Stan Glazer’s big wheel remembered
When Stanford Glazer — restaurateur, comedy-club creator, owner of what he insists was KC’s first Jaguar — ran for mayor in 2007, his campaign floated several futuristic visions. But the one that seemed to resonate most with the public was his plan to build a 55-story Ferris wheel in Richard L. Berkley Riverfront Park. It was to be a giant skyline icon, a project to steal the thunder from St. Louis’ Gateway Arch. And in Glazer’s plan, it would also have generated revenue by charging $20 a person for rides (which would have lasted an hour).
No grand scheme goes without ridicule, and so it was for Glazer’s enormous wheel. A Lee Judge cartoon in The Kansas City Star suggested that the would-be politico could see “the end of his political career” from the top of the ride. Glazer lost emphatically to the future mayor, Mark Funkhouser. And though he insisted that his fairground-style idea was merely a proposal, not the whole platform, the wheel has remained central to the memory of that campaign. Glazer’s mantra helped: “Let’s replace the rodents in Berkley Park with retail and the pigeons with people.”
Had Glazer’s $100 million plan (which also included restaurants, a lagoon and a towering fountain that would have sprayed water in a heart-shaped pattern into the Missouri) rolled on the river, would it have been a wheel of fortune for the city’s financial coffers? Alas, we’ll never know. Meanwhile, a decade later, there are still more pigeons than people in Berkley Park.
