War Games

Carl DiCapo, retired restaurateur and longtime friend of the Liberty Memorial, gripped the lectern and made a sort of pledge.

“Ten years from now, we don’t want another penny from the city,” he told the Kansas City, Missouri, Board of Parks and Recreation commissioners on January 20.

In the meantime, KC residents can keep digging for change.

Backers of the World War I monument seek a $20 million bond issue that, if approved, would provide most of what is needed to complete a new museum underneath the main deck. The bond request follows a 1998 vote to raise the sales tax that netted $45 million for the memorial’s renovation. The city also staffs and illuminates the edifice, a $625,000 annual subsidy that runs until 2014.

Despite that hefty outlay, the Parks Board was impressed with DiCapo’s words. Commissioners voted to transfer their authority over the monument — which they’ve had since the 1960s — to the Liberty Memorial Association, a private charity. The decision was unanimous, the mood jubilant. Board member Bill Washington interrupted the vote to have the record reflect that he re- seconded the motion.

Under the new contract, the city will continue to own the monument and surrounding park. The Liberty Memorial Association will be responsible for operations and for finishing the museum.

Long in the works, the museum is hoped to be “a major, major attraction,” Liberty Memorial Association President Willard Snyder told the Parks Board.

Not everyone shares the enthusiasm. Councilman Jim Glover, fearing a drag on future budgets, voted against the Liberty Memorial bond issue. (The measure passed 10-2.) “I’d love to see it built, but I get tired of driving over potholes,” he says, referring to millions of dollars’ worth of basic city maintenance that remains unfunded.

Others question the wisdom of adding a museum to the monument. Mel Solomon, an architect and the former head of the city’s Landmarks Commission, says the existing memorial is “a beautiful thing.” He adds, “I’m not sure we need to go underneath it and look at the horrors of the first world war.”

Voters never said they wanted a new museum. Documents show that the Parks Department considered building a new museum below the deck in 1995, three years before the vote to save the memorial with a temporary sales-tax increase. But as written, the tax called only for renovating the monument, which had fallen into disrepair and closed in 1994, and providing a maintenance endowment.

Just the same, the Parks Board ordered that space for a museum be carved during the renovation. Donations and other government sources were expected to pay for the work necessary to transform the cave into a showplace.

But in 2001, a year before the memorial reopened, City Auditor Mark Funkhouser accused the Parks Department of keeping sloppy books and allowing sales-tax dollars to seep into the future museum. Funkhouser pointed out that $8 million to $10 million could have been saved by repairing support columns rather than replacing them to make room for a museum.

The Parks Board’s accountants said replacing the columns added a relative pittance (between $250,000 and $1.4 million) to the work order.

Whatever the true cost, removing the columns made lots of room. The museum, designed by the planners of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, will contain a theater, video walls, a trench-warfare simulation, a café and enough exhibit space for many of the 400,000 World War I artifacts the Liberty Memorial Association has acquired.

One recent afternoon, Steve Berkheiser, the association’s executive director, led a tour of the concrete shell. In shape, it resembles a Trivial Pursuit game piece with room for four wedges. It’s a stark space, but museum touches are already showing up — in one corner, World War I cannons await a more dramatic staging than a ribbon of police tape. Museum proponents like Berkheiser emphasize the Great War’s relevant themes, such as the rise of nationalism, the enlistment of women and the assertion of U.S. might.

Construction workers greeted Berkheiser, a retired brigadier general, as “sir” when he passed by. Berkheiser served two tours in Vietnam, and a protest of that era asked, What if they gave a war and nobody came? “In World War I, basically, somebody gave a war and everybody came,” Berkheiser says. “There’s no greater decision a country makes than to go to war.”

How many visitors will want to contemplate these notions is unknown. The National D-Day Museum in New Orleans, after opening in 2000, admitted more than 650,000 in its first two years. But it benefited from the success of 1998’s Saving Private Ryan, not to mention a living veteran base.

For the expanded Liberty Memorial, estimates call for 140,000 visitors annually — two and a half times the current paid attendance. But attracting half the numbers of the D-Day Museum, which commemorates a more recent war in a destination city, might be asking a lot from Archduke Franz Ferdinand mementos. Forty percent of memorial visitors already skip the Turkish Army knapsacks and Austrian utensil sets cased in the site’s two existing exhibit halls, paying only for the elevator ride. “How much depth does a person really want on that subject?” Solomon wonders.

For museum skeptics, what may be most galling is that KC taxpayers are being asked to bankroll something they never asked for. “[The memorial’s supporters] got themselves in a mess, and they can’t get out of it without going back on the public dole,” says Jane Flynn, former president of the Historic Kansas City Foundation.

A recent Liberty Memorial budget makes a case for Flynn’s crankiness. The $102 million budget says that costs associated with the restoration and “adaptive reconstruction,” that is, making room for the museum, have doubled from preliminary estimates. This seems to support Funkhouser’s earlier contention that sales taxes went toward museum work. Meanwhile, the cost of the museum itself has (on paper, at least) shrunk from $30 million to $26 million. But that money was supposed to come from private sources. Donors pledged $10 million during the renovation, but recent fund-raising efforts have produced little.

So museum backers are returning to their most reliable source of cash: the Kansas City taxpayer. Debt service on the bond would cost about $1.8 million a year over twenty years. “I’m surprised we’re going to spend money of this magnitude on an expanded museum with so little public discussion,” Funkhouser tells the Pitch.

Glover thinks the city should ask Uncle Sam to sponsor what is essentially a national monument. “The Liberty Memorial would be a wonderful federal project,” he says.

Flynn, though, thinks the feds would pass on adopting the memorial. “Why would they want it?” she says. “They can’t really maintain a lot of the things they have now.”

In an effort to appeal to residents, who will decide the bond issue in April, friends of the museum are touting it as an economic-development tool. “It will bring people to Kansas City,” Berkheiser says. Councilwoman Becky Nace tells the Pitch that the memorial “generates tourism and provides something that make us unique and talked about on the world stage.”

A museum, Nace adds, is a way to capture revenue. “How many people leave Disneyland with one of those stupid hats they’re never going to wear again? We should take advantage of that.”

Line up now for your souvenir: My great-grandfather died on the Western Front, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt from the Liberty Memorial.