Kansas City's Parks and Boulevards

Kansas City's Parks and Boulevards

Author: Patrick Alley

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2014-10-27

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 143964800X

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A fast-growing frontier community transformed itself into a beautiful urban model of parks and boulevards. In 1893, East Coast newspapers were calling Kansas City the filthiest in the United States. The drainage of many houses emptied into gullies and cesspools. There was no garbage collection service, and herding livestock through the city was only recently prohibited. Through the diligent efforts of a handful of recently arrived citizens, political, financial, and botanical skills were successfully applied to a nascent parks system. Squirrel pastures, cliffs and bluffs, ugly ravines, and shanties and slums were turned into a gridiron of green, with chains of parks and boulevards extending in all directions. Wherever the system penetrated well-settled localities, the policy was to provide playgrounds, tennis courts, baseball diamonds, pools, and field houses. By the time the city fathers were finished, Kansas City could boast of 90 miles of boulevards and 2,500 acres of urban parks.


Hare & Hare, Landscape Architects and City Planners

Hare & Hare, Landscape Architects and City Planners

Author: Carol Grove

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2019-04-01

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0820354813

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When Sidney J. Hare (1860-1938) and S. Herbert Hare (1888-1960) launched their Kansas City firm in 1910, they founded what would become the most influential landscape architecture and planning practice in the Midwest. Over time, their work became increasingly far-ranging, in both its geographical scope and its project types. Between 1924 and 1955, Hare & Hare commissions included fifty-four cemeteries in fifteen states; numerous city and state parks (seventeen in Missouri alone); more than fifteen subdivisions in Salt Lake City; the Denver neighborhood of Belcaro Park; the picturesque grounds of the Christian Science Sanatorium in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts; and the University of Texas at Austin among fifty-one college and university campuses. In Hare & Hare: Landscape Architects and City Planners Carol Grove and Cydney Millstein document the extraordinary achievements of this little-known firm and weave them into a narrative that spans from the birth of the late nineteenth-century "modern cemetery movement" to midcentury modernism. Through the figures of Sidney, a "homespun" amateur geologist who built a rustic family retreat called Harecliff, and his son Herbert, an urbane Harvard-trained landscape architect who traveled Europe and lived in a modern apartment building, Grove and Millstein chronicle the growth of the field from its amorphous Victorian beginnings to its coalescence as a profession during the first half of the twentieth century. Hare & Hare provides a unique and valuable parallel to studies of prominent East and West Coast landscape architecture firms--one that expands the reader's understanding of the history of American landscape architecture practice.