The Secret Concrete Canyon

According to a poem by the Poet Laureate of Lobster Land, the 'secret concrete canyon' was the Turkey Creek bed before the Rosedale diversion tunnel was built almost a century ago. It makes the creek go underground for to the river over on the Kansas side.

So I've walked in the canyon before, to see the Nine Blue Sheep ('Believe Only What You Here'[sic]), me and Corinna locked our bikes up and walked down. Then, thanks to a recent conversation she'd had with a railroad bull, we ended up high-tailing it out of there the first time a train came by. Well, she high-tailed it, I couldn't run that fast if I was in a building on fire.

So last Critical Mass we happened to go down the Paseo into the Jazz District before winding back into Downtown and ending up at the usual places.

As we approached 18th Street, I saw tags, gorgeous tags that begged me to photograph them. So, being that I was attending mass, I made a mental note to come back.

When I did, I realized that the tags I'd spotted were in the Secret Concrete Canyon.

Then, I spotted what I thought was a pretty good way to get in by bicycle. I guess it is posted 'private property' and 'no trespassing,' something like that, but if they were serious about keeping people out why would they have such a spectacular collection of art on display?

And they did include a bicycle access point. By access point, I mean a place where there is a padlocked gate you can walk a bike around. Gates that are meant to actually stop people, you can't walk a bike with panniers around those. What I think of as a car gate, the road is closed, but not to me.

Corinna tells me taggers from around the country travel here to check out this gallery and I can believe it. I had to weed it down pretty good to get under 50 pics for this post, and really, I didn't cover the whole length of the canyon, just the easy stuff between Forest & Vine.

I think Survlazy may be the biggest tag in Kansas City. MpulseFemme (if you take those two together as one tag, which I doubt they are) and Mayhem on the Kansas River dike might rival it, but it'd be close. So if Survlazy isn't the biggest, it's in the top three.

A lot of these tags are dated and I was surprised to see some 2003's in the mix. That's ten years ago, pretty near immortality in an art scene where your masterpiece is likely to be covered over by a city crew with gray paint in a few weeks. I wonder if Banksy knows about the Secret Concrete Canyon.

And of course, if you want to be left alone, try flattery. Corinna included a shot of God Bless the Railroads in one of her digital poem collages, but it was cropped to where you couldn't see the context. This tag is four lanes wide (it spans the base the Paseo bridge). Painting that is a bit of an operation, but why would BNSF want to cover that one up?

Frost is a tag you see a lot in this canyon. I got really mad when the city gray paint crews splattered one of his tags on Beardsley. It was a pretty tag, it was on the limestone cliff face, probably outside city property, and they only defaced it, didn't cover it over. It was senseless vandalism committed in the name of cleaning up vandalism. But I guess the Secret Concrete Canyon archive makes that modest tag seem like small beer. It's frosted over.