The balcony building on the Country Club Plaza has made thousands of friends on Facebook since Highwoods Properties stated talking about knocking it down. Turns out, clicking "like" and showing up at City Hall are two different things.
The proposal to drop a hulking office building on the balcony block received its first public hearing on Thursday, and only a few opponents of the plan showed up at the meeting.
It's not that opponents have been unheard. Responding to the visceral hatred of the preliminary sketch, representatives from Highwoods and the law firm, Polsinelli Shughart, told the city council they would work to save the balcony building's tower.
Scott Lane, the president of the Historic Kansas City Foundation, was one of the opponents of the original proposal to attend the meeting. Lane did not see much improvement in the revised drawing. In this scheme, the Polsinelli buildings sits farther back from 47th Street. But it remains eight stories tall and too suburban in character for Lane's liking. "I live in Johnson County," he said. "It looks like a lot of the buildings in the office parks."
Susan Morten, a resident without title, also came to City Hall to show her support for the balcony building, which was built in the 1920s. The Polsinelli building looked "horrendous" to Morten when she first saw it. "It's kind of a wound to the heart of Kansas City," she said. "It's just so different. It's just doesn't fit. It's a glaring -- in every sense of the word -- building."
Morten loves going to the Plaza and said she would hate to see its character disturbed. "I never miss a Plaza [Christmas] lighting," she said, calling it can't-miss event for even people who don't like crowds. "It's more of a community than a crowd."
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In your face protests, letter writing, and talking directly to the people in power will get you to your goal. Don't EVEN think having X number of followers on Facebook counts for anything.
Get people out in the street! Stop this montronsity. That's your goal.
The Facebook Group (page) is just over a week old and has well over 5,000 followers. We are working closely with the Historic Kansas City Foundation. We believe a well planned out strategy is the way to be effective at obtaining our goal. Our FIRST rally is this weekend, many more are to follow so every one of our fans can attend at least one. Keep up with us on facebook: Save The Plaza 2010.
It really bothered me when the organizer(s) of the FB group postponed the meeting at Unity without giving a reason and then scheduled a rally on a holiday weekend... The group is not well organized and have publicly told them that. Now the big thing is to handwriten KC Council people. Typewritten letters work as well. I can tell these people have never done advocacy work.
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