Seville Circle: Realizing the Fuller Potential of the Parks and Boulevards System

Kansas City’s most popular place is the Plaza. When it’s summertime, it’s a evening stroll in the shadow of the district’s many towers. Come Fall, it’s the Art Fair, then soon it’s the holidays and the Plaza Lights. Kansas Citians love the Plaza — for many of them, it’s the real heart of the city — even more than downtown.

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Sadly, while the Plaza is be one of the most popular and best-designed spaces in the city, some of the space directly adjacent to the great district is very poorly designed and, consequently, avoided by visitors. Perhaps even worse is that the space includes major elements of the Parks and Boulevards System, including Brookside Blvd, Emanuel Cleaver Blvd., Ward Pkwy, Mill Creek Park and more.

streets

Above is a birds-eye view taken from Google Earth. If you blow it up (click on it), then you’ll be able to see the Plaza’s iconic Giralda Tower on the left-hand side. North follows Main Street out of frame.

The space between the tower and where buildings resume to the east of Brookside Blvd is a crucial crossing point into the Plaza from points east. The closest and most prominent of the these is the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the lawn of which you can just make out in the top-left corner of the photo above.

You wouldn’t be faulted for thinking that visitors on foot might want to cross from the Plaza to the Nelson or vice versa on a Saturday afternoon. And yet we’ve created a pretty terrible space for that.

47th and Main

This is 47th Street/Emanuel Cleaver (left to right) at the intersection of Main/Brookside Blvd. (As the names changes of the streets might suggest, this is a key coming-together point.) The streets are a minimum of six lanes wide.  There are left turn lanes in all directions and even a couple channelized right-turn lanes (northwest and southeast corners of the intersection). While this makes for a more comfortable ride in a car, it’s awful if you’re on foot — you have to cross 100 ft. in any direction in this intersection. What’s worse is that, up until very recently, the most minimal style of crosswalk striping was used.

crosswalk

The result? Crossing as a pedestrian at maybe one of the most important intersections in the city is a scary, dangerous experience.

The heavily car-oriented design of the adjacent streets means that we get a situation like this — two boulevards (Emanuel Cleaver and Brookside) creating a physical (and really, psychological) disconnection in one of the city’s otherwise great neighborhoods:

disconnection

That’s not all, though. While the south end of Mill Creek Park (across the street to the north of the tennis courts) is a pleasant, inviting space, we’ve put a fenced-in set of tennis courts (owned by the parks department) to the south of them, denying the opportunity for an excellent public space connecting the park to Brush Creek on the south.

(Right now, buses from all over the city converge around the tennis courts. If someone wants to transfer from one bus to another, they have to around the tennis courts to find their next stop.)

How do you address these issues?

What about with this?

reduced plan

A roundabout at 47th and Main, accessible to pedestrians, like Columbus Circle in New York:

columbus circle

And yes, move the Nichols Fountain to the middle of it. Give the fountain the prominence it deserves. (Mill Creek Park, meanwhile, would have room to expand for new, exciting uses.)

Why a roundabout? Not only is it monumental, it allows roads around it to be reduced in width because the roundabout works as left- and right-turn lane in one — six or seven lane Brookside Blvd can now become just four.

With wider crosswalks and generous crossing islands, the trip for pedestrians and cyclists is safer, too. (It’s also quite a bit more of an “event,” with the roundabout in the background.) The yellow line on the plan indicates where the Trolley Track Trail could finally pass through.

Meanwhile, why not a new public square to the south, something that might look like this (it’s photoshopped):

square

The public square could connect Mill Creek Park to Brush Creek. And unlike the existing tennis courts, it would be much more “plaza” than “country club,” as such a spot — so close to the action of the Plaza — should be.

For an east-west connection, why not an artisan or book fair down the middle of the street? There’s room, and this would create interest, activity, and a very real connection towards the Nelson-Atkins Museum. (Check out this precedent in Buenos Aires; also an existing proposal to put such a fair on the north side of 47th Street arbitrarily favors one side of the street, while putting high-intensity activity in the front yard of apartment-dwellers there.)

The city’s streetcar — perhaps expanding as far south as UMKC someday — would dip underground for a few hundred feet near the roundabout (dotted blue line). Crucially, most buses could now stop at one point, while interfacing easily with a streetcar “subway” station below.

transit

 

New opportunities for development arise if the area to the southeast of the roundabout — currently rather awkwardly built on — is rearranged to better acknowledge the Plaza and become part of the event that is the roundabout.

Feasible?
In all, the idea might seem a little “out there” but it’s a vision for how the Parks and Boulevards can better serve the city that it’s supposed to connect.