The Concrete Bungle

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."