Plaza Branch and Central Library will open late at 11 a.m. on Saturday, Oct. 17 due to the Kansas City Marathon.
North Kansas City bought the River Forest Park site in 1973. For a long time, though, it wasn’t developed as a neighborhood park and was mostly forgotten.
What’s Your KCQ?, a partnership between The Star and Kansas City Public Library, looks at how this city park is finally getting the attention it deserves.
In September 1978, North Kansas City resident Jerry Hartgrove welcomed a reporter from The Kansas City Star into his backyard to show how heavy rainfall was damaging his property.
Hartgrove talked about losing trees and seeing parts of his land collapse into the ravine behind his house. Neighbors on East 26th Avenue were dealing with the same issues.
He said he’d reported the problem to local officials but was told the drainage and erosion issues were not the city’s responsibility.
The area to the south — where trees and chunks of soil were giving way — was River Forest Park. Backyards had been slowly disappearing ever since the adjacent subdivision’s construction in the mid-1950s. With just over 7.5 acres of dense woods and brush and no amenities, it was barely a park at all.
Nearly 40 years later, not much had changed.
Read the rest of the story at KCHistory.org or on The Kansas City Star website. Plus, access The Kansas City Star articles, both past and present, on the Library website with a Library card.