<\/p>\n
KANSAS CITY — The audacious Joyce Hall was all of 18 years old when he reckoned his Nebraska hometown wasn\u2019t big enough to realize the potential of his family\u2019s wholesaling Norfolk Post Card Co.<\/p>\n
So on to Omaha it was going to be. But whether by happenstance or fate, a Kansas City cigar salesman warming himself in the store one day persuaded him that this was the place.<\/p>\n
\u201cI came to Kansas City in 1910, not because of its size or importance, but because I\u2019d heard about the Kansas City Spirit, and I believed it to be a community where my future was worth risking,\u201d the Hallmark founder wrote in a 1965 full-page ad in The Kansas City Star urging \u201call Kansas Citians to work toward a great revival of the Kansas City Spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the late 1960s after Ewing Kauffman was awarded an American League expansion team, its name emerged from a contest that attracted some 17,000 entries — 547 of whom voted \u201cRoyals\u201d among ideas alphabetically ranging from Aces to Zoomers.<\/p>\n
Engineer Sanford Porte was the official winner because of what The Star called the \u201cneatness of his entry\u201d and his rationale: tribute to the American Royal and the area\u2019s billion-dollar livestock income.<\/p>\n
Still needing a logo, Kauffman turned to Hallmark.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe criteria were that the logo had to have blue, gold and a crown,\u201d Shannon Manning, the former Hallmark artist who designed the winner, told The Star in 2018. \u201cI always kid that they came to Hallmark because they knew crowns really well.\u201d<\/p>\n
All of that past and plenty more was prologue to Wednesday, when the descendants of those visionaries — one by birth, the other by nature — convened at the American Restaurant in the heart of Crown Center.<\/p>\n
As the Royals announced their intention to move from the Truman Sports Complex and build a stadium in the area now occupied by Hallmark headquarters, at the literal and figurative foundation was an announced partnership with Hallmark — the details of which were sparse as of last Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Not to mention a number of further details are unclear, more checkpoints await before this can come to fruition and that Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe was on site but didn\u2019t disclose what the state\u2019s anticipated addition to the city\u2019s $600 million commitment would be. And what did Sherman mean by calling all of this \u201cphase one,\u201d anyway?<\/p>\n
But there was an abiding synergy to a day that at once heralded a future state-of-the-art ballpark and attached development — an estimated $3-billion project, approximately $2 billion of which the Royals said they will pay — and harkened to all that has made Kansas City what it is.<\/p>\n
Alternately glancing out the window behind them, gesturing or alluding to their surroundings were Hall\u2019s grandson, Don Hall Jr., and Royals owner John Sherman — who from the day he was announced as the team\u2019s owner in 2019 has spoken of seeking to honor Kauffman\u2019s legacy in service to the community.<\/p>\n
\u201cDon, we\u2019re deeply honored to bring our crown back home to the very place where it was created. Here at Hallmark,\u201d Sherman said. \u201cDestiny appears to have its eyes on us.\u201d<\/p>\n
What Mayor Quinton Lucas referred to as all the strands coming together included Sherman\u2019s homage to former Mayor Kay Barnes, under whose leadership the pivotal Power & Light District and what\u2019s now known as T-Mobile Center were built nearly 20 years ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe would not be here having this conversation today if she had not had the courage to lead that process,\u201d said Sherman, who recalled Barnes sending him handwritten letters that included encouraging him to \u201cthink big. And if you think big, think bigger.\u201d<\/p>\n
Seated alongside Barnes was former Mayor Sly James, who through controversy shepherded the building of the new Kansas City International Airport — without which Sherman correctly noted Kansas City would not have earned the opportunity to be a 2026 FIFA World Cup host.<\/p>\n
Just behind them out that window, the adjacent landscape features the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, the National World War I Museum and Memorial and Crown Center (which as all stands now is to be preserved even as Hallmark\u2019s headquarters is transformed into the stadium site).<\/p>\n
Less than two miles away now will be the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, which figures to benefit from the proximity and is yet another part of this fabric. NLBM president Bob Kendrick presiding over the ceremony reminded this plan also marks a return to the urban core where the Negro Leagues were founded and Jackie Robinson, Satchel Paige and Buck O\u2019Neil played among other legendary Monarchs.<\/p>\n
Among all those institutions, though, in the moment Hall highlighted nearby Union Station.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s where in 1910 his grandfather \u201cjumped off the train,\u201d as he put it, because he had heard tell of the aforementioned Kansas City Spirit.<\/p>\n
The concept goes back to at least 1885 in Star archives and perhaps was most succinctly summed up by an 1899 ad that equated it to a \u201cget up and git\u201d mentality.<\/p>\n
It later was immortalized in the awesome painting by the great Norman Rockwell in the 1950s that became a gift to his friend Joyce Hall and remains part of the Hallmark Art Collection.<\/p>\n
Joyce Hall \u201cgot caught up in that spirit,\u201d his grandson said.<\/p>\n
It manifested through both the entrepreneurial and philanthropic, something quite in common among the Hall, Kauffman and Sherman families that bind them all the more within the community.<\/p>\n
By way of recent example, Sherman and his wife, Marny, last Thursday were honorary chairs for the 2026 \u201cWild About Harry\u201d gala for the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum — one of many local causes in which he has been deeply invested.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what Hall meant when he said Sherman\u2019s plan to move the franchise into a downtown stadium and all it signals — connectivity and economic growth in particular — is \u201can expression of the Kansas City Spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n
A different component of the Kansas City spirit, of course, is to be appropriately skeptical about how a project of such scale will work and what impact it will make both positively and negatively.<\/p>\n
It took some selling and negotiating, for instance, to get the twin stadiums at the Truman Sports Complex built.<\/p>\n
Fair to say that worked out, though the inability to develop around it surely has been part of this and the Chiefs determining they\u2019d move to Kansas for the 2031 season. It remains understood that the Royals intend to be downtown by 2030.<\/p>\n
Around about the same time the Truman Sports Complex was going up, the then-new KCI was put in motion to open in 1972. And in what was then an area in decline, Crown Center opened in 1973 — the same year the Royals started playing at what was then known as Royals Stadium.<\/p>\n
All of which proved to be pillars of what Lucas called a \u201cparticularly momentous time\u201d that he can see parallels in now.<\/p>\n
Beyond the airport, dramatic recent investment and growth has included the $1 billion development plan on the Missouri River sparked by the Kansas City Current\u2019s initiative to create the world\u2019s first stadium purpose-built for a professional women\u2019s soccer team.<\/p>\n
More immediately and directly tethered to the moment is the transformative downtown initiative championed by Barnes.<\/p>\n
While it\u2019s true it never has met its debt obligations, it nonetheless changed everything about the then-dead core of the city and rippled out in ways that have reinvigorated the city.<\/p>\n
That obviously doesn\u2019t mean anyone should get a blank check, and this should remain very much a work in progress with a lot more light on it the further along it goes.<\/p>\n
Indeed, it\u2019s a fascinating twist to all this the Royals arrived at this apparent solution through a circuitous process that included a resounding defeat at the polls two years ago in response to a clumsy and tin-eared approach to an East Crossroads plan.<\/p>\n
Put another way, that pushback put what at least seems to be a more appealing and frictionless general concept in motion.<\/p>\n
To his credit, Sherman rather embraced that point last Thursday.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been said that patience is the calm acceptance that things can happen in a different order than what you had in mind \u2026\u201d he said. \u201cPatience has given us an outcome that we could never have imagined.\u201d<\/p>\n
There was no script or playbook, he added, no blueprint or road map to the site.<\/p>\n
Except maybe the Kansas City Spirit \u2026 and this chance at its latest great revival.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.newstribune.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" KANSAS CITY — The audacious Joyce Hall was all of 18 years old when he reckoned his Nebraska hometown wasn\u2019t big enough to realize the potential of his family\u2019s wholesaling Norfolk Post Card Co. So on to Omaha it was going to be. But whether by happenstance or fate, a Kansas City cigar salesman warming […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2390963,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2390962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-royalty"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/How-proposed-Royals-stadium-at-Crown-Center-channels-the-\u2018Kansas.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2390962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2390962"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2390962\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2390964,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2390962\/revisions\/2390964"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2390963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2390962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2390962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2390962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}