyone is allowed to walk down the street and sit on a bench in my neighborhood. But the blunt fact is that only someone who looks more or less like me is likely to feel fully comfortable doing so. The restrictions Nichols designed, and which generations of white Kansas Citians bought up with enthusiasm, still define the daily lived experience of this city.

The most famous and photographed fountain in Kansas City was named to honor JC Nichols. It sits off of Main Street at the entry to the Plaza, and features statues of four horses which are meant to symbolize “the four mighty rivers of the world,” all of which are located in Europe or North America. The Nichols Memorial Fountain is featured in countless Kansas City postcards, it is virtually guaranteed to make an appearance when any Chiefs game comes back from commercial, and I suspect that most Kansas Citians have a picture of themselves standing near or in front of it. I didn’t even realize that I had one until I went scrolling through my facebook photos, but there I am, eleven years ago. 

Photo Credit: Anne Twitty

Unlike the smaller fountains in residential neighborhoods, the Nichols Fountain is a public space used by all sorts of people, and it has long been a key location for political protests, including the recent Black Lives Matter protests. More than anyplace else in the city, the Nichols Fountain is Kansas City’s town square.

The news came out today that the Parks Board is going to remove Nichols’ name from the fountain. Good. And I’m sure that someone will argue that this constitutes “erasing history,” but that’s ridiculous. Nichols’ influence is so wide-ranging and profound that to erase his history, you would have to erase Kansas City itself. We live our lives along geographical lines he quite literally drew, and it will take a lot more than altering the name of an equine fountain to erase that. But Kansas City cannot continue to honor him. Taking his name off a fountain is of course entirely symbolic, but it is a symbolic action this city has to take if we want our next 100 years to be defined by something other than the sins of the past 100 years.   

Further reading: If you're interested in knowing more about the history of Nichols' role in Kansas City, the article I cite by Sara Stevens is well worth your time. Whitney Terrell's novel The King of King's County deals with a fictionalized version of the Nichols family, and Evan Connell's Mrs. Bridge, probably the most important novel ever written about Kansas City, depicts life in Nichols' Country Club District in the 1930's.

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[1] I was going to say “overflowing,” but I have too much respect for you, dear reader.

[2] Sorry—couldn’t help that one.

Forced and Erroneous: 16 Notes on the 16-Year-Old Movie "Wimbledon"

Last night, as I contemplated falling asleep, I instead stumbled upon the movie Wimbledon. Then I woke up and wrote the following, which I believe constitutes the most time anyone has spent thinking about Wimbledon since it came out sixteen years ago.

Spoiler alert: In the text below, I discuss many “plot points” from the “film” Wimbledon.

1. The meet-cute in the 2004 romantic comedy Wimbledon happens the day before Wimbledon begins, when our male lead, the never-quite-made-it-big British tennis player Peter Colt (Paul Bettany), is assigned the wrong hotel room, and accidentally walks in on rising American tennis star Lizzie Bradbury (Kirsten Dunst) while she is the shower. Lizzie is surprisingly chill about this situation—she never for a second seems even vaguely surprised or worried. I get that the screenwriters are trying to suggest that she’s cool as a cucumber and doesn’t have hang-ups about her body or whatever, and later it’s revealed that she knows who Peter is because she’s seen one of his matches. But I have to think that even a super-sex-positive, tennis-aware woman with icewater in her veins is going to display at least a moment’s shock when a tall male stranger walks into her hotel room. Regardless, the audience reaction to a meet-cute probably shouldn’t be “why the hell isn’t this woman calling security?”

2. Lizzie Bradbury would be a much better name for a girl detective than a women’s tennis player. 

3. A young Jaime Lannister appears in the movie in the “wisecracking buddy” role. He’s supposed to be German, but I initially thought he was trying and failing to sound Irish. Just let the man be pretty and English—that’s why God put him on the Earth.  

4. Any sports movie is going to face the problem that Hollywood actors aren’t actually built like athletes, but sometimes it’s at least plausible—Kevin Costner as a minor-league catcher; Denzel Washington as a aging playground hoops legend; Geena Davis as a line-drive hitter—these are concepts you can believe if you squint. As for Wimbledon...yeesh. Paul Bettany is tall, so that’s good, but he’s more than a little doughy if you mentally compare him to Rafa Nadal. And Dunst, God love her, was far too much the ingénue circa 2004 to be believable as an elite athlete, particularly in a sport that requires the raw explosiveness of 21st-century tennis.

5. And then there’s the problem of Dunst’s tennis form, which is terrible. During the tournament montages, they mostly mask this problem with clever editing, but there’s a scene where Dunst and Bettany play flirtatious pantomime tennis in the park, and when she fake-serves it looks like the Elaine Benes dance from Seinfeld.  

6. There’s a whole plotline about how we know that Peter is a good guy because he looks worried when ballboys get hit by errant serves. That seems a low bar to clear.

7. Peter and Lizzie spend a lot of time driving around England on picturesque dates. To be clear, they are doing this in the middle of the Wimbledon tournament. I know that players have off days, but I really doubt that Roger Federer is taking romantic strolls through the countryside the day before the quarterfinals.

8. In real life, ten out of the eleven tournaments staged between 2000 and 2010 featured at least one Williams sister in the Wimbledon final. On four occasions Venus and Serena played each other in the final round, including the two years immediately before this film came out. I bring this up because I cannot recall a single black person appearing in the movie Wimbledon.

9. It’s a romantic comedy, so there is of course an airport scene early in the third act (Lizzie and her father are flying home while Peter plays in the men’s final). Bear in mind that this is an airport scene in 2004, depicting two people waiting to board an international flight from Europe to the US. Now consider that Lizzie and her father just straight-up abandon their bags in the terminal. I was genuinely more interested in knowing how long Heathrow got shut down for the bomb-sniffing dogs than I was in who won the match, but alas, my questions were never addressed.

10. Late in the second act, Lizzie tells Peter that she does not want to continue seeing him because tennis needs to be her first priority. After some hijinks involving trellis-climbing, he breaks into her apartment the night before a big match and she seems...surprisingly okay with it. Being down with having her privacy violated appears to be a core trait of Lizzie Bradbury’s character. Anyway, the next day she plays badly and gets knocked out of the tournament, at which point she breaks things off with Peter and leaves town. Later, Peter gives her a big public apology, but the apology is quite vague, and it could easily be read as him apologizing not for breaking into her apartment, but for rocking her world so thoroughly that it made her bad at tennis.

11. Indeed, to that last point, the question of how sex the night before a match impacts one’s tennis performance is discussed frequently in the movie. The film suggests emphatically that sex makes men better at tennis, but it makes women worse.

12. At least that’s its opinion regarding hetero relationships. The film has gay and lesbian characters, but they are all queer quippy sexless sidekicks of the sort that future film historians will be led to believe were omnipresent from 1998 to 2005.

13. Peter wins the Wimbledon final. His opponent is portrayed as a bad guy, though his bad guy bona fides are that he is cocky, he is slightly less concerned than Peter is when ballboys get hit in the face, and he makes a pass at Lizzie at one point (though unlike Peter he stops pursuing her when she says she’s not interested). He also has really good hair. He is, to put it mildly, a poorly realized villain.

14. I would not have guessed at the time that the actor in Wimbledon who would have the most Hollywood success over the next sixteen years would be Jon Favreau. But then, who could have foreseen Baby Yoda? I also don’t think I would have guessed that Kirsten Dunst would end up engaged to Landry from Friday Night Lights. Crucifictorious forever!

15. Both our leads have “wacky families.” There is the inevitable wisecracking sibling, and an overprotective yet wise father. Also, Peter’s parents are in the middle of a madcap marital dispute that has led to Peter’s father living in a treehouse—that’s like ten percent of the film. The movie would have been much better if most of the family stuff had been removed, in no small part because then it only would have been about forty minutes long.

16. The sports movie/rom-com hybrid is truly a mutant hellbeast, combining as it does two of the most formulaic movie genres. Bull Durham is the only example I can think of that is especially good. So is Wimbledon more successful as a rom-com or sports movie? It’s honestly a tough call. What it has to say about romance is more offensive, but the way it imagines sports is considerably dumber. Guess we’ll just have to score it a deuce.