Fast-growing Kearney works to rejuvenate its historic downtown

Late on a Saturday morning in downtown Kearney, residents Forrest Sim and Jenny Hayes batted around ideas for the next steps for the historic business district.

Sim, a recent transplant from Fort Collins, Colo., said a water element, like a fountain, could work in a setting like Kearney. Hayes said it might fit in well with the turn-of-the-20th-century look the district is going for.

“What we want is consistent architectural elements,” said Hayes, a leader of the newly formed downtown renewal group.

They gathered on Washington Street, the de facto main drag in Kearney. They stood in the middle of the closed roadway with a farmers market behind them.

The farmers market and the increased focus on downtown Kearney are part of an effort that dates back to 2010, when the city’s interest in reinventing an old, retired firehouse blossomed into the construction of a city community center in 2012 and the start of a concerted effort to rebuild the downtown district through the Kearney Downtown Revitalization Group.

Hayes is executive director of the Kearney Enrichment Council, the nonprofit that oversees the downtown group.

Sim was relocated for his job, a sales consultant for a building firm, and a robust highway system means he could have put roots down virtually anywhere in the Kansas City area.

“What brings me to the area is work,” he said, his young daughter tugging at his arm. “What brings me to Kearney is Kearney.”

Ask any longtime Kearney resident. Before the downtown group was formed, the district had been stagnant for decades.

“It’s always looked like this” is a common refrain from those familiar with downtown, “this” being the three-block stretch of Washington Street that greets visitors coming into downtown.

But Kearney is growing — it was recently named by the Mid-America Regional Council as one of the fastest-growing cities in the metro area, and with that growth, many see expansion in downtown businesses. The recent burst of activity downtown has engendered what Mayor Bill Dane feels is a unique momentum at this point in the city’s history.

Cross the train tracks and visitors will spot a mural depicting historic scenes from the city painted on Pence’s HVAC & Appliances. The city administration has moved into a former bank building on the other side of the street. A row of shops has held revolving doors for various operations, Hayes said.

“People would bring a business down here, and it wouldn’t last very long, or if they had an ongoing concern, they would leave to find a better location,” she said.

The district’s business retention isn’t formally monitored, but Chamber of Commerce president Debbie Holt agreed with Hayes’ assessment. In the five years she’s been with the chamber, she said four businesses have left downtown. The district has gained the same number of businesses.

What spurred a renewed interest in Kearney’s sleeping downtown district was what was simply an empty building.

What today is Kearney’s computer hub and community center was an empty building on Jefferson Street just south of the downtown district: that old fire station.

It sat dormant until 2010, when Dane decided to use the space as a town resource. Hayes, then a member of the board of aldermen, was asked to lead the project.

“Dane said, ‘Let’s not turn this into storage. Let’s figure out what we can do with this,’ ” Hayes said. “He challenged us.”

Hayes created a team to design a community center, and in 2012, the Firehouse Creative Center opened.

Today, the retired city building has been reactivated as an event hall with two computer labs and open creative spaces.

The center has since garnered support from Clay County Senior Services. The downtown group used a grant to create classes to help senior citizens build technology skills.

Other areas of the old firehouse have been built into a sort of arts and creative space for youth. On any given day, Kearney’s youngest residents are there painting, making a catapult or focusing on a craft project. The center will soon acquire a 3-D printer to better accommodate its visitors’ apparently boundless ambitions.

While working to build the community center and use the vacant space, Hayes said it became evident that there was a growing desire to bring new life to downtown Kearney.

The group realized that sort of undertaking would require more organizational strength.

“It was evident at that point that we needed to formalize,” Hayes said. “We’d been doing this up until now by the seat of our pants.

“This was going to be bigger than us. It had to outlive us.”

The nonprofit Kearney Downtown Revitalization Group was formed alongside the newly created community center.

Off the Firehouse Creative Center’s main area, a boardroom with a long table rests in front of a map of the downtown district featuring a quilt of colors, different hues signifying the planned emphasis of each area of the district.

Next to it is a heavily marked up chalkboard where the group has been brainstorming ideas for a fall event.

A local business owner turned the group on to Missouri Main Street Connection, a downtown revitalization management consulting group with involvement in a number of Northland downtown districts, including Liberty and Excelsior Springs.

“It was the leap forward we needed,” Hayes said. The Kearney group formalized its partnership with Missouri Main Street Connection in the fall of 2014.

Downtown Kearney has left an impression already with the Missouri Main Street Connection staffers who have worked with it.

“Kearney is charming; it’s a small-town feel downtown,” said Keith Winge, community development coordinator at Missouri Main Street Connection.

“There are restaurants you walk in and you get a great ‘hello’ from the owner. The local coffee shop, if you’re a regular customer, they know exactly what you want. It’s that small-town hospitality.”

But by itself, panache doesn’t engender economic success or a creative vision. A purposefully designed image is still missing from the Kearney plan, Winge said.

“From our perspective, they’re still trying to figure out the other stuff, like what is their brand, who are we and what we stand for,” he said.

“Normally, as Main Street starts operating and making changes, we want them to be touting those improvements or, if they're not there yet, touting what the goals are,” he said. It’s about spreading the word through social networking, town hall meetings, and publicizing the effort well, he says.

In 2006, Winge joined efforts to revitalize “main street” with Excelsior Springs and was one of the founding members of the city’s revitalization group. He came on as a community development coordinator with the Main Street Connection in late 2013 and has become the group’s pointman in Kearney.

Winge said the city has gone the way of many Northland communities: Economic activity has receded from the town centers in favor of real estate with easier access to a highway and commoditized but inexpensive spaces.

What’s replaced old downtown areas is a sea of similarity, but with that has grown a desire to rescue some of the old distinctions and the historic draw.

“I tell this story when I do trainings: When you think of a community, the picture in my head is of that downtown.

“Strip malls are not tourist destinations. Downtown is what makes that community unique.”

The symptoms and causes of the widespread downtown declines are largely the same. The first order of business is usually to remake the district’s reputation.

“Most communities have given up on downtown. They’ve seen the decline. ‘I haven’t been downtown’ or ‘I don’t go, why would I?’ ” Winge said.

More than an organizing committee or writing grants, the biggest challenge downtown districts face is an image and branding problem.

“It’s about changing that perception,” he said.

Back in 1975 when Darrell McClung first opened Darrell’s Style Shop on Washington Street, Kearney’s historic downtown had a few more buildings and businesses, like a downtown grocery store. But overall, nothing is tremendously different from what’s currently here, he said.

Washington Street ended at the train tracks. On the other side was farmland.

“When I started cutting hair here, the population was less than 1,000 people,” McClung said. “That was just when things were beginning to boom.”

The newly built Interstate 35 brought in an influx of people drawn by Kearney’s strong schools and the small-town charm.

However, the interstate giveth and the interstate taketh away. McClung was part of the earliest efforts to preserve the downtown district before the existing group was organized.

When the Kearney Downtown Revitalization Group came into being, McClung signed on as a volunteer.

“What we want here is a walkable, historic downtown,” McClung said.

McClung also emphasized the importance of creating events that can be ambassadors to those visiting Kearney, like the farmers market.

“That’s really what we want to happen every day now, is to meet and to spent time and to visit with other people as well as shop here,” he said.

McClung’s shop is one a handful of businesses that have weathered downtown’s economic battering, as is Gino’s Italian Cuisine.

Owner George Disciacca opened the store 12 years ago. The restaurant is a destination for diners around the metro area.

“People come up here and they’ll bring other people and ‘Gino, you singing tonight? Gino, you coming in tonight?’ ” Disciacca said.

Disciacca has lived in Kearney for 25 years. When he got the idea to open a restaurant, he did it knowing he wanted to own the building it would be in. A fairly priced space downtown seemed like an obvious choice.

The image of downtown has grown around Gino’s and the big personality that runs it.

“Now, I am downtown. I may not be the mayor, but I’m the mayor of this street,” Disciacca said. “Things like this, I want to be involved. I want to be out there.”

With the firehouse’s unveiling, Kearney’s sleepy downtown won the attention of Lissi Staab.

She had opened her business, Breathe Deep, a natural products and wellness store, in 2009 as an online store run out of her house just northwest of town. Kearney’s downtown had never really held a special appeal for her before the Firehouse Creative Center’s debut.

“When I saw what was happening in downtown and what they were doing with the firehouse, it really gave me hope, and it was just very encouraging about the direction of Kearney,” Staab said.

Staab had developed an interest in teaching yoga. She sensed the time was right to formalize her business with a storefront, and Kearney appeared to welcome the idea.

“I really wanted to bring my passions to where I live,” she said.

Staab moved to town from Colorado in 2007.

When she arrived, downtown was “sort of a ghost town, really. Not a lot going on and certainly not a lot of people,” Staab said, adding that some of the residents she spoke to weren’t aware the area was a distinct district.

Staab, a landscape architect by training, said she had studied some of the downtown decline situations Winge had detailed. She signed on as a volunteer with the Kearney Downtown Revitalization Group in 2013.

Staab said her involvement with the group is part of what brought her in as a downtown Kearney business owner.

The other part: Hayes.

“Jenny’s pretty persuasive,” Staab said with a laugh.

In the flurry of downtown activity that has followed the opening of the Firehouse Creative Center, Staab said Hayes has emerged as a key figure in the changing landscape of downtown.

“Jenny is visionary, really. She’s full of all kinds of incredible energy, and what she gets done I think really amazes everyone.

“She’s pivotal to this whole process, both in terms of gathering these ideas and the people involved.”

Kearney Mayor Dane agrees that Hayes has succeeded in turning a loose vision of a city center into what it is today.

“With all candor, it’s far bigger and greater than what I was able to imagine,” Dane said.

Outside of his career in public service, the mayor’s professional work has given him a broader context from which to see Kearney’s downtown district.

In between Dane’s terms as mayor, he traveled heavily with his job. His work took him throughout the country.

Dane said he liked to drive through towns to get a sense of the location and unintentionally got a front row seat to one of the most serious changes in small towns across the country.

“One of the things that I noticed was when the towns developed along the interstate, the downtown died,” he said of his travels. “You could feel it dragging through the town. The aura, the essence of the city died.”

Dane said that many times, the restaurants in the downtowns took a hit, a phenomenon that touched him personally.

Locals in Kearney will remember Clem’s Cafe as the spot to get expertly cooked catfish; it was the place where you said “fork it” to the piece of coconut cream pie that was going to be yours. It was a happening place, Dane said.

In 2002, the restaurant left.

“We can’t let that continue to happen,” Dane said. “We have to develop and bring more businesses to downtown to keep it alive.”

Dane’s focus on downtown has resulted in a raft of city commitments to the district.

First, the city created a 250-acre community improvement district that encompasses the businesses located east of I-35. A 1 percent sales tax goes to a fund that will create an aquatic center and community center near Kearney Middle School.

Second, Kearney will finish improving a handful of downtown roads by the fall, one being the alley just south of Washington Street behind the downtown district’s most prominent line of businesses.

Third, Dane has a strong interest in directing city resources to the purchase of two residential lots on the north side of Washington Street opposite the city’s prominent line of iconic businesses. The lots would be used to create a downtown retail row to match that on the south side of the street.

Finally, the city has committed $30,000 of public funding to a menu of youth and family-oriented programs. That’s in addition to allowing the group to operate the Firehouse Creative Center virtually utility-fee free.

Dane has lived in Kearney since 1980. In that time, he’s seen plenty of downtown groups come and go.

The initiatives have never had the broad business owner impact of the Kearney Downtown Revitalization Group.

Dane said the group will be measured by its ability to secure a destination business to attract an out-of-towner, be that a brewery or another restaurant.

The sun set on the end of Washington Street opposite to Gino’s Italian Cuisine. Dressed in a chef’s apron, Disciacca stepped out into the fading daylight to greet and hold the door for diners coming into his restaurant.

“Look at this street,” he said. “This is my street.”

Disciacca said he welcomes the possibility of the downtown group’s efforts to bring in another business, possibly another restaurant.

“I want them to put in a barbecue joint. They go there, and they’ll point and go ‘What’s that up there? Italian? I gotta check that out next time,’ ” Disciacca said.

He walked back in to his restaurant to survey and mingle with the night’s business. Disciacca goes from table to table singing to customers and telling jokes.

He excused himself from the table to grab a piece of cheesecake for a young girl with a birthday. She and her mom were with a birthday party, ready to go, when Disciacca discovered it was the girl’s birthday. She dashed off pleased.

“Tell your husband I said hi!” Disciacca called to the birthday girl’s mom as she left with haste to catch up to her daughter.

Disciacca pointed out two customers, Don Petty and his mother, Grace Petty.

Disciacca “is a wonderful business owner and friend,” Don Petty said.

Turning to Disciacca, he joked, “How much are you paying me for this again?”

Over dinner, mother and son batted around ideas about what downtown would need to look like in the future to survive. Don Petty said it would need to turn into more of an entertainment district with a Country Club Plaza feel.

His mom would like to see more antique stores and furniture shops in the area.

The current dilemma mirrors one from Grace Petty’s hometown, Dresden, Ohio.

That city struggled with a waning downtown for years before hitting the mark in the ’70s in a niche market: handmade baskets. Grace Petty worked in sales with Longaberger Basket Company and saw the city build a tourism industry through tourists’ desire to see the manufacturing process and watch the products being made.

Unimaginably, the company also built a giant, house-sized basket to enhance the city’s credentials as the handmade basket capital of the world.

“That placed exploded,” Grace Petty said.

The moral of the story, she said: When faced with a difficult economic trend, consider something big, ambitious and unusual.

This story was originally published September 15, 2015 at 5:19 PM with the headline "Fast-growing Kearney works to rejuvenate its historic downtown."