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Calling it a pioneer project of the nineteenth century, the American Society of Civil Engineers on October 21, 1974 designated the Kansas City park and boulevard system, including Cliff Drive and Kessler Park , as a national historic landmark. Mr. Walter Snow, chair of the Kansas City Section of the landmark committee, said" the project was an outstanding example of urban environmental planning" and " from its beginning attracted future development of the city."
Recognizing that a process for preserving historic landscapes would require that they would require that they first be identified and documented, the Prairie Gateway chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) initiated the first historic landscape survey in Missouri in 1989. The scope of the 1989 survey, conducted by Dean Wolfenbarger covered most of the parks and boulevards plan for Kansas City. In 1991 a second, supplemental survey was authored by Anthony Walmsley of the New York office of Tourbies & Walmsley, Inc.; Cydney E. Millstein in association with Linda F. Becker (architectural historian), both of Architectural and Art Historical Research; and Frank Theis and Kristie Hatley of Theis Doolittle Associates, Inc. This two-volume survey covered twenty-nine parks and thirty one boulevards planned and built during the period 1893 to 1940. Copies of the detailed report are referenced citing the identification of Cliff Drive in Kessler Park as exceptionally significant in the area of landscape architecture as an excellent example of a park designed in the American Romantic style. The park and drive is also highly significant in community planning for attempting to counteract the intensity of urban living by retaining and further developing a piece of countryside within the city. Lastly it is significant for its role in establishing the legality of park system's condemnation procedure.
In 1910, George E. Kessler moved from Kansas City to St. Louis where he had previously worked as the Chief Landscape Architect for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, and then as Director of the Restoration of Forest Park, which had been the site of the exposition. Kessler worked in many cities in the years that followed until his death in 1923. Leaders of growing cities such as Denver, Dallas, Memphis, Houston, and E1 Paso wanted him to give their communities the same urban beauty he had given Kansas City.
After he died, the park board decided to name a short road near the Liberty Memorial after Kessler. When Frank Vaydik came to Kansas City as park director in 1964, he was disturbed by the city's lack of appreciation of Kessler, who had earned a national reputation as a pioneering park planner. The board decided to rename North Terrace Park for Kessler despite some local residential opposition. On July 6, 1971 , nearly fifty years after his death, the board passed a resolution stating that Kessler had never been honored properly for his great contribution to the beauty of Kansas City . They officially renamed North Terrace "Kessler Park".
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