Kansas City’s Bipolar City Beautiful
This Kansas City case study offers insight into the two styles of City Beautiful as (1) a stroll in the park and (2) conventional downtown modernization—city beautiful and city practical. The study also describes City Beautiful as it plods through a Pendergast machine/businessman policy system, and demonstrates once again how Dillon’s Law affects local ED policy.
City Beautiful as a “stroll in the park”
Kansas City started down its City Beautiful path in the early 1870s, continuing through the 1890s. The goal was to build a parks and boulevard system à la Olmsted and Central Park. The Kansas City parks initiative, pure and simple, was driven by wealthy elites, notably the owner of the Kansas City Star newspaper, William R. Nelson. For a decade and a half the Star pushed the parks movement week after week:
Nelson’s systematic and resolute crusade for a parks and boulevard system … began in the mid 1880’s. There were three reasons for his crusade. The first was Nelson’s love of beauty … [T]he park and boulevard movement dovetailed nicely with [his] “good roads” transportation campaign. Lastly, Nelson wanted the rough-hewn Kansas City to match his vision of a progressive, stable community, blessed with an active, corruption-free government. (Wilson, 1989, pp. 101–2)
The Star’s campaign “combined repetition and adulation.” In article after article Nelson celebrated the glories and successes of parks in other cities. His campaign added a subtly to the usual simple “bigger and better than you” competitiveness seemingly inherent in our urban hierarchical competition. For Nelson, Kansas City was not only left out of the pleasures and benefits of parks; it was simply deficient in not having what other cities had. Cities to become a great metropolis had to have parks. The chief impediment was the city’s lack of a municipal “capacity” sufficient to build a park system; it needed to create a parks board/commission. That required local legislative action, state authorizing legislation (charter reform) and a local approval referendum. A second problem was that an 1875 charter reform permitted Kansas City to exercise eminent domain; but the only structural vehicle authorized to use that power was the privately controlled Real Estate Board, which concentrated on streets and roads and was populated by civil engineers less enamored with arts and beauty, and more mindful of expense.
Each time another city achieved one or another of these steps, Kansas City readers were sure to hear about it. Chicago (eight years previous to the Columbian Exposition) was the model to be emulated. In the years preceding the Exposition, Chicago and Olmsted created a mighty park system—which Nelson’s city just had to copy. Creating a park board and empowering it with eminent domain were the first steps. For the better part of 15 years proponents of the park board argued its case—and essentially got nowhere. Finally, the logjam broke and state legislation authorized a park board in 1899 in a new charter. But the board had no powers to issue bonds to pay for its proposed park system—and had to convince an independent and uncooperative Real Estate Board to condemn the required property.
The Parks Board was insufficient for its purposes and local legislation pushed hard to remedy this deficiency. With muscle from wealthy elites, it was shortly later approved by the council; but a now hostile Real Estate Board failed to take action, and the city made no funds available for parks condemnation. Wealthy elites could force legislation through, but could not stop foot-dragging. An outraged Parks Board then shot itself in the foot by trying to compel the state to grant it eminent domain. The state Supreme Court found city legislation to be deficient on a technicality and reversed earlier municipal legislation.
Abandoning the Parks Board, a new charter (1891), supported aggressively by the newly formed Kansas City Municipal Improvement Association, established a Parks Commission complete with bond issuance powers. A pro-parks corporate elite was duly appointed to the Parks Commission by the mayor. The president, August Robert Meyer—wealthy, German-educated owner of the Kansas City Consolidated Smelting and Refining Company—took over the lead from Nelson. Utilizing support from the city’s powerful Commercial Club, Meyer pushed the previously uncooperative elements into slow, grudging support of the parks and boulevard system. Joined by the young landscape architect George Edward Kessler (also German-born/educated), the Parks Commission secured a small (21-acre) parcel of land from the Real Estate Board and began to build a park and garden.
This small start was as much frustrating as gratifying; it was not the park and boulevard system found elsewhere. Olmsted, after visiting the city in March 1893, urged, given the almost indifferent support behind the city’s parks movement, only one additional park—which was not well received by the locals. The shock of Chicago’s Great White City hit hard in October 1893. In a report submitted that month Kessler summarized Kansas City park adherents’ commitment to do more:
We are but just beginning to realize that by beautifying our city … we shall create among our people warm attachment to the city, and promote civic pride, thereby supplementing and emphasizing our business advantages and increasing their power to draw business and population. (Wilson, 1989, p. 109 The plan that followed called for three separate large parks connected by wide, tree-lined boulevards. These would, it was believed, lead to new residential neighborhoods that would replace shanties of white and black residential areas in their path. The parks and boulevard movement was drifting into slum removal.
The 1893 plan was endorsed by the Star, the mayor, Kansas City’s political machine (led by James Pendergast) and the Commercial Club. The next problem involved bond issuance. Kansas City was bumping against state debt limits; the choice was between the park system and a new, badly needed water pumping station. The solution was local legislation which created a new form of debt issuance, a certificate, which did not count against the debt ceiling. The victory was short-lived as, like previous local legislation, the state Supreme Court held it violated the city charter.
So back to charter reform went the park movement advocates, and in 1895 they secured yet another charter reform (are you counting the charters?) which not only legitimized the certificates but also finally removed the Department of Public Works’ (the old Real Estate Board) ability to oppose or slow boulevard construction and eminent domain. In its place a citizen improvement association was set up and approved by popular referendum. The Pendergast machine provided votes the wealthy elites could not.
Finally, in 1895, with a powerful structure, the Parks Commission endowed with necessary powers was ready to go. In 1896 a spectacular 1300-acre land donation was manna from heaven. Boulevard construction started—and then the roof, shingle by shingle, fell in:
For almost four years [to 1900] … opponents of the park organized a series of petitions, public meetings, delegations to the council and the park board, court fights, substitutes for Kessler’s Plan, and an attempt to remove Meyer from the Park Commission. (Wilson, 1989, p. 120)
The issue was the expense, the cost to implement the plan. Parks, compared to other projects, were superfluous; a whim of the city’s wealthy. Most of the opposition came from the larger business community—the city’s small business and real estate industry. A Taxpayers’ League formed. Law suits to the state Supreme Court resulted in a series of decisions, starting in 1899 and ending in 1908, that finally upheld the bonding certificate issuance approved 13 years earlier.
While effective opposition was over after 1900, the City Beautiful in Kansas City had badly split the business community. The parks system put in place during these years—including its crowning jewel, the Paseo—was visually impressive, and elicited considerable local support once in place. Nevertheless, after this lengthy and hardfought success, the Kansas City Parks Movement phase of the City Beautiful was fairly well over. The next phase—Union Station, development of the nation’s allegedly first shopping plaza built to accommodate the car (Country Club Plaza) and the rejection of a civic center—moved in an entirely different direction. Why?
Kansas City businessmen, machines/unions and economic development
Nineteenth-century Kansas City’s parks and boulevard/City Beautiful initiatives revealed an immature or transitional municipal policy system under the influence of no sustainable coalition. Wealthy business elites, civic associations and chambers kept the City Beautiful initiative alive through numerous charter reforms, law suits and legislative/referendums, but could not deliver sustained policy implementation. From real estate exchanges, civil engineers and state judicial action inhibiting use of ED tools by two park-related HEDOs dominated the two-decade struggle.
In the mid-1920s Progressive structural reform reared its head—advocated by a resurgent ward boss who, transcending from a city council ward-based machine, had finally forged a county-wide political machine. The Pendergast ward machine represented lower- and working-class Kansas City, drawing considerable patronage from the streetcar franchises in return for machine support. In 1908 the bosses got together to kill the Progressive favorite, the Public Utilities Commission, and Pendergast held off Nelson’s attacks on his patronage-filled Street Railway franchise—in fact voting in 1909 to extend its franchise for 42 years.
Yet Pendergast and Nelson closed ranks behind municipal ownership of the water company and earlier (in 1895), and again in 1906, he supported municipal takeover of the gas company. In 1909 Pendergast supported the relocation of the Kansas City Union (railroad) terminal from his home first ward to a location 4 miles away. The greatest and most consistent gulf between reformer and ward machine was social legislation—in particular, gambling, prostitution and later prohibition. In fact, control of the police was important to machines not just because of jobs/votes, but also because it permitted loose regulation of these activities.
Despite differences, then, machines and business could come together. Nothing better demonstrates this than a 1900 economic development-related event. Advocated as early as 1884 by Nelson and his newspaper as a “requirement for an aspiring metropolis” was a convention center. Nelson lobbied for more than a decade until, with Pendergast’s support, a convention center was authorized. Finally funded and its design chosen on the basis of an architectural competition, the Convention Hall, accommodating 20,000 visitors, opened for business in February 1899. Within weeks it had signed the Democratic Party to hold its 1900 national convention. Then, in April 1900, three months before the convention, the center burned down—completely destroyed.
Within hours of the fire, the convention center’s commission telegraphed the Democratic Party informing them that nothing had changed. The hall would be rebuilt and ready to hold the party convention on time and on budget. The Commercial Club (the corporate franchises, the largest firms in the city) raised the private funds, hired a new architect and lent their engineers and workers (150 men cleared the site). Unions put aside their bitter resistance to private ownership and joined in the effort. One union leader commented:
The rich man wants to make Kansas City a good place to live in, but the poor man must. A man who has capital can go somewhere else … but we can’t afford to move to satisfy our tastes. Convention Hall has been, and is, a bigger thing to the poor man than to the man who has plenty of money. (Brown and Dorsett, 1978, p. 128)
In 90 days the hall was rebuilt and opened for the Democratic Convention that nominated William Jennings Bryan for President. Kansas City had lived with its 1889 charter (the one authorizing the Parks Commission) for 19 years—not because it wanted to, but because it took that long to get another one. By 1901 a laundry list of changes and reforms, including civil service, prompted the formation of the Kansas City Civic League. Affiliated with the National Municipal League, it attracted over 700 members, mostly businessmen and professionals. The resistance to charter reform was, as always, taxes; but many also feared the loss of checks and balances that the existing, more Jeffersonian, policy system contained.
So in 1907, after years of losing referendums, a Republican mayor set up a new commission; added some boards and commissions to the charter; subtracted some controversial ones; and added a limited referendum for franchise approval—and, in a separate ballot, a recall amendment. Most important, it included sections to build a key streetcar viaduct from the machine-controlled north end to the central business district and the industrial areas of the city. If built, workers could get to work and shop cheaper. It also proposed a new massive City Beautiful-style railroad terminal. In the 1908 referendum that followed, Pendergast sat on his hands, and his rival ward boss, Joseph Shannon, supported both the charter reform and recall. Included in the approved 1908 charter reform was creation of the first public welfare commission in the United States. The former passed nearly 3–1 and the recall lost. Buried amid all this policy and structural mélange was the second phase of the City Beautiful.
The structural reforms discussed in the last chapter had, by 1908, not yet been achieved in Kansas City. The city’s unreformed policy system profoundly affected the course of ED policy, making necessary a series of “log-rolling” compromises, ad hoc coalitions, warring business elites, machines and reformer dynamics—all of which operated within a political culture that could only be described as Privatist: fragmented government, cheap/low cost, low taxes and fear of strong government. All became wrapped up, intermingled, in a Dillon’s Law imposed charter reform. Because of this lack of capacity and consensus, there is little second phase City Beautiful to tell of.
Originally included in the charter package was a well-developed civic center proposal—sandwiched between the railroad station and a park system (linked with slum removal)—but it never survived the politics that followed (Wilson, 1989, pp. 201–4). Its signature project, the Union Railway Terminal, only got built because the railway itself built it: where it wanted; designed not by Burnham, who it rejected; and isolated from CBD synergies and transportation access. In most cities City Beautiful sustained itself into World War I, but the war put an end to most urban initiatives. Finishing up already approved projects characterized much of the 1920s’ City Practical.
Ron W. Coan 