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.