Background: For eight months in 1990-91, I wrote a column called Daytripper for the The KC View (RIP KC View). I was supposed to be about local travel, but I ended up obsessing over the Kansas City I saw disappearing around me. One consistent theme was the city's vanished streetcar system.
And now that the city's transit system is once again something to obsess over, it seems like as good a time as any to unearth my youthful experiments in journalism. Enjoy (RIP Enjoyment).
Bridge to Nowhere
[Original pretentious title: “Where my hair grows, there grow I”]
K.C. View December 28, 1991
“…making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day.”
-Thoreau
When I was a college student in Liberty and wanted to drive down to the Plaza, I knew I had two exits to choose from when it came time to leave I-35 South: either Broadway or Southwest Trafficway. I took the Broadway exit whenever I could, because Broadway seemed like a much happier street. Southwest Trafficway was quicker, but the way it deposited me on the Plaza left me feeling like a cheeseburger at the end of a stainless steel chute.Since moving into Kansas City and, indeed, onto Broadway, it seems strange that I once thought the street or the area happy. It’s my neighborhood now; where I work, where I buy groceries, where my hair grows. It has lost the aura of novelty it once held for that kid from South Dakota.
There were two good things about driving down Broadway, before I knew Broadway. First, there was the jog it takes after 40th Street. This bend in the road brings you to Westport, with its warm brick buildings, its lights and activity. These things struck me, flying by at 35 miles an hour, as profoundly happy. Later I would work in Westport and come to view the place differently.
The other thing I enjoyed about Broadway was the bridge that cuts across it diagonally at 43rd. I could never discern any purpose to it, since nothing ever seemed to cross over it, but something about it was, and still is profoundly pleasing, if not happy. It was an easy landmark, something to help me get my bearings in a city at that time seemed so big. After I moved into the neighborhood, the bridge became like another piece of furniture to me. For years I was among the many who drove under it day in and day out without knowing what it was.
The bridge is a remnant of the Country Club Line, a part of the old streetcar system that ran from Westport through the Plaza, Brookside and Waldo and then on south to 85th Street. In its prime, the Kansas City streetcar system, one of the most extensive in the U.S., carried 300,000 passengers a day. The Country Club Line--specifically who owns it--has been a legal issue almost since the day the street-cars stopped running in the late 1950s.
And it remains a legal issue. The Kansas City Area Transportation Authority (ATA) paid $1 million to buy the line in 1981 with the intention of building a new light-rail system along it and has so far paid $675,000 in legal fees to prove their ownership. ATA officials have set no ceiling on future legal costs and can’t estimate with any certainty when the new line will he built. All the same, they blithely claim that the cost of a new rail line south of the Plaza will be around $50 million. So if all goes well we may soon--sometime in the next century anyway--have a fast, efficient rail system linking downtown to Waldo and points south.
About two years ago, I walked across the bridge on my way to work. There were broken bottles, graffitti, and weeds sprouting from the dirt that had collected around the rails. A few weeks ago, I took another look and found chain link fences at both ends.
I asked Ron Guglielmino, rail manager for the ATA about it. He, too, recalled walking over the bridge a few years ago, but didn’t realize that it had since been fenced off. Ron didn’t know about the fences, he said, because he deals with long-term aspects of the rail line. Another ATA employee deals with short-term things like putting up fences. Ron gave me that employee’s phone number.
Then Ron dropped the bomb: someday the bridge will be torn down. It doesn’t figure into the new rail plan and the city would like to clear it out for better traffic access. Undoubtedly the bridge gives beer truck drivers trouble getting to and from the Levee, a nightspot around the corner. No date has been set for the bridge's demolition. It could be in ten years or fifty, nobody knows. But it will go; the powers that be have so decreed.
I know the bridge serves no real purpose. It so longer does what a bridge is supposed to do. It connects nothing but two grassy hills and two stretches of abandoned rails. But I will mourn its loss, and with good reason. When the bridge goes a part of my life will go with it.
The bridge is a ruin and performs the function of a ruin ably. It grounds our sense of place. It used to tell me where I was, back before I knew my way around. And it continues to be a marker for me, telling me both where I've been and reminds me of both failures and triumphs past and keeps me, in the best sense of the word, humble.
It serves the city as a marker, too, reminding us that we will spend hundreds of millions of dollars over the next half a century to replace what we already had a little over 30 years ago.
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Postscript: The Mill Creek Viaduct was designed in 1928 by Edward Buehler Delk, who also designed much of the Country Club Plaza for J.C. Nichols. The bridge outlasted both the creek (which was diverted below ground) and the streetcars (which stopped running in 1959). It stood as a beautiful urban ruin until was finally demolished in 1996.
More information on The Mill Creek Viaduct and Edward Buelher Delk is at the Historic Kansas City Foundation website.
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