Lee’s Summit Missouri, Best Downtown and my home town

Downtown of the Year

Lee’s Summit Missouri, my hometown was just selected as Downtown of the Year. Take a minute and enjoy the music of another Lee’s Summit hometown boy, Pat Metheny while you read the rest of this post.  This is the same downtown that seemed old and dreary when I grew up in Lee’s Summit 50 years ago. This is quite a testament to the forgotten or under-appreciated delights of small town living in the 50’s. When my family moved to a farm near Lee’s Summit in 1949, it was a sleepy farm town a few miles too far from Kansas City to be a suburb although a few road warriors like my father made the commute daily. It had about 7,000 people and it was very self-sufficient. You didn’t need to go to the city for anything but if you did want something special, you could drive the 30 miles to KC.

Downtown LS was small but complete

The downtown was maybe four blocks by four blocks and had a movie theater, grocery stores, car dealers, banks, department stores, appliance stores, various clothing stores, jewelry stores, drug stores and restaurants. Already when I left for college in the 60’s, strip malls and small shopping centers were springing around the edge of town and the car dealers were starting to relocate to the highways but the downtown remained the center of town. The Homecoming Parade always went through downtown and whenever anyone said Lee’s Summit, the image was the few blocks adjacent to the stoplight at Third and Douglas.

Surrounded by suburban sprawl

Over the years Lee’s Summit grew and the development looked much like suburban development elsewhere but downtown held on- barely. Then an amazing thing happened. A few people recognized the unique character of small town, 20th century America and the revitalization began. Lee’s Summit became recognized as special because of the unique downtown still very much like it was when I grew up there. With a population approaching 90 thousand and boundaries reaching far beyond the city limits in 1950, Lee’s Summit is known for it’s downtown.

Reminder about what is important

Although I don’t visit Lee’s Summit often, more and more I remember my home town fondly. Growing up in Lee’s Summit was such a different experience than what my kids experienced. I couldn’t wait to get out of the boring place and attend college in the big city. Now, I wonder what I was looking for.  When you are young it is so hard to know what is important.