Chris Harris tore down his block and built a park. But as the city tries to clone it, Harris tries to save it

A sprinkling of late-afternoon rain dampens Harris Park’s cracked asphalt. Two teams bound up and down the basketball court, which is tucked discreetly into Kansas City’s Ivanhoe neighborhood. The game is casual but competitive, and the trash talk flows.

Six teams have joined the park’s adult league this year; they play only for bragging rights, but the stands are packed anyway. Nearby, a small playground occupies the children of onlookers. Farther away, a woman circles a trail on the park’s perimeter, paying the game no attention.

A tall man stalks the sidelines with his whistle, his muscular frame filling out his striped referee’s shirt. He calls fouls like a ref but also offers the instructions of a coach. When someone charges past the tallest player on the court for an easy layup, the ref shouts, “C’mon, big man, you gotta put that down.” Big Man doesn’t acknowledge the tip, but he meets the next offensive threat at the rim, sending the ball, and his opponent, flying.

On other inner city courts, words of wisdom from a 41-year-old volunteer ref would likely be ignored or scoffed at. But not here.

“He owns this park,” a 20-something man in the bleachers says, nudging the young woman to his left and pointing out the ref. “Chris owns this park. He did it for the ‘hood. He’s got cake. He’s cool as a motherfucker, too.”

It’s not slang — the man is speaking literally. Chris Harris actually owns the park, a rectangular swath of green that runs the length of Wayne Avenue between 40th and 41st streets.

Harris grew up in this neighborhood. Back in the ’80s, his block was indistinguishable from any other in Ivanhoe. But while Harris was away at college — and stayed away for a career out of town — drugs and violence hacked up his old street. So one summer, 12 years ago, Harris returned with a plan: Demolish the few houses still standing around his own and erect a park in their place.

The city’s Parks and Recreation Department doesn’t cut a blade of grass here. But the park has become the envy of city officials, who say they’d like to copy Harris Park and place clones in each of the city’s six council districts.

One of the reasons that this place is a model among urban parks is something you can’t see — not immediately, anyway. When a car rolls slowly by the park, you don’t see anybody posturing or hitching up their jeans to suggest that there’s something heavy in the waistband. People are at ease here. Other blocks don’t feel like this, Harris points out, and it’s not like this by accident.

But there are flaws in Harris’ model that the city won’t copy, organizational defects that threaten his ability to keep the park running. And after going through a year of resigning board members and dwindling coffers, Harris is faced with deciding what’s more important: owning the park or seeing it thrive.

Across from the park, a man sits on the wooden porch of a small gray house, drinking in the view.

“It’s peaceful here to me,” says Henry Harris, Chris’ 69-year-old dad. Henry lives in Raytown but drives past this house twice a day, stopping to smoke a GNC on his old porch. “I mind my own business and set everybody else free. And I mean that.”

Henry grew up in Louisiana, where he learned an appreciation for owning land, “something you can call your own.” When he bought this house in 1962, his was the only black family on the block. The neighbors “told me how glad they was to have us,” Henry says. “Month later, for-sale signs was up everywhere.”

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In the 1990s, he watched drug dealers and gang violence begin to eat away at his neighborhood, house by house. Homes went vacant and fell into disrepair, the neighborhood on its way to what it is today: part of a battered 3rd District that claims 589 of the city’s 1,042 “dangerous buildings.”

But while everyone else left, Henry stayed, buying up the derelict properties as he could. Eventually his family owned most of the block.

“It had its bad times,” Henry says of Ivanhoe. “Sure did. Lots of bad times. But it was still home to me.”

Henry was never an athlete himself, but he watched his oldest son, Nathan, teach Chris to play basketball. There was no court except the street. “We put a little goal up there, might not have had nets on it, on a light pole or wherever we could nail one to, for the kids,” Henry says. “And they all assembled in front of my house, seemed like.”

Nathan eventually fell into the drug use that had enveloped much of the neighborhood. That was all Chris needed to be convinced to seek a different path. He didn’t play for his Westport High team. But his talent, honed on Kansas City’s street-ball courts, was “discovered” by Penn Valley Community College’s basketball coach, whose team played against Chris in Mayor Emanuel Cleaver’s Night Hoops program.

Chris attended Penn Valley for two years before transferring to Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee, where he studied sociology. But during his time away from home, he imagined ways to breathe life into his dying neighborhood. By the time he graduated, the idea had cemented itself: He wanted to build a park.

He came back to Kansas City the summer following graduation, in 1998. He asked his dad if he could use the property that Henry had acquired over the years.

“I didn’t say nothing to him about it, but it was hard,” Henry says. “That was something that was burning inside of him, so his desires overrode mine. For him, I’m glad. If I had to do it over again, I’d do the same thing. Sure would.”

The idea for this DIY park came together on paper first. Harris searched city records to find out who owned the vacant lots that his family never bought. He learned that they belonged to Jackson County, which takes ownership of foreclosed properties that fail to sell on the courthouse steps. Using his savings, Harris bought up 12 or so lots for $200 apiece.

The plan went from paper to sawdust that same summer. Harris went to the hardware store, spent $50 on a chainsaw, and started to make firewood out of the trees still standing in the ghosts of former neighbors’ front yards.

“My friends still laugh about that today,” Harris says. “While I was doing it, they were riding past, laughing at me. They thought I was crazy. I just told them, ‘You’ll see. When I’m done, I’m gonna invite you over.'”

No one else lived on the block. If residents living a street or two away were disturbed by the sight of him sawing down trees, they didn’t say so. “I don’t think they really cared,” Harris says. “It was all just abandoned, dark and gloomy. All they knew was, it was getting cleaned up.”

The tree stumps were problematic, as were the heaps of torn-down fences and other debris. Harris says he used another $10,000 to $15,000 to get the stumps bulldozed, the debris hauled off, and the land graded flat.

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He was ready to build the park. But he needed money to install the amenities that he imagined: a basketball court, tennis courts, a sand volleyball court and a playground. So he formed a nonprofit corporation, the Harris Foundation, with a board that included established philanthropists such as Roy Morrill, former executive director of Big Brothers, Big Sisters of Greater Kansas City. Harris was appointed executive director.

Children’s Mercy Hospital was one of the foundation’s first donors, in 1999. That donation built the basketball court. The hoops had glass backboards, something most kids in the neighborhood had seen only on TV.

“Kids saw the glass backboards and they started going wild,” Harris says, “like, ‘How we gonna have glass backboards in this ‘hood?'”

The court’s gravitational pull began drawing in kids from around the neighborhood. After a while, Harris rounded up several who played consistently — a group of 15 or 20, he says — and took them for barbecue at Gates.

“I took ’em there to sit and talk to them, and see who was going to shine for me,” Harris says. “They stood up quick and started implementing the rules, and it started going from there. And they’re still doing it, all these years strong.”

One boy whom Harris deputized was Sullivan Franklin. He grew up a few blocks away. Establishing rules to prevent squabbles came pretty easy, recalls Franklin, now 38: “Fellas recognized what we were trying to do and respected us for wanting to keep them off the streets.”

The list of donors began to grow and included such heavy-hitting Kansas City philanthropies as the Ewing M. Kauffman Fund, UMB Bank and Kansas City Power & Light. Over the years, the park has collected $3.4 million in donations, Harris estimates.

As the park grew more stable, Harris moved ahead with his own basketball career, landing coaching gigs in the American Basketball Association and the Continental Basketball Association. He hired staff to man the park, and during each offseason, he returned home to implement programs, such as a basketball league for middle- and high-school-age boys and a cheerleading squad for young girls.

But it wasn’t just about sports. “I was teaching life through basketball,” Harris says.

He used the park as a venue for teaching life’s less glamorous lessons, like getting a kid to eat broccoli by covering it in cheese. He invited the city to set up tables and educate kids and their parents about free city services — Health Department screenings, weatherization grants and free house paint. When he realized how many students didn’t know about financial aid for college, he let them use his home computer to print forms for FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid). The line of young people stretched from his front door to the sidewalk, he says.

Over the years, people in the neighborhood used the park more and more, following rules often ignored at other parks: no littering, no loud music, no dogs, and nobody in the park after dark. Harris personally supervises the park, which is closed Fridays and Saturdays unless someone rents it for a picnic or family reunion. He charges $200 up-front for such rentals and returns $100 if the visitors pick up their own trash.

The park’s mere existence has prompted others to reinvest in the area. A new housing development sprang up one block north of the park in 2004. Proximity to Harris Park was a selling point, the developers say, and they’ve since sold every house they’ve built.

“When you’re selling to families, they want to know what’s available for kids in the area,” says Ron Grover, the president of Midwest Development Associates. “For older folks, too, there’s the walking trail there. So it added to our whole concept.”

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Developers aren’t the only ones noticing Harris Park’s positive impact.

Last April, hundreds of black kids from East Side neighborhoods descended on the Country Club Plaza, re-igniting a conversation that Kansas City has with itself every few years: Where are bored city kids supposed to go for fun? Suddenly, Harris’ phone started ringing.

An aide in Mayor Mark Funkhouser’s office invited Harris to a meeting with representatives from City Hall, the Plaza and Westport. Later, the mayor stopped by Harris Park for a visit.

“Chris Harris got it right,” Funkhouser said at the time. “We have to listen to these kids. We can’t design alternatives we would like; we must work on alternatives they would like. Chris Harris did just that, and I want to learn how.”

Kansas City’s park system has long been a source of frustration for Funkhouser. As city auditor, he wrote scathing reviews of the parks department, and he still criticizes the city for having “drive-by” parks.

“We have parks that are designed to drive by and look pretty, and they were designed to serve as buffers between wealthy people and poor people, between people of color and Caucasian people,” Funkhouser tells The Pitch. “We need to overcome that.”

One way to cure city parks of emptiness, Funkhouser says, is to duplicate Harris’ design, funding “pocket parks” that are run for the neighborhood, by the neighborhood, and unimpeded by the bureaucracy of the parks department.

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” Funkhouser says. “There’s no question that I want to replicate Chris’ idea.”

Such civic attention doesn’t go to Harris’ head. During every election cycle, political candidates flock to 40th Street and Wayne to use the park as a backdrop for photo ops and handshakes, he says. Former Mayors Cleaver and Kay Barnes both used the park to stage press conferences. And while Harris is flattered by the appreciation, he knows that he needs more than friendly press releases to keep his park flourishing.

The mayor’s favorite inner city park faces the same economic challenges that all nonprofits are facing. But recently, flaws in the organization’s structure also have come to light, causing a schism between Harris and his board and making it difficult for Harris to keep raising money without distancing himself from his creation — something he’s unwilling to do.

“I really stayed away from the politics of the world, and now it’s coming back to haunt me,” Harris says from his porch, as he watches the summer sun bake the playground’s ketchup- and mustard-colored plastic. “If anyone’s gonna help, let us do what we’re doing.”

Everything was going fine until 2007, Harris says.

That year, Harris met a philanthropist who took interest in his work. Paul Shumaker was one of the founders of Olathe-based Garmin International. He had directed his substantial wealth toward favorite causes, even before his retirement from Garmin in 2004. So when Shumaker offered to pay for a financial consultant to go through the Harris Foundation’s paperwork and troubleshoot any problems, Harris jumped at the opportunity.

But when that consultant studied Harris’ business, he found flaws that would unravel the board and threaten the park’s viability.

For starters, the Harris Foundation isn’t a foundation at all. Foundations typically exist to fund other charities and often are funded by one wealthy company or family — for example, Kansas City’s Kauffman Foundation. The board promptly changed the name to Midtown Family Activities Center at Harris Park.

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Harris’ role as executive director was also inappropriate. A person in a position to “exercise substantial influence” over a nonprofit can’t serve on its board, according to IRS laws. So the board demoted Harris, paying him $3,000 a month to run the park’s programs.

But the change in title only compounded the problem. The board realized that it was a conflict for Harris to be a paid employee when he still owned the property where Harris Park was located. Harris had never given up the land; he simply leased it and thought the lease was more than fair: For one dollar, the nonprofit could use the park for 100 years.

But what if the board made a decision that Harris didn’t like? If Harris didn’t give up either ownership of the property or his role in the organization — and if the board kept using private donations to make improvements to the park — the land’s value could theoretically rise, putting Harris in a position to profit from his nonprofit.

The consultant posed a solution: Remove Harris’ control and let the nonprofit lease the park for its fair market value, which an appraiser priced at $300 a month. The board would have the option to buy the park from Harris outright, after 10 years, for $60,000. The change in the lease’s wording would help silence questions from the IRS about the board’s independence from its founder.

To Harris, it all felt like a rotten Catch-22. In order to see his dream realized, he would have to relinquish everything: his plan, all decision-making ability for the future of Harris Park and, eventually, the land itself.

That’s the nature of nonprofits: In exchange for tax-exempt status and the community’s generosity, an organization’s founder can’t maintain the same control as other entrepreneurs. Harris had come to understand that. But he still wouldn’t budge.

“I’m not stupid,” Harris says. “I want to provide a safe place for kids to play, and there’s nothing I won’t do to make that happen — besides losing something.”

Eventually, he says, he brought his decision to the board: “I’m not trying to sell it or let you have it. My daughter might want to run it one day.”

The entire board resigned. Shumaker (who died last year) stepped out of the picture, and with him went thousands of potential investments to the park.

Harris appointed a new board in July, but regaining momentum has been tough. Three of the seven new board members have already quit, citing time conflicts, even though the first meeting hadn’t been scheduled.

One of the remaining board members admits that some restructuring is needed for Harris’ nonprofit to work, and he says he’s willing to help Harris through it. But the board member, an accountant, says he prefers to go unnamed while the nonprofit’s affairs are on such shaky ground.

For now, Harris is once again serving as executive director.

It’s a steamy Thursday afternoon, and the courts at Harris Park are crammed with sweat and shit-talking.

Two years ago, a torn Achilles tendon sidelined Harris permanently from his out-of-state coaching gigs. Because his payroll was one of the park’s biggest expenses, Harris dismissed all but one paid employee earlier this summer and ceased all programming except the adult basketball league. He took a job with a construction company in order to pay for the small overhead that the park requires, like gas for his riding lawnmower. He’s been cutting the grass on this block since he was a kid — there’s just a lot more of it now.

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Donations are lagging, but demand for the park’s amenities isn’t. Even when the adult league isn’t playing, someone is usually using the court or the track or the playground.

Harris did pull in a few donations this year: $5,000 from KCP&L and $4,000 from U.S. Bank. A $22,400 grant came through from the Neighborhood Tourism Development Program, which he used for two new goals, basketballs and jerseys, and a new riding lawnmower, among other improvements. But most of Harris’ plans for the park remain unrealized.

On the southernmost end of the park, he envisions tennis courts and batting cages. For now, there’s only grass. Harris keeps an architectural rendering that shows the park’s missing centerpiece: a modestly sized community center with two classrooms, a recording studio, a computer lab and restrooms.

For now, it’s down to biweekly basketball games. The court is mostly dominated by players in their 20s, but Sullivan Franklin, whose leadership qualities shone at Gates all those years ago, is among the older players.

The rules that Franklin helped establish are as good as law now. At 9 p.m., the park is closed. By 9:05? “There won’t be a soul here,” Harris says. “Not because I’m a tough guy but because that’s how we run it. We got no gates, no police. It’s just structure. We’re in a neighborhood that people say is no-holds-barred, and we’ve got structure.”

On the court, Franklin’s game has been streaky. He gets frustrated when two players double-team him and strip him of the ball. He cries out for a foul, but Harris, back on the sidelines with his whistle, isn’t giving him the call.

“I’m done, y’all,” Franklin grumbles, calling for a sub and taking a seat on the bench.

But his team still wins, thanks to one of the youngsters who has benefited from Harris’ structure. Eighteen-year-old Marshaun Maull starred at Westport High School, a member of the school’s final graduating class. He’ll leave soon for Harcum College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania — he received a basketball scholarship — but not before draining some effortless threes on Harris’ cracked concrete.

“I’m the prince of this court,” he announces. “Chris needs to put a star on here with my name on it.”

But his cockiness evaporates as he prepares to leave the park. After the game, Maull slings his sweat-soaked shirt over his shoulder and looks around the court like it’s his last time here, even though he has weeks to go before fall semester begins in Harcum.

“I hope I like it there,” he says, “because it’s a long way away.”