Driving down Ward Parkway on a languid spring evening not long ago I had that rare moment of genuine deja vu. All at once it was that sparkling June day when I first arrived in Kansas City and drove the length of Ward Parkway from the Country Club Plaza to very near its southern end. I had never seen anything quite like this – a sylvan 40-block stretch of stately homes and sculpted shrubbery right in the middle of a city.
In my experience, cities collapsed. The affluent, if they stayed, retreated into wary enclaves girded by iron fences whose spiked points spoke angry volumes to friend and foe alike. I had the chance to revisit my own past in researching my new book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities. By the time we moved to Kansas City the neighborhood of my New Jersey youth had become just that: untenable.
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