Examine any plans for the new Barney Allis Plaza that, for the last year, has been under construction in downtown Kansas City, and those plans will show everything — or almost everything — that the $118 million project is set to deliver:
A new 583-space underground parking garage, a 3.3-acre park the size of a full city block. There’s to be a shaded pavillion with a coffee shop and eatery, a dog park, a playground, a sloping concert and events lawn and a “flex area” for weddings or maybe ice skating.
Earlier this month, the Municipal Art Commission announced that an art duo from Belgium was given a $2.18 million contract to bring public art to the perimeter of the plaza, located between 12th and 13th and Central and Wyandotte streets. Using thin steel tubes, they are to create what amounts to “a memory” piece, the ghostly outline of the architucture of the Convention Hall that in 1899 occupied the space, before it burned to the ground and, in 90 days, was rebuilt.
Park site, underground, being prepped for larger building
What is not often shown — but what exists not only in the minds of Kansas City leaders, but also in a rendering by architecture and design firm HOK Kansas City — is the 200-or-so-unit condominium or apartment complex that city leaders hope one day might rise on the plaza’s western edge.
Kansas City Manager Mario Vasquez emphasized that, as of now, the addition of a condominum complex or other “vertical” building is purely speculative. But not so speculative that current construction at the 5-plus-acre site isn’t preparing for it.
“It is not part of the project right now,” Vasquez said, “but we have built the project so that it could be a possiblity in the future.”…