Salina, Kan.
You don’t have to look very hard to see the striking similarities between New York City and Kansas.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, exhibits some two million objects that span seven centuries, all tucked inside a gigantic Gothic-Revival architectural marvel that was completed in 1872.
And out here on the prairie, nestled among the wheat fields and silos, the town of Colby boasts “the largest barn in Kansas.” The gigantic Cooper Barn once held tens of thousands of chickens and now contains an exhibit called “Prairie Grasses to Golden Grains: Agriculture in Northwest Kansas 1870s-1990s.”
It’s no wonder, then, that this American heartland state would be trying hard to convince New Yorkers to leave Manhattan and move to Manhattan. Kansas, that is.
Stop living like cattle and start living the way people were meant to live: with cattle.
“I don’t want to say there are bad people in New York, because there aren’t,” said Joe Mon aco, spokesman for the Kansas Department of Commerce and a transplanted New Yorker himself. “But they’re not overtly friendly like people in Kansas. Out here I strike up random conversation with people in a grocery store line. You don’t do that in New York.”
A dearth of urgency
Monaco and the Kansas commerce folks want New Yorkers and their businesses. On June 22, a 30-second video ad began running on the monstrous TV screen in Times Square, an ad telling the 1.5 million people who dash through the square each day that Kansas is “as big as you think.” It has run three times an hour, 18 hours a day. When it airs for the final time today, it will have lit up the 26-foot tall Times Square TV a total of 975 times.
“We want to lure business from New York to Kansas,” said Monaco, who grew up on Long Island and moved to Kansas three years ago. “We want bio-science businesses. We want them to see that Kansas is a good place to do business.”
And what about that little lifestyle change?
“New Yorkers are mostly born there and raised there and they don’t think there’s anyplace else on earth,” Monaco said. “Sometimes they seem crabby and grumpy. They’re on edge and always in a rush. My own family is like that. I see it every time I visit.
“But Kansas is slower. It’s not unsophisticated or dumber, it’s just a little slower. There’s not that sense of urgency to everything.”
The commercial was filmed on the Konza Prairie south of Manhattan, Kan., and in a few locations around Topeka. It cost just $40,000 to produce and air. With 975 showings, Mon aco pointed out, the cost of the ad comes to about $41 per viewing. Kansas commerce officials concede that there is no way to gauge how effective the ads will be, but they hope to see New Yorkers inquiring about moving businesses to Kansas.
It is part of an ongoing effort started in 2005 by the state’s commerce department to boost the economy of Kansas and showcase some pretty unique things.
Take the rendition of Van Gogh’s famed Sunflowers painting that sits near a field in Goodland, near the Colorado border. The painting is 32 feet by 24 feet and balances atop an 80-foot high easel.
Or the world’s largest ball of twine, which weighs more than 17,000 pounds, contains some 1,400 miles of twine and has its own protective shed alongside a road in Cawker City.
Amber Heier, 18, a recent graduate of Salina High School and a lifelong Kansan, hopes New Yorkers can handle it.
“We have small-town morals and everybody helps out when you need it,” she said on a recent morning as she prepared to board a bus filled with young golfers on their way to the U.S. Senior Men’s Open tournament down the road in Hutchinson.
“Both of my parents were raised on farms and everyone in Kansas still operates on the idea of ‘work hard and get paid.’ If New Yorkers came, maybe what we do would rub off on them and what they do would rub off on us. Maybe they could show us how to run things, how to be more efficient. But I’m not sure we’d ever get that ‘gotta go, gotta go’ attitude. We definitely have our own pace.”
Good steak, no nightlife
Charles Maddox, now retired, grew up in Wichita and has been in the smaller town of Salina since 1967. He smiles at the idea of a horde of New Yorkers descending on Kansas.
“Wait ’til they go out to find a place to eat,” he said. “With the variety they’re used to, Kansas would be quite a shock. You’ve basically got two choices: Italian or a steakhouse.”
As for entertainment, well, Maddox said any newcomers better get used to the outdoors.
“We really don’t have any nightspots,” he said.
Gary Hines of Dodge City has another concern.
“Most people out here hunt,” he said, smiling. “Maybe they’d feel like they had to give it a try. And frankly, I’d be a little leery of a bunch of New Yorkers with guns. Maybe for the first few years we’d require them to go into the woods without guns, just to see if they could find their way back to the car.”
Rich Martinez also smiles at the thought. He moved to the town of Lyons, Kan., population about 4,000, some 12 years ago from Los Angeles.
“There are some things that you never get used to out here,” he said. “I had some friends in the house one night and I went outside in the driveway to lock my car. One of them said ‘Why on earth would you do that?’
“There’s no need to do it, but locking my doors, that’s just a habit I can’t break.”
