How a proposed Royals stadium at Crown Center channels the ‘Kansas City Spirit’
The audacious Joyce Hall was all of 18 years old when he reckoned his Nebraska hometown wasn’t big enough to realize the potential of his family’s 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 himself in the store one day persuaded him that this was the place.
“I came to Kansas City in 1910, not because of its size or importance, but because I’d heard about the Kansas City Spirit, and I believed it to be a community where my future was worth risking,” the Hallmark founder wrote in a 1965 full-page ad in The Star urging “all Kansas Citians to work toward a great revival of the Kansas City Spirit.”
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 “Royals” among ideas alphabetically ranging from Aces to Zoomers.
Engineer Sanford Porte was the official winner because of what The Star called the “neatness of his entry” and his rationale: tribute to the American Royal and the area’s billion-dollar livestock income.
Still needing a logo, Kauffman turned to Hallmark.
“The criteria were that the logo had to have blue, gold and a crown,” Shannon Manning, the former Hallmark artist who designed the winner, told The Star in 2018. “I always kid that they came to Hallmark because they knew crowns really well.”
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.
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 Wednesday.
Not to mention that 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’t disclose what the state’s anticipated addition to the city’s $600 million commitment would be. And what did Sherman mean by calling all of this “phase one,” anyway?
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’ll pay — and harkened to all that’s made Kansas City what it is.
Alternately glancing out the window behind them, gesturing or alluding to their surroundings were Hall’s grandson, Don Hall Jr., and Royals owner John Sherman — who from the day he was announced as the team’s owner in 2019 has spoken of seeking to honor Kauffman’s legacy in service to the community.
“Don, we’re deeply honored to bring our crown back home to the very place where it was created. Here at Hallmark,” Sherman said. “Destiny appears to have its eyes on us.”
What Mayor Quinton Lucas referred to as all the strands coming together included Sherman’s homage to former Mayor Kay Barnes, under whose leadership the pivotal Power & Light District and what’s now known as T-Mobile Center were built nearly 20 years ago.
“We would not be here having this conversation today if she had not had the courage to lead that process,” said Sherman, who recalled Barnes sending him handwritten letters that included encouraging him to “think big. And if you think big, think bigger.”
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.
Amid the adjacent landscape featuring 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’s headquarters is transformed into the stadium site), Hall thought most about nearby Union Station.
That’s where in 1910 his grandfather “jumped off the train,” as he put it, because he had heard tell of the aforementioned Kansas City Spirit.
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 “get up and git” mentality.
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.
Joyce Hall “got caught up in that spirit,” his grandson said.
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.
By way of recent example, Sherman and his wife, Marny, on Thursday will be honorary chairs for the 2026 “Wild About Harry” gala for the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum — one of many local causes in which he’s been deeply invested.
That’s what Hall meant when he said Sherman’s plan to move the franchise into a downtown stadium and all it signals — connectivity and economic growth in particular — is “an expression of the Kansas City Spirit.”
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.
It took some selling and negotiating, for instance, to get the twin stadiums at the Truman Sports Complex built.
Fair to say that worked out, though the inability to develop around it surely has been part of this and the Chiefs determining they’d move to Kansas for the 2031 season. It remains understood that the Royals intend to be downtown by 2030.
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.
All of which proved to be pillars of what Lucas called a “particularly momentous time” that he can see parallels in now.
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’s initiative to create the world’s first stadium purpose-built for a professional women’s soccer team.
More immediately and directly tethered to the moment is the transformative downtown initiative championed by Barnes.
While it’s true that 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.
That obviously doesn’t 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.
Indeed, it’s a fascinating twist to all this that 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.
Put another way, that pushback put what at least seems to be a more appealing and frictionless general concept in motion.
To his credit, Sherman rather embraced that point on Thursday.
“It’s been said that patience is the calm acceptance that things can happen in a different order than what you had in mind …” he said. “Patience has given us an outcome that we could never have imagined.”
There was no script or playbook, he added, no blueprint or roadmap to the site.
Except maybe the Kansas City Spirit ... and this chance at its latest great revival.
This story was originally published April 22, 2026 at 7:04 PM with the headline "How a proposed Royals stadium at Crown Center channels the ‘Kansas City Spirit’."