Liberty for All

One sunny Sunday last October, Chris Benge stared at his right hand as it dripped blood down the underside of his skateboard and onto Liberty Memorial’s limestone stairs. Moments earlier, he’d announced, “I’m going to jump this son of a bitch!” and ollied off one of the steep ramps on the north side of the memorial’s observation deck. All seemed to be going well until he reached the bottom. His board jerked to a stop where the ramp met level ground, but Benge kept skidding, leaving bits of skin as he went and proving that the World War I monument wasn’t intended as a skatepark.

It may be fortunate, then, that the newest and most promising prospective location for a real skatepark is about half a mile southwest of the memorial at Penn Valley Park.

Over the past couple of years, a task force made up of city planners and skaters has studied potential locations for a skatepark. The group eventually identified Gillham Park as a strong possibility, but neighbors opposed the idea (“Hot About Wheels,” August 28, 2003). Although the task force hasn’t given up on that site, recent attention has turned to Penn Valley Park.

The task force’s proposal went over remarkably well at a February 7 meeting at Penn Valley Community College, where fifty or so neighborhood activists, skaters, parks commissioners and residents met to discuss the park’s future. Skateboarders might turn out to be the Kansas City, Missouri, Parks and Recreation Department’s first line of defense against public sex.

As Parks Commissioner Bob Lewellen pointed out, the memorial has a reputation — and it’s not the good kind. Lewellen recalled a 2000 meeting of the National Recreation and Parks Association in St. Louis that he attended with about 7,000 employees from parks systems around the country. At a seminar put together by park rangers and police to address “problem parks” — where people cruise for drugs and sex — a picture of Liberty Memorial flashed onto a screen. “It was a shock to see that,” Lewellen said.

In other cities, he said, skateparks that are well-lighted and 24-hour-accessible have driven away undesirable activities.

Dick Woods, the vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, the new $200 million headquarters for which will be Penn Valley’s neighbor to the southeast, said he was impressed by the skatepark task force’s organization and presentation.

However, Steve Berkheiser, Liberty Memorial’s executive director, worried that skaters who were bored with their own park might make his memorial a second playground.

Skaters scoff at that logic. Stephan Baker, 21, is a member of the task force and an employee of Lovely, a skate shop on 18th Street. “Most of the groundwork and cement is so rough it’s almost unskateable,” he says of Liberty Memorial. “Think about it. You’ve got this awesome, perfectly designed, perfectly smooth skatepark in your right hand, and this really, really rough, janky, rocky terrain in your other hand.” Skaters, he says, “won’t look twice at Liberty Memorial, because they’ll see their skatepark and their eyes will light up.”

However, other interests have their eyes on the same stretch of land, which runs roughly from the Scout statue south to the BMA Tower.

By 2007, when construction on the new Federal Reserve building is complete, as many as 1,100 employees could be jogging around Penn Valley Park on their lunch breaks. Joining them will be the folks working for the new DST-developed, $380 million IRS building outside the park’s northwest corner.

And park neighbors have long worried about DST Realty’s rumored plans for a housing development inside the park. At the February 7 meeting, the public got its first glimpse of the actual drawings when Jim Calcara of CDFM2 Architecture presented colorful posters and maps showing a series of lakes starting near the Firefighters’ Fountain and extending north down the hill to the park’s fishing pond. A pedestrian bridge could help people cross Broadway, he said, and an elevator could lift people from the roadside to the top of the bluff.

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It would all be paid for by two clusters of housing.

Calcara later told the Pitch that his team had envisioned “an Italian hill town, like townhouses with Italian flavor.” They’d mapped out six or seven houses in a row, green space and then more housing. “All we were trying to do was see how many would fit in kind of a defined area.”

The housing, which would take up 14 acres of park land — as much as 10 percent of the available green space — would be a necessary trade-off to bankroll the park improvements, Calcara told meeting attendees. Neighbors, however, questioned how necessary it really was.

“It’s prime space,” Ricky Olivares tells the Pitch. Olivares is a member of the Friends of Penn Valley Park, a group of park neighbors. “Lots of the land in Penn Valley is very hilly, rocky, but those 14 acres they wanted were the flattest, highest points in the park, all as a trade-off for a series of lakes coming from the Firefighters’ Fountain, which would become a waterpark supposedly for the community. But in reality, they’d make those lakes as a selling point for them to be able to sell their homes for more [money]. So the community didn’t really gain anything. They just lost 14 acres.”

DST spokeswoman Jill Metzler tells the Pitch that the firm will not be involved in a housing development at Penn Valley Park. Calcara says CDFM2, which is working with DST on the IRS building project, came up with the drawings as a “civic gesture” to see how people would react. If the response were good, Calcara says, it would be up to another developer to see it through.

But some neighborhood residents were concerned that nobody contacted them before drawing up plans.

“We did this all backwards,” Calcara admitted to the group. “This plan was not for public consumption until after we discussed it from within.” Calcara says those discussions involved his design team at CDFM2, DST, parks commissioners and Mayor Kay Barnes, who saw the plan before the public did.

“This is a master planning process for Penn Valley Park, and those firms were in partnership with Parks and Recreation in initiating the public planning process to figure out what makes sense in a long-range direction for Penn Valley Park,” mayoral aide Donovan Mouton tells the Pitch. “They listed various issues, like what is available as far as funding to realize the vision out of this public process; what to do with amenities like the lakes, the trails; whether housing makes sense and how to reconcile all these different uses, from the IRS to the Federal Reserve; and the changes related to increased housing around the park, too.”

Ultimately, any decision on whether to give up park land for housing would be up to a public vote.

But, Mouton says, “The mayor has been very clear that she wants to see both new and rehabbed housing throughout the urban core.”

Barnes has also made it clear that she doesn’t want skateboarders downtown. But even though Barnes has outlawed his method of getting to work, Baker understands where she’s coming from. “Anything that helps development in the downtown area is a good thing,” he says. “If you can get people to feel safe downtown, then Mayor Kay has succeeded, which she hasn’t done at all, as I see it, yet.”

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A skatepark, with its dual youth-drawing and scuzzball-chasing powers, may be just what’s needed. “It’s a field of dreams,” Baker says. “If you build it, they will come. And they will spend money.”