Between the World Wars, Kansas City, Missouri, achieved what no American city ever had, earning a Janus-faced reputation as America's most beautiful and most corrupt and crime-ridden city. Delving into politics, architecture, social life, and artistic production, this dissertation explores the geographic realities of this peculiar identity. It illuminates the contours of the city's two figurative territories: the corrupt and violent urban core presided over by political boss Tom Pendergast, and the pristine suburban world shaped by developer J. C. Nichols. It considers the ways in which these seemingly divergent regimes in fact shaped together the city's most iconic features---its Country Club District and Plaza, a unique brand of jazz, a seemingly sophisticated aesthetic legacy written in boulevards and fine art, and a landscape of vice whose relative scale was unrivaled by that of any other American city. Finally, it elucidates the reality that, by sustaining these two worlds in one metropolis, America's heartland city also sowed the seeds of its own destruction; with its cultural economy tied to political corruption and organized crime, its pristine suburban fabric woven from prejudice and exclusion, and its aspirations for urban greatness weighed down by provincial mindsets and mannerisms, Kansas City's time in the limelight would be short lived. In the end, Kansas City's apotheosis of identity was---like that of every city's---as tenuous as it was definitive.
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机译：在两次世界大战之间，密苏里州堪萨斯城实现了美国城市从未有过的成就，赢得了贾努斯面子的声誉，被誉为美国最美丽，最腐败和罪恶缠身的城市。深入研究政治，建筑，社会生活和艺术创作，本文探讨了这种独特身份的地理现实。它阐明了城市的两个象征性地区的轮廓：由政治老板汤姆·潘德加斯特（Tom Pendergast）主持的腐败和暴力的城市核心区，以及由开发商J. C. Nichols塑造的原始郊区。它考虑了这些看似不同的政权实际上是如何塑造城市最标志性的特征的-乡村俱乐部区和广场，一个独特的爵士品牌，以林荫大道和精美艺术写的看似精致的美学遗产以及一道风景其相对规模是美国其他城市所无法比拟的。最后，它阐明了一个现实，即通过在一个大都市中维持这两个世界，美国的心脏地带城市也播下了自己毁灭的种子。堪萨斯城的文化经济与政治腐败和有组织犯罪息息相关，其原始的郊区结构因偏见和排斥而交织在一起，其对城市发展的渴望被省份的思想观念和举止所压制，因此堪萨斯城的风头将是短暂的。最终，堪萨斯城的认同神化-就像每个城市一样-是确定性的。
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