Thread: A Place Called Kansas City, MO
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Old Posted Jun 2, 2014, 11:31 PM
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BigKidD BigKidD is offline
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Join Date: May 2006
Location: KCMO (Plaza)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by soleri View Post
That one picture of those three deco (with one midcentury) skyscrapers sitting in a vast field of parking seems to tell the story here. Kansas City has great buildings but the city itself has been largely destroyed at street level. And it's hardly unique in this way. Almost every American city you see has the same cancer. Go back to 1950 and gaze in wonder how vital every American city and town looked. Gaze today and weep.
Quite true. The closet photo I can find of the area in 1950, which shows the city was already losing low rise buildings downtown.
http://www.kchistory.org/cdm4/item_v...ISOBOX=1&REC=6

I hope these empty parcels will be developed in the future, but it will take a number of years and more progressive local developers.
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“Most planning of the past fifteen years has been based upon three destructive fallacies: the cataclysmic insists upon tearing everything down in order to design from an absolutely clean slate; the automotive would plan for the free passage of the automobile at the expense of all other values; the suburban dislikes the city anyway and would just as soon destroy its density and strew it across the countryside.” Vince Scully
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