Town Topic ending 24-hour service a sign of KC’s fading late-night culture | Opinion
Everybody downtown knows the parking lot south of Town Topic.
Street racers gather there deep into the night, using the lot on Broadway as a kind of staging ground before and after tearing through downtown streets. Even on weeknights, the scene can feel strangely lawless for such a visible stretch of the Crossroads.
It’s been this way for at least a few years, maybe longer. Nothing much ever seems to happen about it.
So although the fatal shooting in that parking lot last week was horrifying, it was not exactly shocking.
More surprising was the news Wednesday that Town Topic — the 90-year-old burger stand that has long served insomniacs, bartenders, shift workers and late-night wanderers at all hours — would be abandoning 24-hour service and closing nightly at the near-puritanical hour of 8 p.m.
The diner’s ownership said it had “pleaded with the police department and Crossroads over the years to help support and secure the area” but had not received “adequate support” to keep overnight operations feeling safe.
Town Topic has given our sleepy city a sense of life after midnight in an era when fewer and fewer establishments stay open late at all. Tourists seek it out because the white shack feels authentic in a way that cannot really be manufactured or rebranded. With the World Cup approaching, it is one of the few restaurants Kansas City can truly hold up as an iconic and historic piece of the city’s culture.
Perhaps the diner has unstated reasons for abandoning its late-night hours. But based on what we know, there is really only one conclusion to draw here: The city’s dysfunction is beginning to chip away at the very places that give Kansas City its identity.
Crossroads CID, mayor weigh in
The lot in question is not owned by Town Topic. It belongs to Time Equities, a New York-based real estate company that has frustrated nearby business owners and neighborhood leaders for years.
Rick Usher, executive director of the recently formed Crossroads Community Improvement District, in which the lot and Town Topic sit, told me Thursday there had already been extensive conversations among the diner, neighborhood leaders and others about the lot prior to the restaurant’s announcement.
Usher explained that the problem is partly legal and structural. The lot is private property, but it is also a commercial pay lot open to the public. People are legally allowed to enter it and park there. That means police cannot simply treat everyone lingering in the lot as automatic trespassers.
To remove somebody for trespassing, there is generally another step: Somebody acting on behalf of the property owner has to revoke that person’s permission to be there and formally notify them they are trespassing before enforcement can escalate.
Usher said there’d been discussions about Time Equities helping fund private security for the lot.
“But that never came to fruition,” he said. “Obviously, it would be our preference that they pay for that security.”
Mayor Quinton Lucas responded Thursday by directing much of the blame toward absentee owners like Time Equities “who don’t give a damn about their neighborhoods, our community, or anything other than sitting on properties for decades watching property values appreciate through no efforts of their own.”
He is not wrong about the problem. Last year, City Hall passed a strengthened chronic nuisance ordinance after Lucas warned that unsecured parking lots in entertainment districts had become “a breeding ground for crime.” The rules lowered the threshold for declaring a property a chronic nuisance and created a faster process for violent incidents.
Lucas also pointed to a pending ordinance that would expand vacant property registration rules to cover unimproved vacant land — the kind of empty lot that can otherwise sit in the middle of the city with little accountability.
But that also raises the obvious question: If City Hall already knows these lots are magnets for disorder, and has already passed new rules meant to address them, why did the one next to Town Topic remain such an obvious problem for so long?
Lucas confirmed the city has facilitated calls with Time Equities and connected the company with KCPD and the Crossroads CID in recent weeks. The company is considering closing the lot from midnight to 5 a.m. and allowing the city and police to cite trespassers during those hours. Lucas also said the Neighborhoods Department has been asked to evaluate the property under the chronic nuisance ordinance following the recent homicide, though the city is still awaiting responses about further coordination efforts.
But when it comes to public safety, ordinances can only go so far. At some point, you need a police department willing to visibly enforce order before problems spiral into tragedy.
A KCPD problem
KCPD says it has been actively policing the area and deploying a range of resources downtown. Spokesperson Alayna Gonzalez told me the department deploys foot beat officers, bicycle patrols, ATVs and proactive units throughout the Crossroads.
But if those efforts were meaningfully deterring the disorder around this lot, it was not especially apparent to the people living and working nearby. I live a few blocks away myself. After midnight, policing in much of the Crossroads often feels remarkably thin for one of the city’s premier entertainment districts.
Nobody seems to want to say that out loud, and for understandable reasons. Town Topic contorted itself in its announcement to complain about a lack of police support while also thanking the police. Mayor Lucas likewise strained to let KCPD off the hook, saying that although the department could do better, “KCPD doesn’t exist to nanny privately owned properties where the owner doesn’t care to call.”
Neither the mayor nor Town Topic wants to end up on the wrong side of the police department. The police can make the mayor’s life miserable politically. Town Topic presumably still needs police help from time to time. And nobody wants to be accused of being anti-police or insufficiently supportive of law enforcement.
But it is also rather obvious that lazy policing is a major part of the equation here.
Look no further than the existence of the Crossroads CID itself. The district was formed largely because of persistent property crime and disorder concerns in the neighborhood. Its first patrol officers from Titan Protection hit the streets yesterday, the very same day Town Topic announced it was narrowing its hours.
Kansas City increasingly seems to operate under the assumption that if neighborhoods or business districts want a stronger sense of order, they should organize and finance it themselves. Across the city, business owners feel they must hire off-duty officers or create entirely new quasi-private layers of security simply to maintain a basic sense of order around their establishments.
Meanwhile, the police department consumes a massive and growing portion of the city’s budget. Isn’t the real question here why such a well-funded organization can’t keep crime from festering around one of Kansas City’s most recognizable businesses?
North Kansas City’s police department seems to manage. Earlier this week, Tay’s Burger Shack on Armour Road posted an announcement with more than a touch of irony: It is going 24 hours.
