According to the broken-window theory, all it takes is one cracked pane to start a pattern of blight that will eventually spread like cancer through a neighborhood.
Joe Reardon believes positive improvements can have the reverse, healing effect.
“We absolutely think it’s going to spread to Central (Avenue) and other areas,” the Unified Government mayor told me Friday when I cornered him after all the speeches were through. “It’s going to happen.”
The occasion: the ceremonial groundbreaking for Prescott Plaza in Kansas City, Kan. No, this isn’t another big deal out by the speedway. This project is going up on 18th Street, just north of Interstate 70 and three or four blocks south of busy Central Avenue.
We’re not talking the Legends II here. Not Son of Cabela’s. No theme restaurants or “destination retail” worth a day trip from Salina or St. Joe.
With a supermarket, a convenience store and other shops, the $20 million Prescott Plaza is going to be like a jillion other suburban strip centers, but with one big exception.
The 70-some-thousand square feet of retail is being developed on KCK’s east side, which hasn’t seen a grocery store grand opening in three decades. It’s going up on the edge of an inner-city neighborhood on a corner that for years was so run-down and crime-ridden that you locked your car doors when you drove by. Even the dirt beneath the squalor was toxic (from leaky fuel tanks).
“In short, it was a mess,” shopping center developer Michael Fishman said.
There was a truck stop, and across from it a motel whose name might have changed over the years, but not its reputation.
“Crackheads would not even live here,” said the review on Yahoo Travel.
Together, the motel and the adjacent Kansas City Truck Terminal were the very embodiment of that business buzzword “synergy,” sharing some of the same clientele.
The prostitution and narcotics dealing got so bad that back in the early 1990s motel employees built a fence between the two businesses to keep the whores and drug dealers from tripping over one another in the parking lot.
“I feel like I live in a war zone,” one resident said at one of several public meetings called to discuss the problems. “I’m afraid to go out at night.”
John Muldoon, now retired, used to run the restaurant at the truck stop.
He well remembers the bad times, but also the good years before it all went downhill, thanks to the high-profile location along the interstate.
“It’s a great corner, that,” he said. “It did good business.”
And with luck — and millions of dollars in tax breaks — it just might do good business again.
It took four years of planning. Along the way, the project was almost derailed by the national stampede to outlaw the use of eminent domain for private development.
But on a sunny spring morning last week, a crowd turned out at the construction site to be entertained by a marching band and a choir, to hear speeches and celebrate what amounts to another milestone in Wyandotte County’s decade-long comeback story.
“What was here (before) sent a wrong message,” Reardon said.
The new message, he hopes, will be that the older parts of town still matter and that the KCK success story isn’t confined to Village West.
“This place is a gateway to our downtown neighborhood,” Reardon said.
And already that gateway looks a lot better than it used to, by virtue of leveling what was there before.
It can only get better.
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