The High Life
The Strip rarely passes up an opportunity to get sauced, especially when the booze is free and the party advertises a chance to throw one back with Mayor Kay Barnes. So a couple of weeks ago, this freeloadin’ filet crashed the groundbreaking for a new housing development high on the West Side hill above Interstate 35. The festivities drew more than 100 well-dressed attendees, who sipped cocktails, nibbled salmon balls and grooved to a jazz trio in the cool, early-autumn air.
They were celebrating the new Cresta Bella project, eight single-family, Victorian-style homes on the bluff overlooking the downtown skyline. The developers are brothers Chris and Andrew Wilson, of the Wilson Development Group, who debuted on the local home-building scene with the Belleview Plaza condos near the Country Club Plaza in 2003. Their promotional materials boast that Cresta Bella is “luxuriously appointed with a multitude of state-of-the art features,” including optional backyard pools, rooftop spas and outdoor kitchens. Starting price: $1.2 million.
Hey, the Strip can dream about living someplace like that just as much as the next guy. But that night, it ended up raising a glass to a local landmark that will be torn down to make way for those schmancy digs: the upside-down-L-shaped house.
For 20 years, the structure has turned heads on I-35 and packed ’em in for after-hours parties. But now, the elevated slab’s days are numbered.
The Strip gets mighty cranky writing eulogies for longtime local points of interest, but because it recently noted the passing of Ray’s Video (“Requiem for Ray’s,” September 28), this nostalgic niblet figured it had better speak a few words on the L-shaped house, too — and give readers a chance to appreciate the thing before it’s gone.
The Strip tracked down Jim Tharp, the original owner of the unconventional abode. Tharp told this meat patty that in the early ’80s, he was between business ventures and decided to put his idle hands to work building his own home in the eclectic hilltop neighborhood. He wanted a room with a view that wouldn’t be obstructed if the church next door added a second level, so he knew that he had to build tall. He also knew that he wanted something he’d never seen before.
A cube struck him as “too commercial.” He also tinkered with the idea of a structure that looked like a capital letter T.
“But that’s the first letter of my last name, which was too predictable,” Tharp says. “It just didn’t turn me on.”
When the perennial businessman (he now hawks high-end countertops) finally settled on the design featuring an elongated living space jutting out from a narrow base, he kept his avant-garde idea under wraps. He also kept the towering structure within the municipal building code‘s height limits so that he wouldn’t need special approval for the architectural oddity.
“I knew anything that required a public hearing might blow up in my face,” he says.
There was plenty of fanfare as the house went up, Tharp recalls. One local newscaster compared the structure with a high-rise bowling alley. It looks precarious, Tharp admits, but it isn’t that far-out when it comes to structural safety. “The only thing that was interesting was, my engineer and I could never agree what would happen if a plane went through one of the little stilts,” he says of the skinny beams that prop up the living space.
Over the 18 years Tharp lived there, the highway head-turner created plenty of unique encounters. During the 1985 World Series, he says, the Goodyear blimp stopped 100 feet from his window on every pass, and he’d wave to each load of VIPs. A decade later, he says, he got a nod from the leader of the free world as a caravan carried Bill Clinton from a Kansas City speaking engagement to the airport via I-35.
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“We raised the blinds and turned on all the lights, and I waved my arm,” he says. He happened to know the congressman sharing the car with the commander in chief. “Then the phone rings, and President Clinton says, ‘That’s the craziest thing I ever saw.'”
Tim Wahl, a local real-estate investor, also caught sight of the crazy construction as he cruised the interstate in 2001 and instantly fell in love. The house wasn’t on the market, but he decided to knock on the door and see if he could broker a sale.
“It took months,” Wahl says. “I left many notes under that garage door trying to get Jim’s attention.”
After the deal closed, Wahl added a rooftop deck — and amped up the building’s buzz. As Tharp puts it, “He [Wahl] was definitely a party animal.”
Did the brash bachelor intend to give the landmark a raucous reputation? “Absolutely, absolutely,” Wahl tells the Strip. Wahl won’t dish on any specifics, but this snoopy sirloin knows one reveler who recalls a night several years ago when she drunkenly climbed into a plush limo and was whisked from the Empire Room to the blufftop party pad. Our source caught a glimpse of Wahl rocking a brown fur coat, but the place was so packed that she never made it to the top of the house to check out the full affair.
Wahl soon got married, though; just as he was thinking about moving his new wife and baby out to the country, the Wilson brothers showed up with an offer in early 2005. Now, Chris Wilson says, the former party space has been gutted and redesigned with a concept kitchen to give potential Cresta Bella buyers a taste of the sleek interiors and second-to-none views that come with the $1.2 million price tag. It will take 10 months to build a full model home, Wilson adds, so the L-shaped house will stay standing for at least another year.
Tharp says he wishes the Wilsons well. Still, the longtime businessman can’t shake his discomfort over the gentrification of his former neighborhood.
“I wasn’t anxious for the West Side to develop,” he says. “I knew someday it would, but I loved it when it was an eclectic mix of different races, lots of artists, some young businessmen — like I considered myself — and a lot of hardworking blue-collar folks. We got along wonderfully. We all had similar goals. And when somebody needed a set of steps out front, we’d do it…. When a developer wanted to come in and build something, we’d all jump in buses and go down to City Hall to testify against it, and we were able to stop that type of development for many years.”
Last year, in an effort to preserve the cultural and architectural integrity of the historically Hispanic and economically diverse community, neighborhood activists organized against a high-dollar condo project with luxuries similar to Cresta Bella’s. But the organizer of that effort tells the Strip that the West Side Planning Group isn’t taking a stand against the million-dollar homes this time around.
Nobody has fought to save the L-shaped house on the grounds of historic preservation, either. Brad Wolf, administrator for the Kansas City Landmarks Commission, says a building less than 50 years old could get a historic designation, but such architectural infants must exhibit “exceptional significance recognized throughout the architectural community.” At least one prominent local architect suggests that the L-shaped house doesn’t meet that high standard.
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“That house is an oddity that, after a while, most architects have come to ignore or think of as one of the urban accidents that make cities interesting — with a clear distinction between good and interesting,” says Steve McDowell, a principal at BNIM in downtown Kansas City.
Even Tharp says he’s at peace with his building’s demise.
“Sure, people will probably remember it longer than I live, but I’m not too concerned about it,” he says. “It’s just not my business anymore. I’m somewhere else. I got one-and-three-quarter acres in Mission with a creek running through it and deer that come on the lot, so I went from the highest to lowest.”
And to that, the Strip can only say, Bottoms up.
