Who has the more (legacy core only) urban streetscape, Kansas City or Indianapolis?? (better, comparison)

[Losfrisco]

This is largely to sate my own curiosity about two iconic cities I unfortunately have little experience with.


Both cities were once compact and densely populated before pursuing policies that expanded city boundaries in excess of 300 square miles.

Which has the more urban appearance left as a legacy from their historic boundaries?

[TheTimidBlueBars]

Definitely KC but Indy is underrated on this. It has a few decent walkable neighborhoods outside the downtown, like Irvington and the Near Eastside. There's a BRT line heading north-south across the entire city and (barely) into surrounding counties.

[MarketStEl]

I agree with TheTimidBlueBars that Indy is underrated for the urban streetscapes of its historic core but that KC's remains the better one.

Even when it was more pockmarked by parking lots than it is now, KC's historic downtown and adjacent warehouse/light industrial district to its south (what locals now call the Crossroads Arts District, whose residential population has shot through the roof since 1980) looked and felt more substantial than Indy's analogous zones, and they still do. (Indy didn't build a noose of freeways around its downtown, however.)

I can't think of an urban commercial thoroughfare in Indy that matches KC's Broadway or Main Street, though I haven't traveled along the route of Indy's BRT line yet. Main Street in KC has a streetcar running down it from the River Market to Union Station, and the line is being extended southward along it to the Country Club Plaza and UMKC.

And this comparison wouldn't be complete without the mention of the Plaza, the nation's first planned shopping center and (Urban Land Institute co-founder) J.C. Nichols' crowning achievement. It serves as one of three Exhibits A to support my assertion that we knew how to build urban places where cars and people could play nice with each other in the 1920s, at the dawn of the Auto Age, then promptly tossed what we knew down the memory hole after World War II. (The other two are the "Town for the Motor Age" of Radburn, N.J., and the Suburban Square shopping center in the Philadelphia suburb of Ardmore, Pa.)

As Strong Towns pointed out in its case study, the 61-square-mile Kansas City, Mo., of 1940 was a pretty amazing place. The 314-square-mile one we have now ain't too shabby, either, but the smaller one could support itself better, and the other 250-odd square miles don't have the urban bones of those 61. The people who shaped that 61-square-mile city between 1880 (when William Rockhill Nelson founded The Kansas City Star, which crusaded for the park and boulevard system that makes the city such an attractive place today) and 1940 left it an incredible legacy, most of which it hasn't squandered, to its credit.

[Losfrisco]

Just from looking at old photos, I'm not immediately seeing what would give KC such a decisive lead.

It appears that high rises were more prominent in KC, while Indy had a more Cleveland style urbanity of grand monuments and masses of people in central gathering places.

Both cities tragically associated themselves with America's new suburban mediocrity with their respective realignments, but its notable that Indy at least significantly increased their city population while KC did not at all.