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Cowtown, lattes, and public art in Wichita
Old Town is a new treat
Lila
Hempel-Edgers poses in downtown Wichita, which is filled with public art, much of
it streetscapes meant to be discovered. (Geoff Edgers/Globe Staff)
WICHITA, Kan. — Before we start, a request: No Toto jokes. And check “we’re not in
Kansas anymore’’ at the door.
There. Now you have permission to travel to Wichita.
The trouble with this city, which sits smack dab in the center of the United States, is
all in the reputation. If you’re from Boston, New York, or anyplace even slightly
snooty, chances are you are not going to pick this flat, Midwestern city as a vacation
destination. You are more likely to consider a hipster haven such as Austin, the
mountain highs of Colorado, or the isolated beauty of Montana.
But if you miss Wichita, you’re missing something. This is on-the-cusp America, a
place where old ways and new styles are beginning to blend, where empty
downtowns are being revived, museums founded, and unexpected treasures lie
waiting in antiques stores that have not been ruined by savvy yuppies raised on PBS
“junking’’ specials.
We came for the Tallgrass Film Festival, now in its eighth year, which had invited me
to show my film, “Do It Again,’’ twice over the weekend. We stayed in Old Town,
which has cobblestones, coffee shops, and clubs that spring to life at night.
Traveling with a baby means taking shifts. I got to go out at night, hanging out with
some of the film directors in town, and, on one joyous evening, packing myself into a
van for a visit to Rene’s, home of the 24-hour taco. In the morning, my wife, Carlene,
got out early, heading to the local YWCA to swim laps. By the time she returned, the
kids were up and ready and we hit the streets.
There we encountered two of Wichita’s main curiosities. First, we saw the incredible
amount of public art, much of it made up of streetscape sculptures meant to be
discovered. We had a public art guide in hand and it became a game for our
daughter, Lila, 8, to find the squirrel or the turtle. (The life-size man reading the
newspaper was easier.) What was strange was that on a beautiful crisp morning,
there was nobody out. As we would learn, Wichita is, like so many places, a driving
city by virtue of there being no traffic and a just-developing population of downtown
residents. Our company for much of the morning was stationary and bronze.
We found proper lattes and a great place to hang at Mead’s Corner and, when we
were properly energized, a huge, two-floor antiques mall just across the street. They
had a stuffed deer going for $10,000, which we didn’t consider buying, and endless
rows of colored-glasses from the 1950s, which we did contemplate purchasing. In the
end, Carlene picked up a bunch of old books and I bought a record produced locally
in the ’60s with original cover art by R. Crumb.
Where to eat? We were told that the Old Mill Tasty Shop was the place to go, a local
institution famous for its chicken salad and milkshakes. This advice created a cycle in
which I either ate foods that I felt would almost immediately kill me (chicken-fried
chicken, biscuits and gravy) or jogged so I could work off those foods.
There is a world-class art museum in Wichita, but we didn’t go. There are world-class
art museums in many cities, but nobody else has Cowtown, which looks to re-create
Old West living circa 1870. Lila roamed the grounds, hopping onto a horse-drawn
wagon at one point and mildly refusing to jump off. We took in a gunfight on the
main drag, wandered through the one-room schoolhouse and funeral parlor. When
we got hungry, we bought a couple of $2.50 hot dogs from a woman at the saloon.
The beauty of Cowtown and another place we visited, Exploration Place — a meld of
a science and children’s museum — is that despite what you are told, they are both
walkable from downtown. They’re located on the Arkansas River Bicycle Path, a
paved trail whose only flaw was that there were not enough people using it.
What else did we find during our short stay: a fantastic artist co-op, Gallery XII,
where we could actually afford to purchase art; a second antiques store full of ’50s
jukeboxes and ’40s cigarette machines and other objects I desperately wanted to buy,
but that were too big to bring on the plane; and Uptown Bistro, which allowed us to
get some healthy choices (seared tuna, shawarma with homemade hummus) to offset
our vacation eating habits.
When it was over, we realized just how much we had enjoyed Wichita. It only took
me a day back in Boston to do a real estate search for a place downtown. No, we
weren’t going to be moving to Kansas, but it was nice to dream of regular visits to the
Tasty.
Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com.
© Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company.