The Concrete Bungle

Last November, City Manager Wayne Cauthen, Downtown Council CEO Bill Dietrich, members of the City Council and other big shots gathered at the Quality Hill headquarters of HNTB Companies, the engineering and architecture giant that has left its deep and wide footprints all over Kansas City.

Kansas City paid HNTB $100,000 to analyze downtown as a convention destination and recommend ways to make it more attractive. Financially this was a small project for HNTB, considering all of the other contracts it had with City Hall — the Department of Public Works alone had paid the firm $123 million for its services over the previous eight years. But the study had produced what seemed like some big ideas.

Heads nodded as HNTB architect Todd Achelpohl unveiled drawings that showed Bartle Hall with a three-story glass facade. His concept for tearing out the wall where Barney Allis Plaza meets 13th Street and replacing it with a gentle slope looked sensible, too.

Achelpohl then dazzled the audience. He showed pictures of what Interstate 670 — a multilane trench of roaring freeway dug into the southern end of downtown — might look like with an eye-pleasing, tree-lined boulevard on top of it.

A boulevard, Achelpohl explained, would deck over a portion of the freeway, making it seem less like a chasm and allowing downtown to connect with the Crossroads District, known for its art galleries and its steadily growing restaurant and retail scene. In addition to providing camouflage for I-670, the boulevard would create new opportunities for shops and housing; HNTB’s sketches made homely Truman Road look as festive as any area around the Plaza.

Mouths practically drooled at the prospect.

“I should say that this is not a new idea,” Achelpohl said. “Spanning over the interstate has been discussed for years and years and years.”

Achelpohl said that decking the interstate had always been a “pie-in-the-sky idea” of architects and urban planners. But with a rainmaker like HNTB taking it seriously, the pie didn’t look so far out of reach.

The presentation ended with applause.

Of course, HNTB had helped create the freeway mess in the first place.

Decades ago, HNTB worked closely with City Hall and the Missouri Highway Department on the design of the freeway loop, which is perhaps the most colossal blunder in the city’s postwar history.

Meant to relieve traffic on busy streets and make visiting downtown a snap, the loop instead divided a city already wobbling from suburban flight.

Today, long after the first crane turned earth, the moats that accommodate several lanes of fast-moving traffic continue to intimidate pedestrians and sever the city center from its most interesting features. For the nonmotorist standing at 12th Street and Main, the Crossroads might as well rest in a Johnson County cul-de-sac.

The city’s most powerful people know it, too.

“The freeways are barriers that are choking the loop,” concluded a 2001 downtown plan prepared for the Civic Council of Greater Kansas City, an elite group of business leaders.

The freeway system no longer functions particularly well as a traffic mover, either. Cars from the booming Northland clog the upper rim. St. Louis-to-Denver traffic gunks up the lower portion. At several points, the loop’s tight design makes maneuvering a “challenge,” to borrow a polite description from a Missouri Department of Transportation study.

Yet HNTB does not stand to be punished for the error. In fact, as a consultant to the city and the state on multiple studies examining possible fixes for the expressways, the firm is now cashing in on the loop’s obsolescence.

Progressive planners and architects, however, worry about HNTB’s reputation for myopia in offering engineering solutions to human dilemmas. One urban planner says watching HNTB come up with an idea like Truman Boulevard is like watching fat kids play sports.

“You really want to encourage them on, but ultimately they just don’t succeed.”

On July 19, 1961, dignitaries boarded a Kansas City Transit bus in order to behold the magnificence of their new freeway.

The largest construction project in the city’s history at the time, the Southeast Freeway, as it was called, formed the east leg of the downtown loop.

The air-conditioned bus began its tour at the corner of Sixth Street and Campbell. Passengers — City Council members, businessmen — marveled at the way the freeway seemed to soar above the congested city streets, according to an account in The Kansas City Times.

One rider, though, did not appreciate the spectacle.

Muehlebach Hotel owner Barney Allis had worried for years that the proposed system of expressways would damage downtown businesses. Engineers and planners spoke of convenience, but Allis was skeptical that a fast-moving ring of traffic was good for downtown. For example, he fretted that first-time visitors to the city might miss an exit and keep on driving, flung to the hinterlands by centrifugal force. “How many people will we lose?” he had asked, according to a 1960 Times story.

He sat on the bus and listened as Robert Hunter, the district engineer for the Missouri Highway Department, described how the freeway could cut a 35-minute trip from the Blue Ridge Mall to downtown to 11 minutes. Allis, who as an immigrant kid had hawked newspapers on a street corner, could take only so much of Hunter’s spiel. At one point in the three-hour tour, the Times reported, Allis took the microphone and restated his concern about traffic patterns and inadequate access to the downtown.

But the argument had been lost. Allis’ plea met with ridicule. “Is this your iron collar, Barney?” Mayor H. Roe Bartle called out, mocking the hotel owner with his own words.

Within a year of the bus ride, Allis sold his hotel and died of a heart attack.

Allis did not die a lonely doomsayer; others had questioned the design of the loop. In 1956, a realtor quoted in the Times predicted that the loop “would confine the downtown district in too small an area.” The realtor, H.C. Edwards, feared that the freeways would insert a “ring of concrete” around downtown, which at the time was thought to extend to 20th Street. West Side community and business leaders expressed a similar concern.

The planners and engineers who worked on the loop failed to heed Allis, Edwards — or the federal government. A detailed master plan the city published in 1947, which proposed a downtown loop that looks much like today’s, acknowledged the federal government’s recommendation that express highways should skirt business centers. (“Motorways must not be allowed to infringe upon the city,” Norman Bel Geddes, the father of the interstate highway system, warned in 1939.) But Kansas City, like a lot of cities across the United States, was greedy for the money Congress was allocating for highways. So the expressways skirted the busy intersection of 12th Street and Grand by a mere seven blocks.

The “greatest generation” might have stopped the Nazis, but its return from World War II was hell on cities. The 1947 plan also promoted segregation, deciding that a housing area “whose occupants have similar educational, social, religious and employment bases is more desirable from a stability and residential value standpoint than is one composed of families with heterogeneous interests.”

The city published its expressway plan in 1951. The web of highways would supposedly save commuters time, reduce accidents, decrease the danger to pedestrians, increase the value of adjacent property and improve mass transit. “A properly located, well-designed expressway reflects the public spirit, is a source of local pride and provides an inspiration for greater municipal achievement,” the plan said, flush with the optimism of its time.

Somehow, though, engineers and planners failed to anticipate that their fabulous new roads would stimulate demand for automobiles. The authors of the report believed that vehicle ownership rates would remain more or less unchanged from 1940 to 1970.

George Satterlee, the Missouri Department of Transportation district engineer from 1970 to 1986, says the expressway plan intended to keep the city core accessible and primed for development. Property values were beginning to decline; the streets were congested.

Ultimately, though, the expressways only hastened downtown’s decline.

“If you knew then what you do now, you probably would have done it differently,” says Satterlee, who left MoDOT for City Hall, where he went on to serve as Public Works director for eight years.

Where did the planners go wrong? For one thing, they thought that ropes of converging expressways would bring downtown closer to the suburbs and other cities.

“I guess it never occurred to anybody that traffic could go the other way, and it did,” says real estate lawyer Whitney Kerr Sr., who in 1955 worked in what was then called the City Plan Department.

In addition to hurling traffic out to the suburbs, the loop crushed existing neighborhoods. “What our I-70 loop did was just cut the West Side in half and certainly did incredible amounts of damage to East Side neighborhoods,” says Vicki Noteis, the city’s planning director from 1997 to 2004.

“The north end, it just got totally decimated,” says Taliaferro & Browne engineer Leonard Graham, who co-chaired FOCUS. (For the 1990s project Forging Our Comprehensive Urban Strategy, thousands of citizens mapped out the city’s planning strategies.)

Daniel Serda, an assistant professor of urban planning at the University of Kansas and the executive director of the nonprofit Kansas City Design Center, notes that the loop created “massive separations” between sections of the city, cutting off downtown from the riverfront, from the West Side, from what’s now called the Crossroads. One need only watch Bartle Hall’s badge-wearing conventioneers contemplate what Serda calls the “horrific experience” of crossing the interstate to grab lunch at the nearby Denny’s.

“The sidewalks are too narrow,” Serda says. “They have to walk across overpasses that are 40 feet above a six-lane freeway. It’s a massive wind tunnel. It’s an environment that is just not a pleasant, comfortable, pedestrian-friendly experience. It doesn’t feel safe, probably because it isn’t in some respects.”

For motorists, too, the loop presents challenges. Transportation experts say the circle has too many points of ingress and egress. “The basic problem is simply being able to get on or off,” says Jim Pritchett, the director of project management at the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority.

HNTB played a significant role in the planning and design of the expressways.

In 1956, then-City Engineer Philip Geissal told the Times that the route had been agreed upon by city, state and federal engineers, and HNTB. Whitney Kerr says he remembers attending a meeting and listening to Barney Allis say the loop should be put in at 20th Street, where it might not form such a tight chokehold on the city.

“The engineers from HNTB wanted to put it where it is now,” Kerr recalls.

HNTB is unable to rebut Kerr’s claim. A spokeswoman for the firm says all the people who worked on the project are dead.
Founded in 1914, HNTB was first known for bridge design. Working for another firm, Ernst Howard — the H in HNTB — had been the principal engineer of the Innercity Viaduct, which opened in 1906. Howard and Henry Tammen (the T) later designed the innovative Armour-Swift-Burlington Bridge, which carried automobiles and railroads on separate decks; using telescopelike hangers, the bridge could be raised to accommodate riverboats.

HNTB’s business changed with the times. During World War II, the firm designed a prisoner-of-war camp in Concordia, Kansas. Later it won an assignment to build the Miami International Airport.

The partners worked diligently. In a note to a partner in 1953, Howard approved of a suggestion to hold a business conference “of all partners with wives” for a week or several days. “I have long been convinced that we are the hardest working firm that could be found, and have been so intense that we seem to have a guilty feeling if we take an ordinary vacation,” Howard wrote, according to company history published in 1989. “We may be overlooking the fact that our lives are going on and we are living today, and will not be living at some future distant time.”

Three months later, Howard suffered a fatal heart attack while sitting at his desk in the firm’s offices at 1801 Grand. He was 73 years old.

Howard had lived long enough to see HNTB land one of its most significant jobs: designing the Maine Turnpike.

Its first segment opened in 1947, putting HNTB in an excellent position for the road-construction boom soon to follow. Enoch Needles (the N) was president of the American Society of Civil Engineers when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway Act in 1956.

Like the rest of the nation, the maker of stately bridges grew infatuated with the automobile and how best to move it from point A to point B. Looking at pictures in the company history, there’s a striking contrast between the bridges, several of them postcard-worthy, and the freeways. The graceful Mississippi River Bridge in Dubuque, Iowa, and the chaotic three-level, five-interchange Bruckner Expressway in the Bronx in New York City appear to have been conceived by members of different species.

HNTB’s principal highwayman was R.N. Bergendoff (the B), a Nebraskan who bore a passing resemblance to Jimmy Hoffa. In 1972, when the expressway system was nearly complete — a $143 million job —Bergendoff wrote a piece for The Kansas City Star that talked about the city not in terms of its people or its places but its ability to transport things. Bergendoff believed that Kansas City held advantages over cities located on the coasts and the Great Lakes because waterfront cities “serve only 180-degree trade territory.”

It was as if he were writing a new slogan for the metro: Kansas City — Happy to Be America’s Truck Stop.

Last year, HNTB announced revenues of nearly $500 million. The firm has managed to prosper, despite its penchant for offering dubious ideas — some of which eventually got built — over the years.

HNTB Architecture often gets credit for the famed designs of Arrowhead and Kauffman stadiums. In fact, Colorado architect Charles Deaton conceived the innovative two-stadium concept. Deaton worked on the project with the Kansas City architecture firm Kivett & Myers, which HNTB acquired in 1975 — three years after Arrowhead’s dedication. (It was the first to open for play.)

If Jackson County had taken HNTB’s suggestion, Kansas City sports fans might have been stuck with a dome.

In 1966, HNTB and the engineering firms Black & Veatch and Burns & McDonnell submitted a design for a domed stadium that could accommodate baseball and football. Several such multipurpose stadiums — covered and uncovered — were built during this period. Most cities that built them — Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati — came to regret the decision and later replaced their circular structures with sport-specific stadiums like Arrowhead and Kauffman.

Another HNTB proposal from the mid-1960s would have plunked a shopping mall along the southern edge of downtown. Working with Stan Durwood, the late chairman of the AMC theater chain, HNTB imagined Crosstown Center as a multiblock shopping, office and entertainment complex.

In the abstract, Crosstown Center is similar to the entertainment district under development today on those same blocks. The modern one, though, at least purports to have an urban feel. Crosstown Center was essentially a shiny slab of suburbia. HNTB’s brochure shows shoppers, lifted safely above the streets by skywalks, enjoying “the ideal climate” of an enclosed center.

Crosstown Center was never built, though elements of it made their way into the Town Pavilion and 1201 Walnut, postmodern glass-and-steel skyscrapers that HNTB designed in the 1980s. Like Crosstown Center, the buildings look inward, buffering visitors with third-level food courts. At street level, the buildings turn a cold shoulder. The black marble walls of 1201 Walnut are especially menacing to passing pedestrians.

HNTB Architecture also choreographed the 1990s expansion of Bartle Hall, which added a conference center and stretched the exhibit hall to span I-670. Although it was a neat engineering trick, the expansion, which cost $144 million, did nothing to make people want to be downtown. “Nobody considered when Bartle was expanded how the street experience should work,” Daniel Serda complains.

Obviously, HNTB isn’t the only designer of uninviting buildings in Kansas City. “I think almost everything we’ve done up until the last 10 years could be described as menacing at street level,” Vicki Noteis says. Besides, the most visionary designers’ aspirations are always limited by the tastes and budgets of their clients.

What’s unique about HNTB is the way the city seems to rely on it for solutions to problems the firm had a hand in creating.

In 2003, for instance, HNTB produced for the city the Downtown Land Use and Development Plan (cost: $100,000). The plan sought to build on recommendations and strategies identified in previous reports, such as the Civic Council’s Downtown Corridor Redevelopment Strategy (commonly referred to as the “Sasaki plan,” named after the consulting firm that wrote the report) and the FOCUS Urban Core Plan.

HNTB’s plan began with a description of how downtown Kansas City had steadily lost businesses to the suburbs. A growing number of urban housing choices, however, signaled a “renewed interest in the characteristics of a traditional downtown.”

And just what is a characteristic of a traditional downtown? “Pedestrian friendliness” — historically a pronounced weakness of HNTB designs — was first on the list.

HNTB would not be a $500 million company if its bridges teetered and its turnpikes ran into mountainsides. And, obviously, one way to stay in governments’ good graces is to do the job right. The company points with special pride to the job it performed in 1969 at the Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport, where 10,000 feet of runway were built in 40 days.

With offices from coast to coast, HNTB is a prolific designer and engineer of ribbon cutters — that is, things that cost a lot of money, such as airport terminals, convention centers, sports stadiums and rail tunnels. The firm has designed everything from a gym at the Pentagon to the Riverfront Park in Atchison, Kansas. If it’s made of concrete, stone or steel, chances are HNTB knows how to build it.

A firm of HNTB’s size and stature is expert at understanding how governments spend money. One way to develop this expertise is to hire former government officials. Last December, the firm announced that retired Army general and former U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey would serve as chairman of its subsidiary Federal Services Corporation, which does security planning and military-base design for the government. An HNTB press release noted that, as drug czar, McCaffrey had coordinated a $19.2 billion budget. HNTB’s hiring of former government officials who know budgets and bureaucracies dates as far back as the 1960s, when the former head of the Federal Highway Administration got a job there.

John Norquist, the former mayor of Milwaukee, says HNTB is “well-positioned” in Wisconsin, a point The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigated last year. Last August, the newspaper reported that the Wisconsin Department of Transportation had signed a $164,962 contract with HNTB to maintain its inventory of road signs. Prior to HNTB getting the contract, the work had been done by a short-term employee who cost the state $30,000 a year. The contract was later rescinded, and Governor Jim Doyle — who received $47,000 in campaign donations from HNTB employees in 2002 and 2003 — issued new rules for contracts.

The Journal Sentinel also reported that HNTB and another company had received a $685,000, no-bid contract to build a Web site that monitored the progress of work on an interchange. One Web developer told the newspaper he “would have been dancing in the streets” to be paid $300,000 for the same job. An HNTB official defended the contract, telling the Journal Sentinel the firm was “damn proud” of the Web site.

In 2002, HNTB donated $25,000 to a campaign led by the mayor of Los Angeles to keep the San Fernando Valley from seceding from the city. A few months after it made the donation, HNTB won a contract to plan a medium-size airport for the city. The following year, the mayor proposed spending $9 billion to modernize Los Angeles International Airport.

In Ohio, the director of the state turnpike commission resigned in 2002, after an investigation revealed a “free flow of gratuities” from contractors to turnpike employees. The investigation found HNTB to be among the grateful, treating the director and other employees to golf games, meals and various outings 21 times during a period in which HNTB landed $2.8 billion in turnpike business.

But taking clients to dinner and making campaign contributions are practically matters of etiquette in the business world. HNTB isn’t considered a sinister company — connected might be a better word. “They’re basically honorable people,” says Norquist. He adds that he sometimes has agreed with HNTB’s recommendations. “It’s not all their fault bad stuff gets built, at least not theirs alone. They’re basically doing what they’re asked to do.”

Still, Norquist says, it would have been nice if HNTB had reminded state and regional transportation officials that mass transit might be a better option than the endless thatch of expressways the firm is usually asked to design. “But they’re trying to make money, so you don’t start arguing with your client.”

HNTB’s proposal to build decks over a portion of the south leg of the loop is not a revolutionary idea. The Sasaki and the FOCUS plans talked about reconstructing the north leg into a boulevard. Undoing the north leg is appealing because it would remove the barrier separating the River Market from downtown. Also, the north leg is less heavily traveled than the south leg, making it more amenable to change.

The former mayor of Milwaukee has an even more interesting idea for the loop: Just tear up the whole thing.

“Those freeways have been depressing the property values of downtown Kansas City since they were built,” says Norquist, who led several efforts to remove or halt freeway construction during his four terms in office. Norquist came to be- lieve that urban freeways obliterated neighborhoods, hastened sprawl and demanded hundreds of millions of dollars in upkeep.

“They are a complete net loss,” he says. “They make Kansas City worth less — much less — than it would have been if they hadn’t been built. It was the worst kind of public works project. It cost tons of money, and it reduced the value of the place it was supposed to help. The only sensible thing is to tear it out and replace it with an at-grade street level or boulevard. It is the only thing that makes sense. Anything else is a complete waste of taxpayer money.”

Norquist is today the CEO of the Congress for New Urbanism, a nonprofit organization that seeks to re-establish compact, walkable and environmentally sustainable cities. He advises cities to follow the models in Europe and in such U.S. cities as San Francisco, where the removal of a freeway damaged by the 1989 earthquake led surrounding property values to rise by 300 percent.

Kansas City isn’t on the fast track to removing anything, however. In fact, a $1 million MoDOT study of connections between downtown and the Northland (HTNB received about $425,000 for its role in putting together the study) essentially concluded that Interstate 29 needed to be widened. Widening I-29 would require the Paseo Bridge to be expanded or replaced, a design job HNTB is more than qualified to perform. (An eight-lane Paseo bridge would also make the loop indispensable, defeating Norquist’s cause.)

The Northland-downtown study did consider proposals to transform the north leg into a boulevard. It determined that such an approach would merely shift traffic elsewhere. “All of a sudden, you need more lanes on the south leg,” says Jerry Mugg, an HNTB transportation director.

Others, however, say it’s time for the city to stop thinking in circles.

In a recent issue of the arts magazine Review, for example, BNIM architect Tom Knittel wrote a piece calling for wholesale reconsideration of the loop, which he described as “over-engineered and under-designed.”

Knittel tells the Pitch he would like to see a holistic study of the loop that asks for a high level of public participation.

“The general idea of just sort of decking it over and acting like it’s never been there strikes me as not very realistic or sustainable,” he says. “I don’t think we can afford to deck over all of these sites. I feel as if this sort of here-and-there strategy doesn’t really address the real problem.”

“I think the loop in many respects functions well,” Mugg counters. “I think we need to look at how to make it simple and more efficient.”

Yet according to Norquist, simplicity is the enemy. Cities should be complex and offer a rich set of choices, he says. Building a superhighway in the city, Norquist says, “is like putting a cow barn in the middle of the downtown.”
HNTB has discovered that sometimes all it takes to line up work in Kansas City is the power of suggestion.

A few years ago, the Greater Kansas City Convention and Visitors Bureau hired the Minneapolis consulting firm CSL International to perform a market-demand and feasibility analysis for improving Bartle Hall. CSL recommended that meeting rooms needed to be refinished and that the existing ballroom was inadequate. Voters approved a tax increase in 2002 to pay for the work, which is ongoing and expected to cost $135 million.

HNTB worked with CSL on its analysis, preparing drawings of what an expanded Bartle Hall might look like. Sure enough, after the tax increase passed, HNTB won the right to design the improvements. This year, the job has paid HNTB $15.7 million, according to city records.

There’s more work to be done, if HNTB can help it.

The officials who went to HNTB headquarters in November to see the presentation about Kansas City as a convention place caught a glimpse of the future. Todd Achelpohl, the HNTB architect, showed images of a new 1,000-room convention hotel and yet another expansion of convention facilities, this one to the west of Broadway.

John Kaatz, a principal at CSL International, acting as HNTB’s subcontractor, was on hand to explain that more exhibit space and a new hotel were not needed immediately. But, Kaatz said, Kansas City risked falling behind other cities if it did nothing in the coming years.

Neither Kaatz nor Achelpohl mentioned that the city already subsidizes its existing downtown hotels and is burdened with $300 million in debt for past and ongoing improvements at Bartle Hall.

No decisions were made on this November night, but the presentation succeeded at least in putting a bug in the right ears.

“We can’t build it until the need is there,” City Councilman Charles Eddy, who attended the meeting, said later. “But as soon as that appears, we want to start working.”