Kansas City Strip
How do you plead? During the Cold War, savvy American travelers knew not to brazenly photograph architectural treasures in Red Square: better to simply hold the camera waist high and nonchalantly shoot while pretending to gawk.
In this post-Timothy McVeigh era, however, we can save the airfare and enjoy the spectacle of arrogant government paranoia right here at home: Photographing the $450,000 Sentinels of Justice inside Kansas City’s sparkling $112 million Charles Evans Whittaker federal judicial palace incites threats from aging and bored marshals who’ve traded their sniper rifles for metal-detection wands.
A few days ago, we posed federal LSD defendant Mark McCloud (Casey Logan’s “Adventures in Wonderland,” page 14) on the courthouse steps, then moved inside for more shots beside the Beverly Pepper sculptures in the soaring, marbled lobby.
“What are you doing?” bellowed a man from the guard station. “You need the permission of the building manager!” He said he would detain the shooter and confiscate the camera if pictures were taken indoors, but he’d let slide our violations on the steps outside.
Days later, we tried building manager Dan Sexton‘s office upstairs. It was locked at 9:40 on a Monday morning. An office worker for marshal Robert Bradford English sent us back downstairs to the clerk’s office (right beside the guard station), where a relaxed and helpful supervisor, Bill Terry, assured us that federal judge Dean Whipple had agreed we could shoot the sculptures, as long as Terry escorted us. Call it “artistic freedom.”
That same night, however, we saw Journal-World photographer Mike Yoder wielding an ax at the federal post office in Lawrence. Okay, so the ax was a guitar, and Yoder was helping Steve Mason‘s string band play the William Tell Overture for a crowd of a hundred last-minute tax filers. (“Who thought this up?” asked Ralph Nader, who galloped through the party dead last at 12:01 a.m.)
Kansas City’s judicial palace may be that busy once the Ilus W. Davis Civic Mall is complete across Ninth Street. What a civics lesson that’ll be: tourists losing their cameras to high-strung guards operating under the noses (and orders) of eighteen federal judges. Better to simply hold the camera waist high and nonchalantly shoot while pretending to gawk.
