Finding neighborheads wherever.

[MarketStEl]

Originally Posted by Hazel W

I did write a reply to this but it seems to have disappeared. Just said that the Art Museum building was also part of that legacy. At least the original building was. The addition was just a few years ago. Different architectural style. I guess it suits its times - modern- but hey do not look right to me tied together. Everyone has his own tastes.

I just realized something:

Unlike the St. Louis Museum of Art, the Nelson-Atkins doesn't sit on city parkland.

It occupies the site of William Rockhill Nelson's mansion, Oak Hall, one room from which was (and I hope still is) preserved in the museum. The house was thrown open to the public for viewing after Nelson's widow passed in 1927, which paved the way for its demolition to build the Nelson-Atkins. The museum grounds are owned by the museum.

BTW, I do find the story of the museum's creation interesting: Nelson left a pile of money to buy artworks but none for a building to house them. Atkins left a fortune (a huge sum for a woman to have left at the time: just shy of $1 million on her death in 1911) to build a museum but nothing to fill it with art.

It only made sense to combine the two endowments to create a single institution: a museum building filled with art.

[KC_Retiree]

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

Come to think of it, most Kansas City parks aren't all that sculpted because many of them preserve the natural terrain (Penn Valley Park, for instance). Loose Park, which was the former site of the Kansas City Country Club (the country club that gave its name to both the Plaza and the residential district J.C. Nichols built around it), may be as close as KC gets to a Forest Park-style park.

Kansas City's parks are an enigma. For a city that was part of the City Beautiful Movement and prided itself on its boulevards, its parks are a little underwhelming. The biggest issue with the parks is that they have not been integrated well into the surrounding neighborhoods. There are significant barriers between the people that live nearby and the use of the any of the parks with the exception of Loose Park which is actually well integrated (as you note). The Mall in Penn Valley Park is sculpted and provides a wonderful setting as nice as any place in Forest Park. In fact, it's one of my favorite urban spots in the US. But the rest of the park is pretty much an afterthought. Penn Valley Park is hurt by the almost complete lack of residential abutting the park and the division of the park into two unequal pieces by the presence of high-speed Broadway which is heavily used as an approach to I-35. It's urban setting would be perfect for integration into the city around it but it fails miserably with the exception of the Mall (but even that is almost exclusively accessed by automobiles). To make it truly work, Broadway would have to be removed or at least covered and dense residential would need to be built along the periphery of the park. This is at least something that could be accomplished if there was collective will to do so.

Swope Park is wonderful but again, it's isolated and approachable only by automobile. It has a peripheral-to the-core location and only a minor attempt was made to integrate the park into the surrounding neighborhood although I do like the entrance at Meyer and Swope Parkway. I love the park's natural topography and urban wilderness feel and the two main attractions, the zoo and Starlight, are very well done. Unfortunately, it will always be a car-centric park. Reasonable public transportation to the park is decades away.

[MarketStEl]

Originally Posted by KC_Retiree

Kansas City's parks are an enigma. For a city that was part of the City Beautiful Movement and prided itself on its boulevards, its parks are a little underwhelming. The biggest issue with the parks is that they have not been integrated well into the surrounding neighborhoods. There are significant barriers between the people that live nearby and the use of the any of the parks with the exception of Loose Park which is actually well integrated (as you note). The Mall in Penn Valley Park is sculpted and provides a wonderful setting as nice as any place in Forest Park. In fact, it's one of my favorite urban spots in the US. But the rest of the park is pretty much an afterthought. Penn Valley Park is hurt by the almost complete lack of residential abutting the park and the division of the park into two unequal pieces by the presence of high-speed Broadway which is heavily used as an approach to I-35. It's urban setting would be perfect for integration into the city around it but it fails miserably with the exception of the Mall (but even that is almost exclusively accessed by automobiles). To make it truly work, Broadway would have to be removed or at least covered and dense residential would need to be built along the periphery of the park. This is at least something that could be accomplished if there was collective will to do so.

Swope Park is wonderful but again, it's isolated and approachable only by automobile. It has a peripheral-to the-core location and only a minor attempt was made to integrate the park into the surrounding neighborhood although I do like the entrance at Meyer and Swope Parkway. I love the park's natural topography and urban wilderness feel and the two main attractions, the zoo and Starlight, are very well done. Unfortunately, it will always be a car-centric park. Reasonable public transportation to the park is decades away.

I think you might find that some of the city's smaller parks are a little better integrated with their neighborhoods. The city park that my East Side neighborhood was named for (I wish I knew the history of Oak Park the neighborhood; it's marked by stone pillars at the entrances on several of the main streets leading into it, and some of those pillars were rehabbed or restored sometime before 2013) was a two-block walk from my home and surrounded by residences. Given that it sloped steeply to the southwest, where it abutted backyards, however, the tie-in with the streets on its north and east sides was better than with what lay to its south and west. (The slope made for great sledding, though.)

But on the whole, your point about the major parks is well taken.