Let’s Go Prospecting!

Charles Ray Bradley sits on a short set of concrete stairs, a cup of McDonald’s coffee in his hand.

His red ball cap is bleached with sun and smeared with grease. Every morning, he drives a maroon Isuzu from his house on the East Side to his auto shop near the intersection of Prospect and 21st Street.

When he started Bradley’s Garage in 1984, he says, business was good. Now he comes to work when he feels like it, leaves when he gets sick of it and, in between, sits on the stairs with a clunky cordless phone that rarely rings.

“It used to be something, but now it ain’t nothing,” he says of his business on Prospect Avenue, a 15-mile artery that’s one of the city’s most neglected yet most notorious thoroughfares.

A few weeks ago, Prospect was the route for a 20-block moving shootout between cops and drug dealers; it’s been the bloodline for a staggering number of drive-by shootings this year. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, residents of the Prospect corridor earn less than half the median income in Kansas City, Missouri. Based on a 2002 city estimate, more than 70 percent of the homes there are worth less than $50,000.

Slicing through the 3rd and 5th City Council districts, the area has suffered from ineffective representation. In 2002, community leaders embarked on the ambitious Prospect Corridor Initiative, a project that aimed to revive this struggling sector of the city. Just five years later, that city-led effort seems to have been abandoned.

But Prospect is far from dead.

Some business owners have been here for half a lifetime. Loretta Washington celebrated her grand opening on April Fools’ Day, 1979, and business at her sewing and alteration shop, near 75th Street, has been nonstop ever since. James Smith, now 82, was inspired to start his driving school near 25th Street back in 1957, when he was the only Midwestern Baptist Seminary student who had a car.

If Charles Ray Bradley has grown jaded over years of sporadic business, even this cynical mechanic occasionally causes a stir on Prospect. His real love isn’t cars, anyway. It’s horses. He’s got seven of them — Kid, Peaches, Baldy, Smokey, Buddy, Peanut and Sugar — and he’s been known to bring one or two to work with him.

Walk the street, and you’ll find people who don’t want to complain about crime and blight or be congratulated for sticking around. They just want Kansas City residents to swing by when they’re looking for an oil change or a haircut.
Joe Giamalva looks like he was born in shoulder pads. Even if he wasn’t wearing a St. Pius football T-shirt, his broad shoulders and short-cropped hair would give him the air of a linebacker.

Holding the line seems to be a metaphor for his business, which anchors the northern end of Prospect. Giamalva has been operating Speedy’s Food and Liquor Mart, a windowless building at Ninth Street, for more than 30 years. He runs this joint with his sister’s husband, Larry Marshall, a former Chiefs player who still ranks third in the team’s history for his 28-yard average kickoff return during the 1972 season.

Giamalva lives in Liberty, but he grew up just a few blocks away from here. He started the convenience store after he graduated from Northeast High School in 1973.

Longtime customers who now have kids of their own tell Giamalva that they remember playing pinball and Pac-Man while they watched out the door for the school bus. Those games are gone now, replaced by old-school vending machines that hawk candy and “Bling Watches” for a quarter or two.

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The morning rush brings in people buying cigarettes, coffee and sodas for their commute, and Giamalva knows most of them by name. When a man with a short bottle of liquor tries to set his booze on the counter to pick a few items from the shelves, one of Giamalva’s employees chides him — not like a troublemaker off the street but as though he were a friend who’s pushed his patience a little too far.

“Come on, man, you know it’s illegal to bring liquor back in here,” he says.

Giamalva acknowledges that the neighborhood has changed. This building used to house a Safeway. Some of the houses have slid into disrepair. Outside, his parking lot hosts a billboard in Spanish and a sign that reads “Bienvenidos a Speedy’s Convenience and Liquor Store.”

He was robbed a couple of Christmases ago, but that’s the only time he’s been hit in three decades. To be honest, he says, the only real threat to his shop is competition from the Costco at Linwood and Main.

But he has fame on his side. He’s not talking about a business partner who’s a former Chief, either. He’s talking about spicy cucumbers.

“We’re known for the hottest pickle ever made,” he says.

He pulls a shiny sample from a clear jar that looks like a test container in a mad scientist’s laboratory. He cradles the pickle in a napkin, its spices evident even an arm’s length away. He won’t reveal the recipe, but these bad boys marinate in the jar for a week before they’re ready.

“People who have moved say, ‘I drove all the way from Grandview to get one of these.'”
James Townsend wears a gold scorpion around his neck and keeps his sunglasses on in a dimly lighted bar. He’s a man with a reputation to protect.

Townsend has never strayed more than a block or two off this thoroughfare since he moved here with his brother in 1950. When he was 17, he used to sneak into a bar called the Green Duck Lounge at the corner of 26th Street. Now he owns it.

That’s where the reputation comes in.

The Green Duck is more than a neighborhood gathering place. The business was established and made famous by local icon Leon Jordan, a police lieutenant and state representative who founded the black political club Freedom Inc. at the Green Duck. Jordan was shot at point-blank range and killed outside the bar in 1970.

“People come to the Green Duck because it’s the Green Duck,” Townsend says. “It had a name far before I got it.”

A sign on the door bars weapons, drugs and anyone under the age of 30. Townsend says he doesn’t want youngsters coming in and creating a ruckus. That didn’t prevent him from getting robbed early in the summer.

From the back of the building, someone managed to roll out a refrigerator-sized safe containing several days’ worth of profits. Townsend says he filed a police report, but nothing ever came of it. He doesn’t blame the burglary on his location, though. Sometimes, he says, it seems like any crime on the East Side gets attached to Prospect. Even so, he’s bulking up security.

“I’m going to stop ’em eventually,” he says of potential burglars. “Thing is, if you get lucky enough to shoot one, you go to the penitentiary.”

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There’s plenty to defend here, and not just a political legacy. A sign at the far edge of the long wooden bar says “Happy’s Corner” — a guy regulars called Happy drank draft beer in that spot for years. On the wall facing the dance floor, another sign reads: “This Corner Dedicated to Big Zeke.” A table next to the sign is worn from all the domino games Townsend played there with Zeke, who died in 2000. A lot of the patrons are getting older, Townsend says, and can’t drive themselves here. They get their kids to give them a lift.

One summer morning, half a dozen men sit with the remains of breakfast plates and neatly folded newspapers in front of them. They’re all retired. “We just sit and talk to the old fellows,” one says.

They won’t reveal today’s topic of discussion; they just laugh and say you can’t print that kind of thing in the paper.
Of the three dozen businesses that repair or sell cars on Prospect, Robert Frazier’s is the most welcoming. In fact, 39th Street Detailing is probably the brightest auto shop in town. It must be the only one covered with murals of kids playing basketball and staring at the stars.

Just after Frazier opened five years ago, he says, a bunch of high-schoolers came knocking. They wanted to paint his building.

“I asked them, ‘How much?’ They said, ‘Nothing.’ I said, ‘Where’s the paint?'” Frazier recalls with a laugh.

Business is light on this Friday afternoon. But as Frazier finishes patching up a wheelbarrow tire, a young boy pedals up on a green bike. He’s wearing a striped business shirt and a blue tie. In a sheepish voice, he tells Frazier that he’s on his way to work.

“I’ll tell your sister you got a job,” the mechanic says excitedly. “Stay with it.”

Frazier has four kids of his own. He grew up at 45th Street and Prospect and learned how to fix cars from his dad and a family friend. For a while, he greased the streets for work, scraping together $10 here and $20 there by patching engines and changing oil. But he knew he wanted his own business. These days, his two older sons come in on the weekends to help him out and make some money. It’s tough to find good work around here, the 41-year-old father says.

“But you ain’t got to shoot nobody for money — there’s enough for everyone,” he adds. “I try to inspire their ego, you know, let them know they can do anything. It took me almost 40 years to get what I got, but I got it.”

He lets Michael Drone use a piece of it, too. At the edge of the parking lot, Drone has set up a blue umbrella and a sign that says “Lawnmowers fixed on-the-spot.” Like Frazier, he learned young and practiced his skills out on the street.

When Drone was 17, he says, his lawn mower broke, and the repair at the shop was too expensive. A friend’s dad, who was an airplane mechanic, taught him about rods and pistons and the inner workings of engines. Drone fixed his own machine and started working on other people’s mowers, too. Years ago, he set up his first stand at 63rd Street and Indiana. Soon he had 20 customers.

“It was as if they were starving for a mechanic,” he says.

Charging $25 to $35, depending on the task, this gig pays the bills. But it might have cost him a career as a portrait artist. Drone says he used to have quite a portfolio of drawings and paintings.

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He says his art skills are rusty now, but he could pick it back up if he wanted. Maybe when the high school murals need some touching up, he’ll unpack his brushes.
There’s a reason that Lutfi’s Fried Fish is painted bright-yellow. Co-owner Arthurine Simmons is convinced that it’s the color of appetite. Customers come in wanting fish, she says, and they leave with french fries and strawberry shortcake, too.

Not that this institution needs tricks to get customers. Lutfi’s is backed by a 10-year history, and it’s the only place you can get catfish fried in a secret batter perfected by a family herbologist.

Of the 15 restaurants on Prospect (including half a dozen fast-food chains), this yellow café’s biggest competition might be itself: the second Lutfi’s, a few miles south, at 70th Street.

Simmons’ parents hail from Meridian, Mississippi, so she grew up around catfish and orange roughy, red beans and rice, fried okra and cornbread. Her grandfather was a master of culinary seasoning. Simmons’ oldest brother — the first of her 19 siblings — followed in his footsteps and created, quite simply, the best frying batter Simmons had ever tasted.

It was the kind of recipe that begged for a restaurant.

In 1997, Simmons and her youngest brother, Lutfi, opened a fish joint on Troost. That place burned in 2000, and they put the business on hold until 2003. That’s when they packed their wares into a big black van and took the restaurant to the streets, cruising to construction sites and City Hall to cater to lunch crowds and special events. Simmons says she knew as soon as she walked into the current location, near 35th Street and Prospect, that this was the place where Lutfi’s would settle down for its second run.

That was three years ago. Since then, they’ve opened another Lutfi’s on 70th, one on Raytown Road and two in Omaha, Nebraska. They’re looking at a couple of locations in Kansas City, Kansas. Simmons is also interviewing drivers to get that black van back on the streets.

To keep up with customer demand, Lutfi’s buys 1,000 pounds of fish each week from Murdock’s Fish Market, which has done brisk business on Prospect for the past decade.

“They come from downtown and Blue Springs and Overland Park, and they give me the blues because they don’t like coming to the inner city,” she says of some customers. “But anybody who thinks they’re somebody has been to Lutfi’s.”
For two weeks in August, economic desperation and eternal salvation share a street corner at 27th Street and Prospect.

At 9 a.m., a woman glares suspiciously, waiting for a stranger to move on before she takes a drag off a minibar bottle of clear liquor. Another, dressed in a leopard-print shirt and black Spandex shorts, talks loudly as she eats from a bag of potato chips. The man in the group sits with both hands wrapped around a paper bag that surely contains a 40-ounce can of beer.

This intersection hosts a constant crowd of homeless and intoxicated people; they sit on steps that lead to a vacant lot strewn with Vess-brand soda bottles and odd shards of glass and debris.

By nightfall, though, a different crowd gathers on the south side of the street, under the umbrella of a red-and-white tarp advertising the “Last Call Tent Revival.”

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At least once a year, the congregation of the Beacon Light Seventh Day Adventist Church, on the Paseo near 48th Street, holds some kind of outreach event. This year, the two-week revival fell during the hottest stretch of the summer.

Of course, if you turn away from Jesus, one worker notes, the alternative is an even hotter eternity.

As parishioners set up a Casio keyboard and a small drum kit, several dozen faithful prepare a buffet of fried chicken, mashed potatoes and corn. As the revival begins, they stand and sing hymns; one woman in the front row shakes a tambourine.

Preacher Karim Williams has a serious message for a serious time — a time when people are turning away from the Lord, trying to find hope in alcohol, crack cocaine and fornication.

“The Bible describes two different types of wine, fermented wine and pure wine of the grape, which is grape juice. I want you to know that Jesus was not sipping the wine that causes 40 percent of all traffic-related deaths. He was not sipping on wine that clouds the mind and causes you to behold strange things. You cannot imagine in your wildest imagination that Jesus was saying ‘Blessed are the pure of heart,’ while taking a sip of Jack Daniel’s. Are you with me today?”

The group claps and shouts “Amen.”

By the time the hourlong revival is over, the street is dark. Nearby, a woman in an ill-fitting white tank top with a disheveled ponytail walks with an uneven gait.

“How was church?” she asks in a mocking tone.
The northeast corner of 55th Street and Prospect is a vacant lot with piles of dirt in the back and a sign staked in the front: “Future site of Country Boys Convenience Store and McDonald’s.” Until the golden arches arrive, one independent entrepreneur sells what he promises are the sweetest organic melons on Kansas City’s East Side.

Jackie (who isn’t keen on giving his full name) peers through orange-tinted sunglasses and leans on the open cab of his white pickup truck. He chose this corner for his produce stand because there was a big shade tree, but that fell when the fast-food developer claimed the land. He has rigged a tarp over the top of his vehicle and set a patio umbrella on the ground to block the rays.

Jackie doesn’t live in Kansas City. He’s not a farmer, either. Though he worked for Ford and lived in the area for three decades, he moved out to Lone Jack four years ago. He drives 75 miles on U.S. Highway 71 a couple of times a week to buy watermelons, cantaloupes and tomatoes from an Amish community in Rich Hill and resell them on Prospect. Because the farmers don’t use chemicals, their produce is impeccable and their prices are fair.

Two other guys are also hawking watermelons out of pickups near 21st and 29th streets.

Business for Jackie is constant, though. As a woman pulls up in a minivan and eyes the watermelons, he says that on a good day he unloads 30 watermelons, 15 cantaloupes and 25 pounds of tomatoes. And that’s just from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

But Jackie isn’t the hardest-working guy at the intersection of 55th Street and Prospect. That title, the produce vendor says, is reserved for Nazareth Wilson, who is smoking a cigarette in the shade of a tree on the other side of the street.

Wilson is instantly recognizable for a number of reasons. On an afternoon when the heat index is flirting with 110 degrees, he’s wearing black dress socks pulled up to meet the bottom of his military fatigue shorts. Over his torso he wears a neon-orange hazard vest.

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In his left hand, he’s holding a broom with a red handle. On his right side, a smudged gym sock covers the rounded end of his arm.

He lost his right hand in a car accident. Years ago, he stole a 1955 Chevy and crashed the thing. “I ain’t stolen a car since,” he says.

These days, he’s the man who keeps 55th and Prospect clean.

For many years, he unloaded trucks at the City Market. One day, he got an inspiration from a household item. “I looked at my broom and decided to get me my own job, be my own boss,” he says.

So he went knocking on doors, asking business owners if they needed any cleaning help. The Family Dollar at 55th Street and the barbershop next door employ Wilson to sweep their sizable parking lots. He wears through a broom every two weeks. He names them all Bessie.

“In 13 years, I’ve never missed a day,” he says. “When it snows, me and Bessie still go out and push the water and snow.”
On Prospect, there seems to be a car wash on every other corner. But most have pavement that is cracked, rusty coin slots and vacuums protected by cages.

The sign at B.J.’s Old School Car Wash and Candy Store stands out for two reasons. First, the airbrushed paint is crisp and bright. Second, the smiling character in the middle looks a lot like SpongeBob SquarePants.

A man with short dreads, a white tank top and blue athletic shorts is vacuuming out a white sedan. He says he’s had this operation for about six months now and business is good. He’s even seen his share of high-end cars: Mercedes, Hummers and Corvettes. For less than $15, the crew will soak and sponge the exterior by hand and vacuum the interior, too.

Brad Reeder says he started the car wash to keep his 14-year-old son, B.J., out of trouble.

Reeder grew up in this neighborhood and knows it’s a challenge to keep on the straight and narrow. “It’s easy to get in trouble. It’s easy to get harassed,” he says.

Having the responsibility of being here every day, having a stake in a business, Reeder says, gives B.J. confidence and something productive to do. And it’s right across the street from a club, he adds, so it’s not a bad place to hang out and watch girls.

On a single day, this place can turn a decent profit, and most of it is banked for B.J.’s future. (This isn’t Reeder’s main employment. He works nights for a railroad, checking in freight cars.) When B.J. is old enough, Reeder hopes the money from the car wash will give his son options.

There’s a small office in the middle of the car wash, tucked under the two drive-in-style roofs that extend like wings across the parking lot. Half the space is occupied by a black weight machine, where Reeder and his son work out every morning. B.J. hopes to play tight-end at Hogan Preparatory Academy this year.

Called away from a dominoes game with employees, B.J. answers questions with the careful diction of a politician at a press conference. His scalp is clean-shaven, and he wears a spotless white T-shirt. He says there are a lot of distractions for a kid in this neighborhood, but “you got to move on.” He likes being a business owner, can see himself doing this when he grows up.

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“I’d like to be a constructive man, like my dad,” he says, slapping his father on the back.
When her mother moved to Texas and left her a four-bedroom house on Prospect, LaShon Mack promptly ripped out the kitchen appliances. With the help of her nine children, she repainted the walls, scattered the front porch with colorful signs and hauled in new fire-engine-red and mustard-yellow fixtures.

Even from the street, this space looks like the site of an artistic explosion. That’s why it’s called Supernova.

Mack got the idea for an all-natural salon when she discarded the chemicals from her own hair regimen a few years ago. She noticed her hair becoming more vibrant, suffering less breakage. So when her friend opened an all-natural salon on Troost, Mack apprenticed there. Today, she runs a beauty and braiding shop with her 20-year-old daughter, Ebony.

On this Tuesday morning, Mack is tightening her son Josiah’s dreadlocks. She douses his hair and massages his head in a bright-red sink. Her wash basins sit on the top of custom-built wooden bases. After she finishes rinsing the natural shampoo and conditioner, she leads him into what used to be the dining room and sets him down on a barber’s chair in front of a full-sized mirror. As she rubs shea butter into his locks, she explains that she has ponied up thousands of dollars for chairs and salon-sized hair dryers that are still sprawled out in the laundry room, waiting to be hung.

In the next room, Ebony is getting ready for her first customer of the day. A slim, talkative graduate of Southwest Charter High School, she’s the resident braider. Showing off her work on a digital camera, she says kinky twists are the most popular style right now. But she also knows how to do pixie braids and zigzags. Give her enough time, and she can even braid a customer’s name onto her head. Her longest braiding job lasted 15 straight hours.

But hair isn’t the extent of her artistry. Those are her murals on the walls. She can’t decide if her favorite is the woman with the striking red mohawk, facing the front door, or the guy with the big rasta dreads, over the fireplace. Or maybe it’s the woman with the giant yellow Afro studded with a pink hibiscus, in the dining room. Regardless, they’re good enough that the barber next-door asked her to help with his signs. And the deep purples and reds create the kind of relaxed vibe that Mack is going for with Supernova.

“Customers come in and they feel the mood,” she says.

They take off their shoes, kick back on the couch and pick out a DVD to watch on a small TV in the living room turned waiting area. This space could soon be the gateway to a larger boutique. Like her daughter, Mack has multiple talents.

On a table in the dining room are hundreds of beads in little plastic trays. Mack finds them at thrift stores and garage sales and creates jewelry that she sells at local boutiques. She used to go door to door at hair salons, and those ladies used to tell her that she belonged on Oprah’s show. Once, she made a necklace out of coral and copper and gave it to singer Erykah Badu when she was in town a couple of years ago.

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“She said, ‘It’s so beautiful, queen,’ and gave me a bow,” Mack recalls.
At the southern end of Prospect, near 85th Street, an American flag is painted on the faded clapboard of the What’s Happen’n Lounge. Pickup trucks are parked in the gravel lot.

This looks like the kind of place where strangers might not be welcome.

Mikee, a bartender with a thick goatee and a gravelly voice, is pouring the drinks for half a dozen men, all white, all pushing retirement or past their working years.

It’s not yet 4 p.m., and these are just a handful of the regulars. Mike, who wears a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, says he started remodeling homes in this area 23 years ago and has been coming here ever since. Brian, a neat, grandfatherly type, comes here even though he doesn’t drink; he takes nips from a Powerade bottle full of coffee.

This watering hole started as a round house on the southern end of Kansas City’s trolley system, Brian says. Other men start shouting out the pub’s various names over the past 50 years: Dobson’s Tavern, Marci’s, Richie’s. Mikee remembers when it was a biker bar, with a clientele known to cruise their hogs right through the building.

Brian says they’ve seen plenty of birthday parties here at which women — and some men — have stripped down to their birthday suits. Women at What’s Happen’n have been known to flash train conductors from the patio, where the railroad tracks pass barely 10 feet from the back of the building.

Topless women aren’t the only loose types here. Behind the bar, there’s a photo of a guy in a white beard and a cowboy hat. He’s famous for having had sex with a woman — with just about the entire bar watching — on top of a plastic bull that What’s Happen’n scored from a nearby barbecue joint.

The man they call Cowboy died a couple of years ago. In fact, these guys have been coming here so long that they’ve lost many of their beer-swilling brothers. Soon they may lose the bar’s owner. Conrad — or ConDaddy, as his patrons call him — has been in the hospital for months. The guys don’t want to discuss the specifics of ConDaddy’s medical battle, but Brian says stoically that the man who painted that American flag on the front after 9/11 is going to get better.

Even so, one of the guys points to a green flier tacked to a post in the middle of the building, right above the sign advertising karaoke. The lengthy tribute is dated January 2007.

He is in a lot of pain. Not a good way to start the year. Probably be the year they want him in heaven and I don’t blame them. He is the one everybody needs…. If this neighborhood has to lose its ConDaddy, lives will be disrupted. Finding a new bar with new friends? That isn’t happening…. The point is you will not meet people like this up the street or down the street or around the corner or the world.

That’s not quite true, though. It seems like the same thing could be said all up and down Prospect.