Bruce Waktins Dr/71 Hwy and the stoplights (Kansas City, Columbia: condo, home)

[Jayhawker434]

I take 71 from 75th St to Downtown and back everyday. I can't even put into words how much I hate highway 71. It is an interstate a few south of me (I49) and a few miles north of downtown (I29).

[westender]

Originally Posted by KC_Retiree

My childhood home was destroyed to make room for Bruce Watkins Drive. My parents moved out of the neighborhood in the 60's to avoid condemnation of their property. Not long before I was born, my father's business was destroyed to make room for I-70. Watkins Drive was a disaster for KC. It hung like the sword of Damocles over the corridor for decades before it was ever built and when it was built, it is an ineffective highway/boulevard hybrid that still doesn't work all that well and the lights now serve no purpose at all. Political compromise at its worst.

This was the narrative I mostly heard growing up. My Dad went to Westport High class of 45 (he lived west of Troost in Sunny Slope now known as 'South Hyde Park'), but he attended Linwood Presbyterian with lots of kids from Central High.

The Central High catchment/ neighborhoods started to 'turn' in the late 1950s, and the highway department started the demos along Michigan, Euclid almost immediately afterward. The alignment shifts eastward south of Brush Creek, toward Montgall and Chestnut, demolished in the 1960s.

Then the right-of-way sat empty for at least 20 years. I remember as a child, maybe 1974 or 1975, during a visit to the "old neighborhoods" looking downhill from a crest onto Euclid Avenue completely denuded of homes and trees.

Second to the emotional destruction of Paseo High School, this is among the most sensitive topics to Kansas City natives of a certain age.

[lovekcmo]

From whatever the long, sordid history of Bruce Watkins, the fact is that it is in place now and there's no going back to neighborhoods of old. Whenever I'm on it, I never see anyone walking/biking across the bridges or waiting at the stoplights to cross, just like any bridges over any highways in the city. I have seen cars run the light, turn right, off of the cross streets to beat the traffic. It's dangerous and clogs up the flow of traffic. My friends that live in SKC to Grandview hate the lights, the whites/blacks, and how it impedes the flow of traffic. I live out by Independence Center, very close to I-70 and am happy that I have an interstate/freeway I can jump on to and not have to travel for 15 minutes on surface streets to get on to the freeway. Just my two cents worth of thoughts.

[chicago2kc]

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

The non-controlled-access segment of Bruce Watkins Drive is the result of a compromise brokered by then-Mayor Emmanuel Cleaver II that ended a long-running legal standoff that had held up construction of the South Midtown Freeway, "the freeway the East Side didn't want."

The Missouri Highway Department (its name hadn't been changed yet) began acquiring land and demolishing houses along the freeway's route in the early 1970s. As soon as the bulldozers started moving, groups of residents in or near its path filed lawsuits seeking to halt its construction.

By this time, the "freeway revolt" was in full swing in cities across the country. City-dwellers, especially African-Americans whose neighborhoods got sliced in two by mega-roads designed to get suburbanites in and out of the city center and affluent urbanites who objected to new roads that would disfigure views from their homes or cut them off from nearby districts, fought to cancel or alter highway projects. It was during this period that most of the freeways planned for Washington and Philadelphia got scrapped, the replacement for New York City's West Side Highway got traded in for subway improvements, and, some time later, existing never-completed freeways demolished in San Francisco (after an earthquake damaged it in 1989) and Milwaukee. Freeways that didn't get canceled got altered to make them less disruptive, as with I-95 at Center City Philadelphia (the result of a fight between wealthy Society Hill residents and the Pennsylvania Highway Department that ultimately got Vice President Hubert Humphrey to intervene).

The path of the South Midtown passed three blocks west of my grandparents' house, which sits in a roughly 12-block section of southeast KC (52nd to 55th streets, Prospect Avenue to Town Fork Creek) that had been deeded for black settlement by the white farmer who had owned it upon his death. They didn't join the fight themselves, but some of their neighbors further west did. I wrote the Missouri Highway and Transportation Department to request the environmental impact study for the road in hopes of coming up with an alternative to it.

The eventual clearing of the path of the freeway, which continued while the lawsuits worked their way through the courts, didn't dampen the opposition. What did quiet it down was the compromise Cleaver proposed: the freeway would be built as a parkway between Brush Creek and 75th Street, with one interchange at 63d Street but the others turned into signalized intersections.

But if you note the design of the parkway, you might see how MoDOT planned for the freeway's eventual completion. The surface roads have a wide median between them - wide enough to insert a six-lane highway and turn the parkway into frontage roads.

So the residents may have won a battle rather than the war. But that will depend on whether enough people decide that the accident count on the surface-arterial portion of Bruce Watkins Drive is high enough to warrant inserting that freeway.

Great explanation and info!

[lovekcmo]

In time, I think the residents will get the stoplights removed, they object to them as much as people passing through in and out. MODOT did a favor to the city with the way they designed/built the road. Emmanuel Cleaver did a disservice to residents with what he did in getting the stop lights in.

[MarketStEl]

Originally Posted by lovekcmo

In time, I think the residents will get the stoplights removed, they object to them as much as people passing through in and out. MODOT did a favor to the city with the way they designed/built the road. Emmanuel Cleaver did a disservice to residents with what he did in getting the stop lights in.

Perhaps, but that was what got the road built finally. MoDOT prepared for its eventual completion as a freeway for its entire length. Had Cleaver not offered that as an alternative, the court battle might still have continued into now.

[pmheart6]

As others have mentioned there were lawsuits and negotions that delayed it decades. If I'm not mistaken, the outcome was lights at the request of businesses and residents. They wanted people to stop and visit the local businesses VS just speed by to/from work downtown.

Originally Posted by lovekcmo

Why of the stoplights? A lot of my friends, from work are African-Americans, and they all seem to hate the stop lights and thing it's a racist thing that the city has the stoplights. I hear a lot from them that drive that they think the reason for the stop lights is for the police to have access. I read the article today in the Star about it and did some searching online about the reasons for them. From people that live in the neighborhoods of where the stoplights are none of them appreciate them being there. Just wandering if anyone out there on this site has any other reasons, than what the Star had to say, on why the stoplights are there?

[KC_Retiree]

Originally Posted by pmheart6

As others have mentioned there were lawsuits and negotions that delayed it decades. If I'm not mistaken, the outcome was lights at the request of businesses and residents. They wanted people to stop and visit the local businesses VS just speed by to/from work downtown.

Yes and they didn't want their neighborhoods to be split by the freeway. I am not sure the lights accomplish any of the stated reasons for their existence. They really accomplish nothing.

The lights really need to go away. Not only do they delay traffic, they are dangerous. I'm glued to my rear view mirror every time I approach the first light coming up 71 from the south. It won't be cheap because the highway is now at grade with cross roads where intersections are controlled by lights and a lot of entrenchment, rebuilding and closures would need to happen to fix the situation retroactively.

[MarketStEl]

Originally Posted by pmheart6

As others have mentioned there were lawsuits and negotions that delayed it decades. If I'm not mistaken, the outcome was lights at the request of businesses and residents. They wanted people to stop and visit the local businesses VS just speed by to/from work downtown.

I will note that the route of the Bruce Watkins Drive parkway section parallels Prospect Avenue about a block to its east. I don't think that a desire to have those driving on it make the detour to patronize the local businesses rated highly among the reasons for the parkway compromise, but it might have played a supporting role.

[comfortably_numb]

Originally Posted by KC_Retiree

It won't be cheap because the highway is now at grade with cross roads where intersections are controlled by lights and a lot of entrenchment, rebuilding and closures would need to happen to fix the situation retroactively.

I-49 will eventually be extended to downtown/I-29 and the lights will be removed. Will it happen in our lifetimes? Well, I'm 44 so maybe?