It wasn’t your typical church meeting. More than 600 people filed into Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church on Linwood near Prospect to confront several state legislators about modern-day loan sharks who operated openly from storefronts and prospered from loopholes in Missouri law. The allegations about some so-called payday-loan operations were startling: interest rates as high as 800 percent; working families paying…
Know the one about downtown Kansas City? Mike Gouddou first heard the sad joke less than two years ago. He was inside Nickol’s Store Fixtures and Equipment, a West Bottoms warehouse of used pots and pans, glasses and utensils — a cemetery of sorts for Kansas City’s failed bars and restaurants. Gus Nickols had even said, “Welcome to the graveyard,”…
You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares, Petula Clark sang in her 1964 hit “Downtown.” That could be the new theme song for a number of downtown restaurants, including Carmen’s on the Boulevard (see review). These establishments are competing for customers by giving them a lot of food for reasonable prices — eating is always a good…
