Cliff Drive: perfect for running, biking, hiking – and driving your trash

With his lean frame and angular face, Frank Murphy still looks like a serious runner, though bad knees have kept him from his passion for three years. 

Murphy’s devotion to the sport (he has published biographies of marathoner Buddy Edelen and distance master Stephanie Herbst) was one reason that he and his wife bought a charming stone house on Gladstone Boulevard 10 years ago, in the Scarritt Renaissance neighborhood. The rehabbed house’s proximity to Cliff Drive and Kessler Park gave Murphy easy access to the scenic road that winds along the Missouri River bluffs, at the edge of Northeast Kansas City. The undulating road is bordered by jagged cliffs to the south and, to the north, a short rock wall that separates the road from a steep hillside that descends seemingly forever. Climbers come here, as do disc golfers and mountain bikers and hikers. They’re drawn to a bucolic escape from the urban surroundings just beyond.

“I ran the park almost every evening for the first six or seven years and was blown away by how beautiful Cliff Drive was,” Murphy says, “especially near twilight.”

In order for Murphy to preserve the pristine image of the road before him, he operated under a self-imposed law.

“The rule was, don’t look over the wall,” he says.

To peer over the deteriorating stone façade that follows Cliff Drive is to replace this sylvan idyll with a troubling reality. Over the wall, countless contractors, transients and thoughtless citizens have dumped trash. They’ve done it for years. And they go on doing it.

“It was a terrible discouragement to look over that wall,” Murphy says.

Brett Shoffner knows exactly what Murphy means. The executive director of the Cliff Drive Corridor Management Committee has spent hours each week over the past year picking through all of that garbage, bagging it with help sometimes and on his own sometimes. He says volunteers have contributed more than 4,000 hours so far over the last year to cleaning up Cliff Drive and the 300-acre Kessler Park directly south of the roadway. That’s not counting the efforts of some 900 youngsters who descended upon Kansas City in July for the National Youth Conference and spent part of their time filling 3,000 bags of trash and retrieving 2,700 abandoned tires. (The adults supervising the kids kept them away from the motor oil and antifreeze and spent condoms.)

Shoffner patrolled Cliff Drive on a sweltering early August afternoon and found what he always finds: freshly laid dump sites and transient camps that regenerate faster than the invasive honeysuckle enshrouding the wilderness lane.

The week before, Shoffner had posted a petition online, seeking support for the idea of closing the four gates that allow cars onto Cliff Drive. The closure would keep trucks out, went the logic, posing a challenge for the contractors who dump the vast majority of the litter: building materials, home-remodeling detritus, even demolition remnants. Joggers and cyclists could still access Cliff Drive, and the gates wouldn’t keep motorists from entering Kessler Park. The idea was to eliminate vehicle traffic on Cliff Drive’s 5 miles of roadway.

The petition fetched just more than 1,500 signatures on change.org, but it was ceremonial rather than binding. It was supposed to send a clear message to the city: Volunteers undertaking the Sisyphean task of cleaning Cliff Drive are sick of trying to protect this asset without enough formal support.

It wasn’t the first time that someone wanted to close the gates. About three years ago, the same idea was floated — and shot down by surrounding neighborhoods.

This time, the petition garnered some support from leaders in nearby neighborhoods. Scarritt Renaissance, the dominant subdivision in the Cliff Drive–Kessler Park environs, favored the idea, as long as the gates were open again within two years.

Also onboard was Scott Wagner, a city councilman who used to live in the Northeast’s Indian Mound neighborhood but moved to the Northland to keep his 1st District seat. He doesn’t represent the Historic Northeast (redistricting meant that Jim Glover and Jan Marcason took over those neighborhoods), but leaders and residents there still call on his influence at City Hall.

Wagner says previous efforts at trash abatement have failed.

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“The evidence is always clear, and there’s always a lot of it,” he tells The Pitch. “I think one of the issues over time is, the attempts that have been made to deal with it have not produced the results everyone is looking for.”

Support for closing the roads has been far from unanimous among residents in Scarritt Renaissance, Indian Mound and Pendleton Heights. These neighborhoods stand out among other Kansas City enclaves for the number of people closely attuned to community matters, yet the petition caught many residents off guard, including many of those who opposed the previous proposal to gate Cliff Drive three years ago.

“During that one, I just went batshit crazy and I set up a website for people opposing it and I got 80 signatures in one day, and that was without me working the phones,” says David Remley, a photographer who lives in Indian Mound. “I think it’s kind of silly. It’s kind of like them throwing in the towel.”

Catherine Browder, another Northeast resident, fired off an e-mail to Scarritt Renaissance president Leslie Caplan: “I do worry that once the gates are closed, they will stay closed forever. This ‘two-year trial run’ strikes me as nonsense. A ruse.”

Mark McHenry, director of Kansas City’s Parks and Recreation Department, also gave the idea a cool reception.

Parks and Recreation oversees Cliff Drive and Kessler Park. McHenry met with neighborhood leaders and members of the Cliff Drive Corridor Management Committee on August 7. The meeting was closed to the media, but sources familiar with it say McHenry was not thrilled about the petition going public without a heads-up to his department.

“The question we have is, if you do that [close the drive to cars], it is a very nice scenic drive, and you can’t walk or bike; you can’t see it,” McHenry tells The Pitch. “How do you do it?”

One way: Extend to weekdays the so-called “car-free weekends” that the city tried in 2008. The idea was that closing the Cliff Drive roadway to motor vehicles for a few weekends during the year might put a dent in crime and dumping.

“It has attracted the wrong kinds of people,” said Michael Herron, then manager of the North District of Kansas City Parks and Recreation, in a 2008 Kansas City Star article. “People who want to do things and not be seen doing them.”

Will Royster, now the president of the Cliff Drive Corridor Management Committee, says car-free weekends triggered a sizable outcry at the time, but the trial led to a 93 percent reduction in calls to Kansas City Police and a 74 percent cut in reported crimes on the days when the gates kept out cars.

The experiment led to ongoing closure on the weekends, but the city has remained reluctant to consider permanent gate closure. Money is one reason.

Cliff Drive was originally created not for cars but as a cattle path when it was cut out of the side of the Missouri River bluffs, around the start of the 20th century. It became a roadway when the city paved it over. In 2001, the city applied for designation as a Missouri Scenic Byway. It remains the only stretch of urban road in Missouri to have earned such a designation.

Wagner, a former chairman of the Cliff Drive Corridor Management Committee, has said the tag is meaningful mostly from a marketing standpoint. But it has also brought federal funds to Cliff Drive. City records show that Cliff Drive has received $3.2 million since 2001 from federal programs associated with scenic byways, money that flows through the Missouri Department of Transportation. Kansas City ponied up $1 million from the Public Improvements Advisory Committee as a local match.

It’s unclear whether shutting the roadway off from vehicle access would prevent Cliff Drive from receiving future allocations.

“My initial look at just the state-law verbiage is that it does require that it be a roadway, which indicates that it be open to vehicle traffic,” says Kenny Voss, local programs administrator with the Missouri Department of Transportation.

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The federal Department of Transportation used to deploy dedicated funding to scenic byways. But the 2012 transportation bill folded that funding into a larger pool of money. That penny-pinching move by Congress means that future allocations for scenic byways will be more competitive. 

The money isn’t meaningless for Cliff Drive. Cutting a road into the side of the bluff leaves the pavement prone to natural forces that cause deterioration.

“I think clearly the challenge when that thing was built, it obviously wasn’t built with the most updated modern engineering,” McHenry says.

Preliminary studies show that water erosion is shifting the roadway’s foundation. There isn’t enough money to carry out a more detailed probe of Cliff Drive’s engineering issues. And there are fewer resources still to address the more visible scourge here: all that trash.

Like many a newsman, Michael Bushnell keeps a police scanner turned up loud in his office. On the afternoon of August 11, the publisher of Northeast News heard something rare.

“The po-po popped some idiot for dumping trash down by the waterfall,” Bushnell says. 

Kansas City police caught a Kansas City, Kansas, resident in the act near the waterfall, halfway along the Cliff Drive stretch, where much of the dumping problem seems to occur.

Barriers have been installed near where motorists previously could park and take in the view over the Missouri River — in summer months, honeysuckle can grow to the point where much of the trash is obscured from view — but to little effect.

Prosecuting dumpers is a difficult, low-reward task for law enforcement. To make a reasonable case, the offending dumper must be all but caught in the act. The city has installed several conspicuous cameras, but it’s unclear who’s watching the feed, or when. Remote surveillance hasn’t led to more litter arrests or less trash.

And the penalties for dumping (from $1,000 to $5,000 in fines) do little to deter contractors who would rather take their chances with the slim law-enforcement presence in Kessler Park than pay to dispose legally of their refuse.

Cliff Drive has been an inviting locale for dumping while other parks in Kansas City are not. The main reason is Cliff Drive’s secluded location relative to houses in the area. It’s easier to dump trash undetected along the heavily wooded stretch than, say, Loose Park, which is surrounded by houses.

Still, Bushnell says closing the gates is a waste of time. In his view, the petition did more to hurt the case for locking the lane. 

“If you’re trying to ingratiate yourself to the parks department, cutting them off at the knees is not the way to do it,” he says.

Instead, he says, the aim should be to make Kessler Park and Cliff Drive more prominent attractions in Kansas City, drawing more residents, whose presence would drive away potential criminals.

Wagner agrees, though he sees the solution differently.

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“You’re kind of touching on what I think is the central discussion point that closure brings forward: Can you counterprogram the drive?” Wagner says. “If you remove vehicle access to it, could you get more bike riders? Could you get more walkers? Could you get more alternative uses going so you have the types of eyes and ears going through it?”

But closing Cliff Drive to cars wouldn’t keep a particular set of eyes and ears out of Kessler Park: the city’s homeless.

“All I want is women and children,” shouts a man standing at the east entrance to Independence Boulevard Christian Church, at Independence and Gladstone avenues. “Take your time. There’s plenty of room for everyone.”

At 5:30 on a mild Monday afternoon in August, about 130 people are gathered outside one of the largest churches in old Northeast, waiting to get through the doors. A bus stops up the street from the church, and about a half-dozen riders get off and get in line. Each Monday, the church gives away meals to the homeless, who come from various corners of the city to eat. Some Mondays, 50 people eat. Other days, 300 are served. Tomorrow, they will go somewhere else.

Standing outside the crowd is Ken Richardson, an electronics engineer who bought his house on Gladstone Boulevard in 2009 and has been fixing it up ever since. On his walk to the church, he points out a house at 523 Gladstone Boulevard. A generation or two ago, it might have been an ornate dwelling, but years of neglect and abandonment have transformed the place into a magnet for squatters.

“They’re in there for a couple of hours, and they can just devastate the place,” says Richardson, who boards up the structure’s broken windows himself, a block away from his home.

It’s a similar story at 526 Benton Boulevard, an old house with classic architecture where the words “DANGEROUS BUILDING” have been stenciled onto the plywood over a busted window. Trash spills out from under a concrete porch, and broken liquor bottles stand guard all around the perimeter. No one lives here, but that doesn’t mean it’s empty of people on a given day. An extension cord can be seen stealing electricity from a nearby house.

If the Northeast’s homeless can’t get into one of these houses, many from the Monday dinner crowd will stay the night in Kessler Park.

The evidence is clear in the park and along Cliff Drive. A tent popped up on top of the waterfall, the same place where police spotted the August 11 dumper. No one is inside the tent, which is surrounded by dirty, discarded clothing.

Cliff Drive is close to the Independence Avenue church, with its Monday-night dinners, as well as to the social-service centers on the east side of downtown Kansas City.

Despite knowing that closing Cliff Drive to cars won’t keep the homeless out of the park, Richardson agrees with the idea. Car-free weekends, he says, bring out nearby residents, who can keep a better eye on the community’s asset.

“On the weekends, when it’s closed, you will have people walking their dogs, whole families riding their bicycles,” Richardson says. Volunteers are already at work expanding the trail system. Among various improvements under way is the construction of about 23 miles of walking, biking and hiking trails.

It would be enough to bring back Frank Murphy, the Gladstone Boulevard resident who was drawn to the neighborhood by the drive’s running potential before his doctor told him to mothball his running shoes.

“I might violate his stricture,” Murphy says when he hears what Cliff Drive might look like in the future. “I believe I’ll run again.”