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I've spent some time in KCMO, easily one of the worst things about the city is the obnoxious freeway spaghetti encircling the CBD area....
Was there a picture attached to that post originally?
I saw neither image nor link when I read it.
And yes on the downtown freeway loop in KC, whose west leg obliterated one of the city's best parks and most dramatic park drives and whose original (north) leg severed the downtown from the area where Kansas City began. There's an image circulating on Twitter showing Sixth Street in 1880 and the view from the same perspective today; the only thing both of them contain is a wedge-shaped narrow building in the distance. The today view has a freeway in front; the 1880 view had a street lined with buildings.
There's talk of removing the north leg (which is the city's oldest freeway and was poorly designed to begin with).
It would be helpful to have photos to compare. I've never been to KC and I was surprised by the lack of urban neighborhoods that I saw during visits to Cleveland. I know that Cleveland was a decent sized city prior to the automobile, but where are those neighborhoods now?
It would be helpful to have photos to compare. I've never been to KC and I was surprised by the lack of urban neighborhoods that I saw during visits to Cleveland. I know that Cleveland was a decent sized city prior to the automobile, but where are those neighborhoods now?
Hmm, you obviously missed Ohio City, University Circle/Little Italy, lower Glenville, Tremont, Detroit-Shoreway, Hingetown, Shaker Square-Larchmere-Buckeye, Old Brooklyn, Clark-Fulton, Edgewater, Kamms Corner, Cudell, Lorain Station, Waterloo, etc., etc....
Hopefully your next visit to Cleveland is a bit more detailed.
Both of them got hit hard by things like this, yea?
Sadly, this isn't just a KC or Cleveland problem, it's an American one. The individual freedom and (potential) speed the automobile gives human beings is great, but the U.S. clearly has gone way overboard with freeways and cars and urban places to store cars, particularly vitality-killing surface parking -- to the point of destroying much of our pre-auto built-up environment leading to the point of human detachment and alienation. Few industrialized nations have allowed cars to negatively dominate as have we and we are paying the collective price in so many ways.
Kansas City and Cleveland have very similar residential housing materials, architecture and density. KC just sprawls over a much wider area than Cleveland. Both cities have hilly areas, but KC much more so. Cleveland's bluffs and deep creek and river gorges, plus Lake Erie to the north, have hemmed in Cleveland to a degree creating a more compact city -- although Cleveland has its sprawly areas, for sure, it's just that Cleveland's sprawl is more directional ...
KC clearly trumps Cleveland in urban retail -- there is no Cleveland comparative to Country Club Plaza, a large, dense, walkable neighborhood of traditional high-end shopping surrounded by apartment/condo complexes of many types, including several high-rises. Also, KC's CBD, though similar in size to Cleveland's, is much tighter (narrower streets) and more complete/filled in with few of the dreaded surface parking holes that pockmark downtown Cleveland--> these are slowly disappearing in Cleveland, but not fast enough. The KC area to the south and west of CCP contains a considerably larger wealthy residential district than any that lie within Cleveland's borders -- Edgewater being the most significant.
Cleveland's rail rapid transit is a major advantage even though it way under-performs compared to the big-boy transit cities. Downtown Cleveland walkability and that of key neighborhoods like Ohio City, Little Italy and Shaker Square have been positively impacted by the Rapid. The Rapid also allowed downtown to maintain an enviable sports complex where the stadiums of the Browns, Cavs and Indians (soon the Guardians) are all adjacent to train stations. Wouldn't it be great if KC's much-admired Kauffman-Arrowhead stadium complex were at or near downtown rather than the edge of KC near a freeway interchange?
Cleveland also pioneered in bus rapid transit, too, with both the Healthline to the east (down main street Euclid Ave) and the Cleveland State University line to the west, whose inner 3 miles is non-stop over the limited-access Shoreway west from downtown.
KC's North River Market district echoes Cleveland's Warehouse District except for KC's highly successful streetcars.
I’ve never been to KC but I know someone who’s moving here to Cleveland from there. He said that downtown Cleveland’s revitalization reminds him a lot of KC’s recent revitalization. I think there may be more blight in Cleveland overall, but Cleveland has more dense old suburbs (Cleveland Heights, Shaker Heights, Lakewood) than KC. Also he said nothing in KC compares to our Little Italy, which to me is really like a small slice of gentrifying Brooklyn.
This is spot on. I was in Brooklyn last fall, then in Cleveland's LI (Presti's) for dessert, and said the exact same thing to friends. The dense, crowded craziness of Mayfield Road plus the tight residential streets surrounding it -- with the multi-unit houses and apartments practically up on the curb, is very New York-ish; more so than any neighborhood I know of in the Midwest outside of Chicago. Little Italy has been vibrant and busy for over 120-years, but RTA's relocated elevated Rapid transit station to LI's front door on Mayfield Rd only enhances the Brooklyn vibe -- since it was built in 2015 there has been an explosion of infill apartments, condos, and townhouses in LI and neighboring Uptown University Circle. And at LI's Murray Hill/Mayfield epicenter, esp during warm evenings at the dinner hour, it is not just a good walking district, pedestrians actually dominate... it's a beautiful thing.
Many of those look like what I saw. They remind me of Nassau, LI.
Nassau County is actually a decent comp to Cleveland overall, and I don't think that's a knock. As far as urbanity, Cleveland is a mix between Nassau and Queens, which I would rank as pretty urban (even if it's suburban for NYC standards).
As for Cleveland vs. KC, I'll say what I've said before on this. I think KC is vastly underrated as far as urbanity, it's just that KC's is mostly confined to a 10 or so square mile area, basically from downtown to midtown. KC's urban contiguous urban area is better than Cleveland's.
On the other hand, it's no comparison to Cleveland in terms of having more urban neighborhoods. KC really drops off, where even if some of the ones in Cleveland may be rough around the edges, there are dozens of nodes around the city (and into the inner suburbs).
I mean, you aren't going to find this 10 miles out from downtown in KC (and E. 185th is very low on the Cleveland urban rankings).
Nassau County is actually a decent comp to Cleveland overall, and I don't think that's a knock. As far as urbanity, Cleveland is a mix between Nassau and Queens, which I would rank as pretty urban (even if it's suburban for NYC standards).
As for Cleveland vs. KC, I'll say what I've said before on this. I think KC is vastly underrated as far as urbanity, it's just that KC's is mostly confined to a 10 or so square mile area, basically from downtown to midtown. KC's urban contiguous urban area is better than Cleveland's.
On the other hand, it's no comparison to Cleveland in terms of having more urban neighborhoods. KC really drops off, where even if some of the ones in Cleveland may be rough around the edges, there are dozens of nodes around the city (and into the inner suburbs).
I mean, you aren't going to find this 10 miles out from downtown in KC (and E. 185th is very low on the Cleveland urban rankings).
You're right; KC has no commercial strips like those beyond the limits of the pre-1946 city (Missouri River to 79th Street, state line to the Blue River). And the ones it does have within those limits — Troost and Prospect avenues, principally — are seriously degraded and nowhere near in as good health as those two streets. (Broadway, which plays a similar role on the west side, is the exception.)
But Lorain Road in Kamms Corner looks to me like it would be not at all out of place in Los Angeles. East 185th looks more urban to me.
I think one reason for your impression that KC's best urban neighborhoods outshine their Cleveland counterparts while Cleveland is more urban overall could stem from the big annexation spree KC went on over the nearly 50 years after 1946, when the city annexed the small semi-industrial suburb of Marlborough on its southern edge.
The city covered about 58 square miles from about 1910 up until then. 400,000 people lived in that area in 1940, about 6,600 people per square mile. In 1950, 456,622 people lived in an area only 2 or so square miles bigger. That's a density of more than 7,000 per square mile. After some years of decline after 1970, the city passed that figure slightly in 2000, but by then, it covered some 312 square miles of land, more than five times its 1940 territory. Even after subtracting the portion of that land area still planted in corn and soybeans, that means KC sprawls a lot more than Cleveland now.
Cleveland feels more like a classic big city. If Cleveland’s larger, denser urban core/inner ring suburbs and comparatively extensive rapid transit system don’t tip the scales in favor of Cleveland, its much larger Jewish and Italian population does.
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