‘It’ll be amazing’: Midtown businesses hope streetcar benefits worth wait, construction

From inside Transit Coffee, which recently opened at 3940 Main St., customers can hear the scraping of concrete.

A “sidewalk closed” sign sits outside near heavy machinery that the city’s Water Department and private utilities workers and are using along Main Street to make upgrades and move utility lines below the road’s surface, which will make room for the new Streetcar extension.

“You can almost feel it under your feet sometimes,” Ben White, the coffee shop’s owner, said as crews removed dirt from the ground outside his window. “It’s kind of frustrating right now, but once it’s all done, it’ll be amazing to have the streetcar here.”

For some business owners along Main Street, construction of the 3.5-mile streetcar extension, which will be up and running in 2025, feels like a long but worthwhile wait. The construction has made navigating some of Main Street’s busiest sections, from Union Station to The Country Club Plaza, a maze of orange cones and obscured access to businesses there.

Still they and Kansas City officials hope the streetcar’s arrival will spur an economic development and boom similar to what followed the launch of the starter line in downtown and the River Market.

Some of that has already begun to take place, businesses flocking to the area in preparation for the foot traffic and benefits the streetcar is expected to bring.

“New food services, new housing and new experience options so you can walk up and down Main again,“ Caleb Buland, whose Exact Partners owns multiple Main Street parcels from Linwood to 39th Street, told The Star in November. “I think having the streetcar come to Main is going to be really key on kicking off that walkability. It’s just a net benefit for everyone involved.”

Buland, an architect, and his partner, attorney Ilan Salzberg, renovate old buildings or build new ones on empty lots.

The Netherland, their 11-floor loft apartment building, a Spanish revival-style building, circa 1928, made the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

Canary Bar + Bistro — created by the owners of Julep Cocktail Club in Westport — occupies the first-floor lobby, as well as on the rooftop, one of the highest rooftop bars in the city.

“If you put good things in places people will come,” Buland said.

Transit Coffee sits just a block south.

White used to work in the River Market and saw the economic benefits of being near a streetcar stop. In a little more than three years, his coffee shop will be next door to a new one in Westport.

As a University of Missouri-Kansas City alumnus, White also thinks students who live on campus, as well as international students, will better be able to experience the city through the streetcar.

At Phyllis’s Barber Shop, Maurice Basey, who has been a barber there for 10 years, said the store will deal with “some short-term pain” because of the construction.

The Kansas City Streetcar Authority has pledged that the construction along the route will never fully close Main Street.

Basey predicts that once the streetcar is up and running, the traffic on Main Street will be “horrible” because the road will be down to one lane.

“I don’t see people taking Main Street anymore after they put the streetcar up here,” he said of drivers.

Laura Norris, owner of Ragazza Food & Wine at 4301 Main St., has been supportive of the streetcar expansion. But she knows downtown restaurants struggled with parking and access issues during construction of the starter line. She hopes they can speed up the expansion and minimize the disruptions, such as construction workers taking up needed parking space.

“It’s absolutely to my advantage to be on the streetcar line,” Norris previously told The Star. “But coming out of this year with COVID, when our sales are 40% of what they were, it’s going to be difficult. There were financial resources for COVID. There won’t be for the streetcar. Wake me up in 2025.”