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Don't just whine about it -- do something. The people featured in this week's feature story spoke up in order to make the parks in this so-called City That Works actually work for them. In other words, they pulled a Cynthia Canady.
This coming September will mark six years that Canady, a retiree of the GM assembly line, has tirelessly attended the meetings of the Board of Parks and Recreation Commissioners. Her goal is now a reality: the new Southeast Community Center at 4201 East 63rd Street opened last December.
It all started six years ago when a friend of Canady's asked that she accompany her to check out the old community center near East 63rd Street and Swope Parkway. Canady's friend wanted to rent the facility for a gathering, and the parks department was going to charge her $200. "I was shocked," Canady says. "The toilet wouldn't work. There were tiles missing from the floor and ceiling. The blinds looked like they hadn't been cleaned since the place was built in 1957. There were big gaps coming in through the windows and the doors that made it freezing in the winter. It was horrible for kids to be in a center like that."
At the point during the Tuesday meetings when citizens can address the parks board, Canady approached the podium with a message that she never tired of repeating: build a new Southeast Community Center. "Sometimes I did get that look, like, 'There she is again,'" Canady says. "I didn't care. I told 'em, 'I'm a taxpayer.'"
The new community center is a reality, a success that Canady chalks up to former Mayor Kay Barnes' board. (Mayor Mark Funkhouser's board, in Canady's opinion, is less "sophisticated" and rarely starts its meetings on time.)
Canady hasn't stopped participating. Someone else might be accused of nitpicking, yet when Canady points out inadequacies, it's with a gentle righteousness that spurs action. And according to her, there are still some major kinks to work out at the new center.
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Southeast Community Center pool
For starters, there's the indoor pool, with a posted capacity of just 28 swimmers. "It's so little they have to send the kids to it in shifts," Canady says. "It's like an oversized bathtub. ... If they didn't have enough money to finish the lap pool that we talked about during all those planning meetings, they should have just left concrete there until they raised it."
A lifeguard at the new community center's pool confirmed Canady's story about sending kids to the tiny watering hole in shifts. The blob-shaped pool has a jungle-gym structure in the middle. Gentle jets of water shoot up from its very shallow end, and stairs lead to a "deep" end that goes to 3 feet at most.
Two other water features share the room with the kiddie pool. One is a warm therapy pool for the elderly or people undergoing physical therapy. The other is a water-filled cube that, when turned on, forces water from one end to the other so that a person can swim in place, like an aquatic treadmill. The lifeguard said that visitors strongly dislike the latter feature, complaining that the current is too strong; they avoid it like it's full of snakes.
Other parts of the community center are popular, though -- so much so that the center could use more employees, Canady says. The exercise and weight rooms get especially busy in the after-work hours between 5 and 7 p.m.
A crowded place in the middle of
Swope Park is a feat in itself. For years, Parks and Recreation staff have tried to encourage Kansas Citians to explore more of Swope Park. Its size -- 1,805 acres -- can be daunting. And like any urban park, it's the setting for
sad tales and
creepy stories.
"It's a paying park," Canady says of Swope. "To go to the
zoo, you pay. To go to
Starlight Theatre, you pay. It looks to me like Swope Park should get money because it makes money."
Canady has requested a walking trail to be built in Swope Park like the one in
Mill Creek Park, so that walkers and joggers can be visible to drivers along Swope Parkway. That would make the park more recreationally attractive, she says. But her requests to
PIAC have been turned down in recent years. "The city is working with less, but we're still paying the same amount of taxes," Canady says, "and yet you saw how they came up with
a plan to get a streetcar going overnight. They cut things here to make another place look better. Priority places, that's what I call it."
This summer, the parks department has been especially active in pointing out Swope Park's assets. On July 11, it held a
Party in the Park, scheduling a day's worth of activities around lesser-known features such as the
1.5-mile Earth Riders Trail Association trail, the
6,000-square-foot Community Garden, and the cricket courts on Lewis Road. The most brilliant thing the parks department did, though, was to print an
8-inch-by-11-inch full-color map of the park on the back of the day's itinerary of events. The roads, the trails, the squiggly path of the Blue River and all of the park's landmarks and structures are clearly marked.
That piece of paper will hopefully make a dent in Swope phobia. But even the city's biggest park needs a Canady. It -- and we -- are lucky that she's sticking around.
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