OFFICIAL: Penn Valley Park (Ideas+redeveloment)

Issues concerning Downtown as described by the Downtown Council. River to 31st Street, I-35 to Bruce R. Watkins.
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Highlander
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Re: OFFICIAL: Penn Valley Park (Ideas+redeveloment)

Post by Highlander »

Penn Valley Park in its current form is such a waste of space. The liberty memorial mall is the only part of the park that actually works and the north side of the park is where it borders with the Union Station is the only place where the park is even remotely of seamless with the surrounding area.

I think there are 3 possible ways to fix the Broadway issue: 1) Close Broadway 2) Keep Broadway as a major thruway but entrench and tunnel it 3) close Broadway access to I-35 which essentially makes the road a more local passage rather than a major commuting corridor. That would drastically cut down on traffic making Broadway a more quiet intra-park drive rather than an on ramp for I-35. I don't think keeping Broadway like it is now and simply bridging it works very well.

Beyond that, there's still no access to the park from the surrounding neighborhoods (which are really not very proximal to the park anyway). The only way to make the situation even partly better is to encourage apartment - condo development on the south side of the park. The city may have to give up part of the park land to make that happen. The East and Northeast side of the park are huge issues with a Trafficway, highway intersection and the IRS fortress. That's an insurmountable problem for now. The Main side has possibilities but it's a steep wooded wall with absolutely no connection to the adjacent crown center. A pedestrian bridge that would allow crown center employees and residents access to the park would help.

It's great urban space with some possibilities but its been essentially ignored with respect to integration and fixing it requires much more than just some cosmetic attention to the park. Neighborhoods and infrastructure need to be altered to make the park (other than the Liberty Memorial Mall) worth all that much. I remember in the not-to-distant-past when the Liberty Memorial Mall was a place people just did not go - and look at it now - so there is hope.
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Re: OFFICIAL: Penn Valley Park (Ideas+redeveloment)

Post by moderne »

The absolute minimum that could be done is a stop light at 29th. I can not understand why this was not included in the recent reconstruction of Broadway and the rumble strips. A Calatrava-esque foot and bike bridge with an axis from south of the Pioneer Mother linking up across the valley to behind the Scout would be great. A stair built into a support tower could lead down to the the Silver Spring valley south of the lake. One of the entries for the architectural competition for the LM had a stone arch bridge over Main from Signboard Hill. All of the LM schemes envisioned the area not as a lonely park, but a building studded acropolis of museums and civic buildings. Long before Science City at Union Station there was an idea to put a science museum UNDER PV park, utilizing the same layer of limestone as the caves on 31st St. How about putting the badly needed regional history museum under the park? Would add traffic without taking up a lot of surface area.
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Re: OFFICIAL: Penn Valley Park (Ideas+redeveloment)

Post by chingon »

Part of me just thinks the best solution to the Penn Valley Park conundrum is to just get rid of it. Everything but Memorial Hill.
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Re: OFFICIAL: Penn Valley Park (Ideas+redeveloment)

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Re: OFFICIAL: Penn Valley Park (Ideas+redeveloment)

Post by smh »

Don't forget that Parks offered to pay for and install bike lanes on Penn Valley Drive (Broadway) when they reworked the street a couple of years ago but KCMO Bike Ped coordinator at the time said "No thanks it isn't on the bike plan."
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Re: OFFICIAL: Penn Valley Park (Ideas+redeveloment)

Post by kcjak »

I respectfully disagree. Reducing Broadway to one lane would just funnel more traffic to Main or SW Trfwy, which are even greater barriers to making the park accessible to neighborhoods. As long as Broadway goes thru the park, and as long as there are no left turns on SB SW Trfy people will still still drive (like crazy) through the park. I'd rather see traffic buried somehow, with a bike or pedestrian trail on top.
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Re: OFFICIAL: Penn Valley Park (Ideas+redeveloment)

Post by flyingember »

Induced demand works in opposite. Removing a road would move some traffic to other streets, but some would disappear or change hours or modes.

Plus I seriously doubt peak commuting hours overlays with peak park use.
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Re: OFFICIAL: Penn Valley Park (Ideas+redeveloment)

Post by beautyfromashes »

Part of the problem too is that if you're going from Midtown to Johnson County, the fastest way is to go through the park into 35 and loop around at Penway. This is even the suggestion on map apps. Why is there no direct connector between Midtown and 35?
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Re: OFFICIAL: Penn Valley Park (Ideas+redeveloment)

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Re: OFFICIAL: Penn Valley Park (Ideas+redeveloment)

Post by chingon »

It's close the Broadway to I-35 interchange or nothing else matters.

That said, the park is more used now than I can remember it being at any time in the last 15 years. I remain probably less convinced than the average board member that access to the park is a panacea, in the same way I'm a little less aggro about pedestrian "friendliness" as a dogma than the average poster on this board.

If they gave me control and a modest budget, I'd close Broadway to the highway but leave it a through street, add parking and a bikes lanes, then turn everything south and west of Kessler into a native plant botanical garden/pollinator preserve with meandering bike and pedestrian trails about as fancy as the trolley track trail and call it good.
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Re: OFFICIAL: Penn Valley Park (Ideas+redeveloment)

Post by moderne »

Originally one side of the current Broadway was the through street, the other was a slower traffic carriageway. There are some absurd measurement of the indirect paths neighbors of the park have to walk to get to the park:
http://urbanangle.net/reconnecting-penn-valley-park/

http://pennvalleypark.org/
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Re: OFFICIAL: Penn Valley Park (Ideas+redeveloment)

Post by missingkc »

Does anyone else think that Penn Valley Park, with its relatively rugged terrain, would be a great place for outdoor sports? Not team sports, "terrain sports". Things like zipline, rock climbing, maybe rafting? Things like that. Seems better suited to vigorous activity than a quiet stroll.
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Re: OFFICIAL: Penn Valley Park (Ideas+redeveloment)

Post by kboish »

All of those, yes. It also needs a mountain bike skills course, disc golf course, aviary, botanical gardens, and a museum of some sort.
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Re: OFFICIAL: Penn Valley Park (Ideas+redeveloment)

Post by missingkc »

I don't think any of those ideas would be very expensive to implement and would bring so much to the city.
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Re: OFFICIAL: Penn Valley Park (Ideas+redeveloment)

Post by DaveKCMO »

Ha! The way parks does things that would several hundred million dollars... to study.
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Re: OFFICIAL: Penn Valley Park (Ideas+redeveloment)

Post by missingkc »

Enlist private, for profit investment like the zipline in Swope.
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Re: OFFICIAL: Penn Valley Park (Ideas+redeveloment)

Post by Highlander »

I was looking at Google Earth images today of Penn Valley Park. It would be great to take Union Cemetery and swap the land for an equal sized portion of southern Penn Valley Park, move the graves from Union Cemetery to that part of PVP, and make Union Cemetery into an urban park. Union Cemetery (which would become a park) would be instantly integrated with a large urban neighborhood and will be even more so when the apartments being built south of Crown Center are finished. It could instantly become the premier urban park in KCMO. The resulting park would be similar to something like Alamo Park in San Francisco.

You could almost link the new Union Park with what's left of PVP via a pedestrian bridge across Main. The part of southern PVP not taken up by the swap with Union Cemetery could be handed over to developers to create neighborhoods along the edge of the remainder of PVP.

PVP keeps its critical areas like the Mall but it loses part of its more far flung area which without some kind of drastic changes to Broadway and the surrounding neighborhoods, will always be kind of lost park anyway. Of course, the new Union Park would be haunted but that's the least of KC's problems.
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Re: OFFICIAL: Penn Valley Park (Ideas+redeveloment)

Post by aknowledgeableperson »

It is not that cheap to move graves. Especially considering how many of the bodies are probably buried. It would be a nightmare.
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Re: OFFICIAL: Penn Valley Park (Ideas+redeveloment)

Post by Highlander »

aknowledgeableperson wrote:It is not that cheap to move graves. Especially considering how many of the bodies are probably buried. It would be a nightmare.
It would be a viable but probably not too popular solution to PVP's problems. Compared to other ways that PVP could me made viable (which isn't going to happen without major changes to Broadway within the park), the cost would be a bargain.
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Re: OFFICIAL: Penn Valley Park (Ideas+redeveloment)

Post by moderne »

The only thing Union Cemetery needs to be a functioning park is gates on all sides open during daylight hours. People in the neighborhoods around it(me) could use it as a pleasant shortcut to Crown Center or Main St or PV Park.
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