Crown Center felt like a bubble to critic in 1980

This week’s Crown Center feature contains excerpts from a Calvin Trillin piece printed in The New Yorker in 1974. Trillin, a Kansas City native, took a skeptical view of what passed for progress in these parts in the early 1970s. He considered Crown Center to be symptomatic of a disease he called “dome-ism,” the worshipful belief cities held in massive projects, such as Houston’s Astrodome and the 73-story Plaza Hotel in Atlanta.

Trillin was not the only visitor to take a dim view of Crown Center. Looking through old Kansas City Star articles, I came across the words of a critic who entered Crown Center and felt “as though I had wandered into someone else’s very large, private (and corporate) courtyard when they weren’t at home.”

The observer was Allan B. Jacobs, the former director of city planning in San Francisco. Jacobs went on to write a couple of books and teach at the University of California at Berkeley. His criticism of Crown Center appeared in Urban Design International in 1980. Donald Hoffman, the Star‘s art and architecture writer, relayed choice quotes from Jacobs’ original.