OFFICIAL: Penn Valley Park (Ideas+redeveloment)

[pash]

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[grovester]

Chipotle>Boulevard

[kucer]

Chipotle>Boulevard

Yup...Boulevardia really should be a free event. I'll hit this up instead and essentially get the same experience... especially since I have no interest in the Taps & Tastes stuff.

[earthling]

Yeah, the major KC fests need to find a way to pull it off for free. Maybe charge an extra buck for concessions.

[brewcrew1000]

Haven't really heard about this, seems like a cool event. http://chipotlecultivate.com/cities/kansas-city/

Seriously, when was this announced? Totally slipped past me. and its free? I'll put it on my calendar

I guess it was announced back in Feb, maybe the Chiptole festival title threw me off and I never bothered to read about it.
http://www.pitch.com/FastPitch/archives ... ty-in-july

[moderne]

The recently denuded natural landscape of the escarpment along Main St is now a series of rock slides, mud slides and mass slumping. What a mess! I am glad the shrub honeysuckle is gone but they should have left a natural Ozarkian landscape. The root system stabilized the hillside. Across the street Crown Center years ago planted vining(not shrub) honeysuckle and that hill has been stable this monsoon season.

[moderne]

Broadway through the park closing for 6 weeks this summer to repair bridge over Wyandotte and 30th St into park to be widened and improved.

[mgh7676]

I had some free time this morning so I took the opportunity to take a long walk from the Garment district to my apartment in Midtown.

It is always amazing to me how PV Park feels more like an obstacle or impediment to an otherwise enjoyable walk, instead of an oasis of nature. The trails are awful and either front roads that double as parking lots during the day, or wind through open/treeless expanses of lawn. This park can and should be better. There should be easy bike paths leading you to/from Midtown/Downtown. There should be expanses of prairie grasses. There should be places to gather and relax, sheltered from the sun/weather.

We have such a great opportunity with this parks proximity to both downtown and midtown, wonderful sightlines, and the huge size of it....I hate to see it squandered so badly.

[DaveKCMO]

this is why i scoff when people want to add green space. just make the green space we have BETTER.

[flyingember]

That's a good point. We can do a lot more with smaller spaces.

Macken Park is a good example of how to program a small park

It's way smaller than Penn Valley and has two sets of restrooms, ~6 shelters, a pavilion, two playgrounds, a walking trail with fitness stations, and a biking trail, four baseball fields overlapping soccer fields, football field, basketball, tennis, squash(?) and some unused green space for water control.

and it fits way more parking than Penn Valley has.

It's the #1 urban park in KC and is the example of how to program a park. I don't know of any KC park that size which has half that list.

[brewcrew1000]

I had some free time this morning so I took the opportunity to take a long walk from the Garment district to my apartment in Midtown.

It is always amazing to me how PV Park feels more like an obstacle or impediment to an otherwise enjoyable walk, instead of an oasis of nature. The trails are awful and either front roads that double as parking lots during the day, or wind through open/treeless expanses of lawn. This park can and should be better. There should be easy bike paths leading you to/from Midtown/Downtown. There should be expanses of prairie grasses. There should be places to gather and relax, sheltered from the sun/weather.

We have such a great opportunity with this parks proximity to both downtown and midtown, wonderful sight lines, and the huge size of it....I hate to see it squandered so badly.

Get rid of Broadway ripping right through the heart and you can probably have this but as it stands Broadway will always make it a terrible park. If Penn Valley was as large as say Balboa Park or Forest Park then Broadway down the center makes perfect sense but when you have large arteries in Main and SW Trafficway on the East and West Boundary, Broadway through the center makes no sense. Getting rid of the Broadway/27th ramps on 35 would also help with traffic congestion as well, there are too many on-ramps in that section and it creates too many problems

[bobbyhawks]

If you get rid of the ramps, I think you also have to allow left turns on SW Trafficway, at least at 31st. This would also add to the road diet, slowdown effect I think has been discussed on this forum before. SW Trafficway is an urban freeway rolling down a suburban roadway and is locked in place to move people back to Kansas. I use it all the time coming from downtown, but to me, the way that street is designed is the biggest thing holding that immediate part of midtown back from any sort of cool/serious development.

**Edit** - And I still think we have a lot of capacity to subtly encourage more traffic to the East, on Gillham.

They could definitely join Broadway directly to SW Trafficway, just south of the lake. Penn Valley Drive/Broadway already aims directly at SW Trafficway for a bit. I still think the on-ramp is necessary. Otherwise, the next on-ramp without going a strange route is on 12th street or at the North end of the loop. There are a lot of ways they could eliminate that stretch of Broadway, though, and still have the on/off ramps to 35.

[flyingember]

You cut and cover tunnel it from Westport Road to near to I-35. Expensive, sure, but it's already no left turn for most of the length so an expressway that keeps the route and reconnects the neighborhood makes sense. You have an alternate surface road for local traffic.

Cut Broadway through the park down to two lanes total. This encourages traffic to detour over from both ends.
Then you put in a roundabout at the northern end of SW Trafficway

By cutting a set of ramps you also improve safety on I-35.

[bobbyhawks]

Cut Broadway through the park down to two lanes total. This encourages traffic to detour over from both ends.

They could do this one pretty much anytime. There is never enough traffic to warrant two lanes here, and given the number of accidents that happen from speeding cars coming downhill, it would be worth slowing the section down until they come up with a better plan to connect both sides of the park. The extra lanes could be removed to add dedicated parking and bike lanes.

[moderne]

Parks dept cannot even maintain the current assets of PV Park. Have you been up to the Scout lately? Still a dumb cut off access road with awkward parking at the skateboardpark/tennis courts. Then they have put in a new sidewalk meandering to the Scout but it ends at one side of the base of the statue. To walk around the statue it is all dirt now. The statue is in horrible condition, reins and bowstring long missing. The statue should be removed indoors the the sculpture hall in the old temporary exhibit gallery at the Nelson and replaced with a fiberglass duplicate.
The traffic calming features they put on the repaved Broadway are totally inadequate(thus the young trees always being crashed into). Need some stoplights to get traffic to come to a halt. Nothing wrong with a real Boulevard but everything wrong with a traffic sewer.
There once was an open spring at the south end of the gulley/watercourse that feeds into the pond. It was called Silver Spring and was a water source for the original shanteytown in the park.Wonder if it still flow, capped and diverted into the sewer system?

[FangKC]

I'm with DaveKCMO on this. We have way too much underutilized green space in parts of our city, and we don't make good use of what we have. Much of it is not cared for properly, and some parks are really not utilized well at all.

This is my sense--with PVP specifically, there does appear to be a group of people who will not allow the park to be changed from the original George Kessler vision of the park as it was when completed.

There is no acknowledgement that perhaps Kessler's vision is a failure in this instance. The park doesn't not engender wide, regular usage. It's not that inviting other than to drive through occasionally. There is no pedestrian appeal. Quite simply, it's a hard park to use, and enjoy. You would be hard-pressed to find a bigger preservationist than me. But if something doesn't work, it doesn't work. I think those who want to keep PVP as it is now are just boneheaded wrong.

There is little about PVP that summons me back there. It's my opinion, but for me, PVP is a complete failure as a city park--except for rare occasions like certain annual festivals use it for concerts. Large swaths of the park are not visited by any significant numbers of residents. There is absolutely NO reason I would ever go to PVP and take a walk. None, Nada. Zilch.

But that's not to say that will the right design and execution, it couldn't be a great park. Loose Park is a good model of what PVP should be, but on a larger scale.

I also agree with flyingember that you can do a lot with small spaces--even within a large park. Because of PVP's topography, it should probably be broken up into more distinct sections. Different types of gardens. Different types of settings.

There are lots of changes that need to be made to PVP. All the roads need to be lined with trees, and much more extensive landscaping should be done. There should be a lot more sidewalks and trails through it. Traffic should be calmed. Interstate access removed. Each of the entrances should probably be marked with some sort of "gate entrance."

If there is any place in the city that should be rezoned for high-rise and mid-rise residential buildings, it's the periphery of PVP.

[KCTOGA]

Wish you were a city planner, Fang. Agree with this 100%.

[flyingember]

One thing worth pointing out is Macken Park sells permits to use their shelters. I did a year ago and the calendar was crazy full. Got the last slot one weekend and I went a month in advance! they booked them and made money. They had three slots per weekend date per shelter. If they do 50% booking half the year and no other time that's $46,000 if rental is $100

They use the park for youth sports. If you have 30 kids paying $50 each for a sports league that's $1500. With the right layout could have 4-5 sports doing this every weekend day multiple times per day in the summer. (Football. Soccer, baseball, softball, tennis, basketball) And you have 4-5 age groups per sport with their own time slot. So a well programmed park can make $30000 per summer.

That pays a good portion of the staff cost for a dedicated employee for that park.
It uses parks for legitimate ways to make some money or at least offset the costs from users if the park and not taxpayers as a whole.

A smart first item would be a major event location. Put in a modern pavilion like Loose Park has that has removable doors for summer, nice fireplaces for winter. A modern rustic. Then sell the space for events and weddings. There's nothing wrong with parks adding facilities to rent out and fund other projects.

[FangKC]

I agree about the shelters and pavilions flyingember.

You need more than just a city planner KCTOGA. You need real community input about how to park could be used better. One probably needs good research into what actually draws people into a park; what attractions work in other large city parks.

If the Kessler naturalist approach has created a park that doesn't work for most residents most of the time, then I see no good reason to preserve that original design. Just as I don't believe that because the first human dwelling designs might have been mud huts, we should continue to live in mud huts because that might have been the original home design for humans.

If the pastoral Kessler design resulted in frequent park users, it would be a different story. A pastoral design that doesn't attract regular park users is simply a mowed pasture in the middle of the city.

Parks should be designed to allow use as a pedestrian. As mgh7676 stated, walking through PVP is more like an obstacle. I would imagine that even riding a bike through PVP is unpleasant.

The other thing I would like to point out is that there is no public swimming pool in all of Penn Valley Park.

[KCthomas]

I think it's not surprising that Penn Valley Park is underutilized when the pedestrian connections to its closest neighbors are sometimes as much as ten times longer than the actual distance. Here are a few ideas to better utilize and connect the park: http://urbanangle.net/reconnecting-penn-valley-park/