Seeking the Good Life in Johnson County and the Edge City

Date of trip:June 20,2009

Last Saturday on the way to watching a Rain Delay and 8 Innings of decent baseball between the Royals and the Cardinals I went to one of the buildings at the Johnson County Museums. We did not make it to the All 1950's electric house. That is a trip for another day.

Edge City is defined in Wiki as:

"Edge city is an American term for a concentration of business, shopping, and entertainment outside a traditional urban area in what had recently been a residential suburb or semi-rural community. The term was first used in Tom Wolfe's 1968 novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and popularized in the 1991 book Edge City: Life on the New Frontier by Joel Garreau, who established its current meaning while working as a reporter for the Washington Post. Garreau argues that the edge city has become the standard form of urban growth worldwide, representing a 20th-century urban form unlike that of the 19th-century central downtown. Other terms for the areas include suburban activity centers, megacenters, and suburban business districts."

As Johnson County could be a textbook example of suburban sprawl,much of the museum is dedicated to how farm lands became the burbs, whether you use the term the burbs,bedroom communities,or as the museum frequently uses the term Edge Cities.

After a brief introduction film in the first room, a couple of rooms are dedicated to early Indian settlements, the Mission at Shawnee and Bleeding Kansas. These rooms were interesting because the origins of some of the street names can be found. I always wondered why there was a street named Black Bob. The explanation is:

(again from Wiki, but it explained at the museum)

"Black Bob/Wa-wah-che-pa-e-hai is the name of a Native American Chief. He was the chief of a Shawnee band, originally a part of the Hatha­wekela division of the Shawnee. Known as the Chaliawa in French term Chalaqua. About the year 1826 they separated from their kindred, then living in eastern Missouri on land granted to them about 1793 by Baron Carondelet, near Cape Girardeau, then in Spanish territory, and removed to Kansas, where, by treaty with their chief, Black Bob, in 1854, they were given rights on the Shawnee reservation in that state. Under Black Bob's leadership they refused to remove with the rest of the tribe to Indian Territory in 1808, but are now incorporated with them, either in the Cherokee Nation or with the Absentee Shawnee or in Ohio with Morning Star Shawnee Nation/Chaliawa who are documented in 2007 as Blood Decent. (From the Access Genealogy website And the Ancestry Book of the Family of Decent.)"

Strangline comes from a train that linked the area, another odd name for the streets.

Once Statehood came and Bleeding Kansas was put behind the area, we see the growth of suburbia,pictures of Victorian Houses,families and into the 1950's.Highways , as the county is the meeting point between the great I-35 running North and South Border to Border and I-70 linking the east to the West.Shopping malls are celebrated and as the museums people came to the area whether farmers to bed room community dwellers seeking The Good Life.

The Museum didn't make much of an impression on me at first, only as I began to think about it and what a prime example Johnson County is of the whole suburban boom of the post war era.Fittingly it's across from a park and close to apartments and strip malls and easily accessible on the I-35 loop that circles the Kansas City Metropolitan area.