Fairway has nearly 4,000 residents, according to the city's own count. On a Tuesday night this summer, more people than that tried to get into Unity Temple on the Plaza to hear James Patterson and Mike Lupica talk about a new thriller. The event wasn't hosted by a downtown convention center or a university lecture series. It was booked by Rainy Day Books, the independent bookstore that has occupied the same corner of the Fairway Shops since 1975.
If you live here, you already know the store exists. What's easy to miss is the mechanism that lets a single storefront in a city smaller than most Kansas City high schools land the same authors who tour Chicago and Los Angeles. It isn't charm alone, and it isn't luck. It's a deliberate decision about where the crowd actually goes.
The Room Down the Street Isn't Where the Line Forms
Rainy Day Books still operates out of 2706 W. 53rd Street, the same shopping center where Vivien Jennings opened the doors on November 4, 1975, in a converted police station with roughly 450 square feet of retail space. The footprint hasn't grown to match the store's reputation, and that's by design. According to the store's own account of its operations, most of its author events are held off-site, at venues built to seat the crowds a national bestseller draws. Unity Temple on the Plaza, with its sanctuary and downstairs Unity Hall, has become the default room for anything too big for Belinder Avenue.
That split is why the math works. The shop stays a neighborhood-sized space where a Fairway resident can wander in on a Wednesday afternoon. The tour stops happen a few miles south, across the state line in Missouri, where a few hundred people can fit. Rainy Day produces more than 300 author events a year, and the ones that make headlines almost never happen inside the actual store.
What the Investors Actually Bought in 2022
In May 2022, Jennings and her longtime partner Roger Doeren announced they were ready to sell. Both were in their seventies, and the store's staying power had already been tested. The bookstore had survived a pandemic-era GoFundMe campaign, and Jennings wanted, in her own words at the time, someone new to be the face and voice of the business.
What she got was a 16-member ownership group led by Tyler Enders, Keith Bradley, and Thomas McIntyre, the founders of local retailer Made in KC. The buyer list also included author David Von Drehle, art collectors Bill and Christy Gautreaux, and U.S. Engineering CEO Tyler Nottberg, all of them longtime customers rather than outside operators looking to flip the brand.
The results are measurable. Enders told Axios Kansas City last November that sales have grown 50 percent since the acquisition closed in 2022. As of late 2025, the store's school book fair program had grown from zero events two years earlier to 13, growth fast enough that general manager Annie Krieg hired three additional staff just to keep pace, according to reporting in Kansas City magazine. None of that happened by expanding the shop. It happened by giving an already-busy events calendar the marketing and staffing muscle to book bigger rooms more often.
The Family That Still Runs the Room
The part of the sale that mattered most to longtime customers wasn't the money. It was who stayed. Geoffrey Jennings, Vivien's son, remained on staff as lead buyer and events manager. Vivien herself kept hosting author conversations and spending time with customers in the store. Doeren stayed on to help with the technical side of the business.
Krieg, who became general manager in the summer of 2025, has talked about what that continuity actually looks like on the floor.
"We're serving the third generation of readers for some families," Krieg has said, describing customers whose grandparents shopped the store's original paperback exchange decades ago.
That's not a marketing line. It's a description of a shop where the same family has been trading recommendations with the same staff since before most of Fairway's current housing stock was built.
What Never Leaves Belinder Avenue
For every off-site show that pulls in a national author, the in-store calendar keeps running its own quieter version of the same idea. Earlier this year, author Kenan Orhan sat down inside the shop to talk about his novel "The Renovation." A few weeks later, Devon Mihesuah did the same for "Blood Relay." These are the events that never make it into a headline, the ones where the audience is thirty or forty people instead of three hundred, and the conversation happens a few feet from the greeting card rack instead of a sanctuary stage.
The store's community work follows a similar split. Rainy Day partners with Lead to Read KC on a program that channels the format of a childhood school book fair into a fundraiser for literacy and mentoring, most recently staged at Old Westport Middle School with vendors like Café Corazón and Ruby Jean's Juicery filling out the floor. And when the store closed out its 50th anniversary season last November, the final marquee guest was Rob Riggle, a Shawnee Mission South graduate coming home to talk about his memoir at Unity Temple before the crowd dispersed back across the state line.
The contrast is the point. Off-site, the store can book a name recognizable to people who have never set foot in Kansas. On its own floor, it's still running the version of the business Jennings built by hand, one conversation at a time.
A short comparison, drawn from the store's own recent calendar, makes the pattern easy to see:
- Off-site, Unity Temple on the Plaza: James Patterson and Mike Lupica, Michael Schur and Joe Posnanski, Christina Lauren with Ali Hazelwood, Julie Soto, and Susan Lee
- In-store, 2706 W. 53rd Street: Kenan Orhan, Devon Mihesuah, smaller regional and debut authors passing through on quieter tour dates
Same bookstore. Two different rooms, chosen on purpose.
Why It Matters If You Already Live Here
None of this changes anything about buying or selling a home. It does explain something residents often can't quite articulate: why a shop the size of a large living room keeps landing writers who fill arenas elsewhere, and why that doesn't feel strange if you've lived here long enough to expect it. The answer isn't that Fairway is somehow bigger than it looks. It's that the people running its most recognizable business figured out, years ago, that you don't have to grow the room to grow the reach. You just have to know when to send the crowd south, across the state line.
That's the kind of detail that only shows up if you're paying attention to the neighborhood block by block, which is the same habit that matters when you're trying to understand what a street, a shopping center, or a home is actually worth here. Bash KC spends as much time tracking the texture of Fairway as we do the comps, because both tell you something true about the place. If you're curious what your own corner of it is worth right now, request a personalized home valuation and we'll walk you through it.
