Best Asset
Kansas City has 30 percent more freeway miles per capita than any metropolis in the world. This is our defining virtue. It has made us the least densely populated, least congested city in America. The average Kansas Citian has never had to slug someone for a parking spot, squander an hour or two a day stuck in traffic, or squeeze onto a subway train filled with smelly strangers and sundry perverts. If the "best thing about Kansas City is the people," as many respondents say, this is why. If we lived in New York, we'd be nasty too, but we're not. We have become instead America's friendliest big city.

Best City Slogan
How about, oh, "America's friendliest big city." Kansas City is now no more a jazz Mecca than Topeka and as to barbecue, you can get that in New Jersey. "For the flavor of it?" Time to get real.

Best Feature
Kansas City's signature area remains The Country Club Plaza, nicely improved by the de-Pendergastization of Brush Creek and the surprisingly graceful extension of the Plaza east to the new 71. This represents the rare occasion when the phrase "urban renewal" turned out to be something other than a cruel joke.

Best Spot
The best spot in Kansas City is a park bench under a tree on the west end of the Plaza overlooking the waterfalls there. It's so nice that a guy once asked me if I could move so he could propose to his girlfriend. (I obliged. He needed all the help he could get.) Our pristine suburban friends shun any water that doesn't come in a bottle so the bench is usually empty. But dibs on it anyhow: if you're there when I get there, you'll have to give it up.

Best Spot for a Ballpark
I should think that a huge underdeveloped site at the nexus of two interstates with plenty of room for parking in the middle of the county that paid for it but easily accessible to the rest of the metro would be an ideal site for a sports complex. But then again, we could have leveled downtown and put the stadium there. Truth be told, I have not seen a more fan-friendly site anywhere in America than the Truman Sports Complex. It's just not sportswriter-friendly. Too bad.

Best Town
Weston and Parkville are a little too-too so the nod goes here to Liberty. A great name for a town, if not quite as distinctive as "Peculiar." The college centers the place and gives it character—something that a Juco just can't do. Only problem is that too many people are catching on.

Best County
I have lampooned this place mercilessly over the years, but if all of America were like Johnson County, our national divorce rate would drop by 75 percent, our murder rate by 90 percent, and our unemployment rate to damn near nothing. Last time I checked, Clay Countians were divorcing four times as much as Johnson Countians (too much country music?), and KCKansans were killing each other an astounding 50 times as frequently. Johnson County may be a little sleepy, but I'd rather die of boredom than from the sting of a Quindaro bumblebee.

Best Neighborhood
Brookside may well be the best urban neighborhood in America, designed as it was by the nation's foremost urban planner, JC Nichols. Ironically, what makes Brookside viable are two arguably negative phenomena: urban sprawl and wretched schools. If it were not so easy to live in the deep suburbs or so hard to send a kid to public school in Kansas City, everyone would want to live in Brookside, and I couldn't afford to.

Potential School District
Under the inspired leadership of the federal judiciary Kansas City, Missouri has reformed its way to meltdown. There is an opportunity here. Kansas City can abandon the public school paradigm that has held it in check, deconstruct fully, and rebuild from the rubble. Who would object? Meanwhile, most suburban school districts will continue on in self-congratulatory mediocrity and produce still another generation of kids unable to tell you who George Washington is, where Great Britain is, or why we fought a revolution. (Revolution? Isn't than an old Beatles' album?) Soon enough realtors will be steering newcomers to the Missouri side "for the schools."

Best Street
No city in America has a street quite like Ward Parkway. It winds gracefully for nearly fifty blocks past pleasure domes that Kubla Khan would have envied and venerable institutions with only-in-America names like "The Country Club Christian Church." Unlike, say, the world-weary Paseo, Ward Parkway has incredible staying power. It's as elegant now as it was when Boss Tom Pendergast called it home some 70 years ago—despite the pickup trucks.

Best Resort
The Fairway Pool. Cheap, close, uncrowded, and blessedly free of rules. True, not much of a view, and no party cove, but little chance you will be eaten by a shark or run over by a drunk on a SeaDoo. What more can you ask for?

Best Walk
You start at the Fireman's statue on 31st Street, walk down along Penn Valley's lovely creek bed below Broadway, past the lake and the illegal aliens hiding in the bushes--excuse me, "undocumented workers"—across Broadway (the tricky part), up the hill with its majestic view in all directions, down past the mobile meat market (they don't call them pick-up trucks for nothing), up past Liberty Memorial, across Main Street, and down to Topsy's at Crown Center for the best frozen yogurt in Kansas City. Bring a stout walking stick. You never know when you'll need it.

Best Attraction
The Steamboat Arabia people spent less money digging up the boat, extracting tons of material, refurbishing tens of thousands of items, and building their museum than the city spent on cost overruns alone at the 18th and Vine project. The former makes a profit. The latter never will.

Best Breakfast
The Diner, just down the street from the Arabia on Grand. Cheap, unpretentious, quick, and real.

Best Lunch
Beethoven's on the Square in Paola. Great quantity, low prices, and a real German guy runs the place. Worth the drive.

Best Shopping Center
I wouldn't know.

Best Use for Downtown
Given its accessibility to the interstates and its obsolescence as a place of commerce, downtown Kansas City has the potential to become a model 21st-century downtown—a financial, legal, civic center, along the lines of Corporate Woods but without the winding, frou-frou streets. The new downtown would have plenty of green space where those weary old office buildings and retail establishments now squat and lots of landscaped outdoor parking with pull in slots so suburbanites won't stay away for fear of parallel parking.

Best New Site for the Convention Center
Instead of trying (and failing) to build a traditional city around the convention center, why not move the convention center to where the city has gone? There is a lot of old, undervalued rental property between the Plaza and Westport that even its residents won't miss. Another likely choice would be just north of the Nelson on Gillham Park. In either case, conventioneers would be able to walk some place they might actually want to go.

Best Moment
Kansas City may have experienced better all around days like when the first train rolled across the Hannibal Bridge or when all those generals inaugurated the Liberty Memorial or when the upstart Chiefs won the Super Bowl, but no single moment can match the scoring of the winning run in the sixth game of the 1985 World Series against the arrogant, hand-in-the-fan lunatics from St. Louis. True, not until the Florida election, had a call been so fiercely disputed as the one at first base that made the run possible. But the beauty of baseball is that they still don't have recounts.

Best Reason to Call Kansas City Home
The best reason to call Kansas City home is because the people here really want you to.