After 75 years of neglect, this Kansas City neighborhood is finally getting a sidewalk
When Kansas City annexed their northland neighborhood 75 years ago, the folks who lived in unincorporated Chaumiere were promised city services equal to those their fellow Kansas Citians enjoyed south of the river.
In a lot of ways, they’re still waiting.
But that might be changing. Thanks to the work of two relative newcomers to the neighborhood who were novices in the ways of city government just last year, City Hall is finally turning its attention their way.
Construction has begun on a new sidewalk along a dangerous stretch of Russell Road, which, like most streets in Chaumiere, is a narrow two-lane strip of crumbling blacktop with no shoulders and steep drop offs on either side to the ditches that pass for storm sewers.
The new sidewalk will make life easier and less stressful for pedestrians, who now are faced with two choices when a truck or car tops a hill:
Head for the ditch or say their prayers.
But not for much longer.
“We just don’t have many sidewalks,” says former neighborhood association president and longtime resident Yvonne Herrick. “If we have a sidewalk, it’s a little piece that’s a remnant from when we used to have a school.”
Monday was a big day in Chaumiere (pronounced shaw-meer), which is French for cottage, since the neighborhood was founded as a lake community a century ago. With the temperature in the upper 90s, city officials and neighborhood leaders gathered at the corner of Russell and Cleveland Avenue to announce that work is underway on a $1 million project to build that sidewalk on the north side of Russell down to North Antioch Road.
The project also includes seven school bus stops throughout the neighborhood, an already installed four-way stop sign and a new pedestrian bridge coming next spring.
Another $8 million in unfunded future improvements are on the city’s to-do list for the rest of the neighborhood, which stretches from North Antioch Road to Northeast Chouteau Parkway and Northeast Parvin Road to Interstate 35 on the north.
“Chaumiere is one of several Northland neighborhoods that was part of the annexation that is without adequate infrastructure, curbs, sidewalks, stormwater drainage,” 4th District At-Large Councilman Crispin Rea said in an interview before this week’s ceremony.
“It’s a necessity for a walkable and safe neighborhood, and city government needs to get the basics right for regular folks who live up in those neighborhoods. They’ve been paying taxes for far too long to not have the basics.”
Couldn’t vote on annexation
It’s a common concern in some northern neighborhoods that Kansas City annexed in 1950 after a three-year court battle with North Kansas City, which also saw annexing territory as a way to boost its tax base.
People in the annexation area had no say in whether they wanted to become Kansas City residents or remain rural. They didn’t get to vote on it. And the opposition group they formed, the Clay County Self Defense Committee, proved powerless to stop it.
Back then, Chaumiere residents weren’t happy. They said being out in the countryside — yet near the big city — had been the whole appeal of the place from its beginning.
“Build your home in beautiful Chaumiere Wood,” beckoned a 1926 advertisement in the Kansas City Journal newspaper. The area was a 5-mile drive “by motor over the concrete highway.” And it was near a stop on the Interurban rail line that brought people to nearby Winnwood Beach, a lakeside amusement park that called itself the Atlantic City of the West.
People built bungalows on Chaumiere’s large lots within a short walk of the waterfront and never expected that the city they tried to escape would come to get them.
But come it did after World War II, as Kansas City sought to increase its territorial reach.
As Winnwood Beach fell into decline, its lakes filling with silt and the amusement park closed, Chaumiere residents said goodbye to what had been something of a suburban vacationland and waited for the benefits of city life to be bestowed upon them as a result of the annexation.
They did get police and fire protection. Public works took care of the streets, more or less.
But they never got the storm sewers, curbs and sidewalks that most other neighborhoods take for granted.
They sought change
Rea and his in-district colleague, Councilman Eric Bunch, have taken a special interest in Chaumiere since last year, after council district maps were redrawn and the neighborhood of 1,500 residents became part of their responsibility.
Most of the 4th District has always been south of the Missouri River, but a small portion of it wraps around North Kansas City and recently got bigger.
During Bunch’s first term, the district didn’t extend as far east as Chaumiere. So when he and Rea, his newly elected colleague, attended their first Public Improvements Advisory Committee (PIAC) meeting up north last August, they first learned how badly Chaumiere had been short-changed by City Hall for so many decades.
They got that news from two newly minted neighborhood leaders. Laurel Shoger-Hall and Olivia Meade had been on the same swim team in high school a dozen years ago, lost touch and then reconnected in March 2023 at a meeting of the Chaumiere Neighborhood Association.
“The whole meeting, I kept looking over at her and thought, do I know you?” Shoger-Hall said. “So after that meeting we’re kind of like, hey, let’s do some stuff to improve our fairly new-to-us neighborhood. We need some basic infrastructure in here.”
After a large sinkhole developed on Russell Road last May, Meade and Shoger-Hall made it their mission to catalog the neighborhood’s many needs over the summer.
“That was really when Olivia and I were like... We can’t keep getting ignored,” Shoger-Hall said. “We actually went on a walk and identified 118 patches on Russell Road that had occurred on that road due to repair work, or you name it.”
During their presentation at the PIAC meeting, they suggested that the city hire someone to do a study of the area’s needs.
But Bunch and Rea suggested instead that Chaumiere leaders take them and city staffers on a walking tour of the neighborhood.
Rather than spend $80,000 to do a study — that’s what they always seem to cost, Bunch said — city officials would see for themselves and order the work done.
Day care for Rea’s 4-month-old son had canceled that day, so he brought him along for a walk in the stroller on those streets without sidewalks.
“We were all playing blocker for him,” Herrick recalls. “We certainly wanted that baby to be safe, so we’re all walking down a neighborhood road with yellow jackets on trying to make sure everybody was safe.”
Many calls, meetings and a PowerPoint presentation followed until finally in January, Rea called Shoger-Hall and Meade to tell them, as Meade recounted at Monday’s groundbreaking, “our persistence paid off.”
“The progress since then has been remarkable,” she said.
Several streets have been repaved, the all-way stop signs have been installed and more infrastructure improvements are in the works.
“This is how projects are supposed to go,” city transportation director Jason Waldron said as construction workers took a break from their work on Russell Road.
Officials from the North Kansas City School District cheered on the sidewalk groundbreaking because kids will be able to walk safely to catch a school bus.
Tom Meyer from UMKC’s Center for Neighborhoods came to support the work of Shoger-Hall and Meade, who gave the center a shoutout for helping them learn how to get things done with city government over the past year.
“This is an engaged and optimistic neighborhood with its eyes on the future,” Bunch said Monday, describing Chaumiere as a model for other areas that want to get their money’s worth out of city government.
Rea said the work isn’t done, and won’t be until City Hall makes good on its promises to Chamiere and other Northland neighborhoods that never got what they were promised all those years ago.
“Some of the surrounding neighborhoods have some of the same challenges,” Rea said. “Other neighborhoods in the area have little more infrastructure. I have received calls from other folks in some of the other neighborhoods, so we’ve got a lot of work to do up there.”
“I hope folks will come out of the woodwork and demand more of their city government.”
This story was originally published August 27, 2024 at 6:00 AM.
