Board 1 of 2.Board 2 of 2.Photo of site detailing safety fence along the Riverfront Heritage Trail preventing people from falling off the bluff’s edge at the old 4th Street Viaduct bridge terminus near 4th & Beardsley. Coordinates: 39°6’30.4″N, 94°35’27.1″W.Photo of screen wall obscuring an electrical substation on private property owned by Evergy near the Town of Kansas Bridge on 2nd & Main. Coordinates: 39°6’40.6″N, 94°35’1.6″W.Photo taken from 3rd & Main of planter-bollards. They, along with the brick planters with trees in them to the right serving as seating, constrict the flow of pedestrian traffic entering and leaving this pedestrianized section of Main Street abutting City Market to the immediate left. Coordinates: 39°6’35.5″N, 94°35’0.7″W.Photo taken at Main & Missouri of a poured concrete retaining wall separating the one-way portion of Independence Avenue between Oak and 5th & Broadway from the original street grid (as well as the original topography). The wall highlights the sheer amount of earth-moving required to ensure a semblance of adequate automobile circulation around the North Loop (let alone for the North Loop itself). The severely unactivated frontage of 529 Main across the street and the underutilized realm around the building and retaining wall create near-perfect conditions for a homeless encampment like the one obscured by overgrowth in the foreground to emerge in the intervening nooks and crannies of public space. Coordinates: 39°6’28.2″N, 94°34’58.8″W.Photo taken at Pacific & Forest of a noise barrier separating the east-southeast portion of the Columbus Park neighborhood from Interstate 29/35. While barriers such as this one may indeed spare the neighborhood from the highway’s noise pollution, it arguably ham-fistedly legitimizes the presence of the adjacent highway by making the implicit concession that the highway indeed yield harmful health effects, but in consolation for state and federal authorities making the value judgment that its perceived economic benefits outweigh its costs to one’s physiological health, the residents are effectively being told to simply forget about it behind the wall. 1958-vintage Sanborn maps and aerial photographs taken by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1963 show that a pedestrian bridge used to cross the interstate from Columbus Park to the Chouteau Courts housing project that once existed along Independence Avenue to the south. Coordinates: 39°6’31.9″N, 94°34’4.9″W.Photo taken at the pedestrian plaza nestled between 5th and Independence along Delaware St. This staircase railing is both wall and fence, and separates the brick alley in the public right-of-way to the left from the private plaza, facing Delaware in the bottom right, which is on the property of 510 Delaware. Although located in nominally private space, these elements of the public realm exist where they are in order to encourage public presence and use. Coordinates: 39°6’27.6″N, 94°35’4.2″W.Head-on view of the same above pedestrian plaza taken from Delaware, facing west-southwest. Another double-duty planter-bollard is seen here in the foreground, while seating, shade trees, and brick pavers are used in the middleground to inculcate an inviting feeling to pedestrians, whether tenants of the loft apartments in the left of the image or not. If not for the break in the iron railing created by the staircase scaling up the sides of the wall to meet the alley in the background, one might forget the alley is itself public space. Coordinates: 39°6’27.8″N, 94°35’3.1″W.
