A Municipal Improvement Association with August Meyer as President was organized to educate citizens and get out the vote on improvement issues. After a brief, but intense campaign by this group, voters amended the city charter to give Kansas City a park board with .power to issue city bonds. The Mayor was given responsibility for appointing all five members. Mayor Nehemiah Holmes immediately named to the board Simeon B. Armour, of the Armour Meat Packing Company; William C. Glass, a retired wholesale liquor deader and realtor; Louis Hammerslough, a prominent clothing merchant; Adriance Van Brunt, an architect; and August Meyer, who was named president of the board. When the city elected a new mayor, William S. Cowherd, in the spring of 1892, he re-appointed Holmes' five men. The board was therefore balanced between business and real estate interests; idealists and improvers. Together they set an example for all boards to follow for over the next one hundred years. At the first meeting of the new board on March 8, 1892, the members voted to enter into discussion with the F .L. Olmsted firm of Boston regarding a parks and boulevard system for Kansas City.
Olmsted was one of the 19th century's great landscape architects and had been the country's leading authority on parks since 1858. His name was virtually synonymous with efforts to create natural environments within urban settings. Central Park in New York City was his best known work.
Seventy years old in 1892, Olmsted was in failing health and although his reputation was solid, the firm's other landscape architects were handling new business. One of those associates, Henry Sargent Codman, was sent to Kansas City to assess the situation in April; and sent back to the Board a preliminary report in May. No action was taken by the Board on his report, and shortly thereafter, Codman died.
George Kessler applied to this new board for the position of landscape architect. The Board could not afford his design services but hired him as secretary to the Board at a salary of $100 per month. Kessler also agreed to serve as an engineer to the board without pay. This strange hiring served the interests of both Kessler and the weakly funded board. The board did not pay him for his early planning work, but they gave him the opportunity to do the work and that is what mattered most to Kessler.
For months, he and August Meyer exchanged ideas about urban beauty, as Kessler studied Kansas City's topography and then began to design a park and boulevard system that would embrace the entire city. Outlined in final form, the 1893 Report of the Board had three sections: Meyer's letter to the Mayor; his recommendations as president of the board; and Kessler's designs, photographs and maps of the rugged topography of Kansas City to illustrate his treatise on how the board's recommendations could be implemented. Kessler did not shrink from the challenge of steep hills and river bluffs, the creek beds and gorges, which had given early city developers so many headaches. He saw these as aesthetic assets and translated to paper his vision of a system of boulevards that would curve gracefully as they followed easy grades to end in three large parks, one on the west bluffs, one on the site of the especially ugly Penn Street Ravine to the south, and one on the North Bluffs, now known as Kessler Park. |
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