I haven't had a chance to write up anything on future trails lately. In the past month, KCMO did officially receive a bunch of $500,000 federal trail grants. One of those grants was to extend the trail system north towards the employment centers along the I-29 corridor as shown in white in the map below. The KCI Corridor Trail will connect the Route 152 Trail to KCI and parts further north.
While getting federal grants is a great thing to stretch local dollars, it comes with a huge bureaucratic and time consuming process that makes me more anti-government every day. One of the fun things one gets to do is fill out forms required to make sure the project doesn't impact any historic items (learn more here).
While I was working on some historical clearance submittals for the extension of the Platte County trail system along the I-29 corridor, I came across some old aerials and had to pull the old USGS topographic maps.
Platte County was pretty desolate in the early 60's. The topo map below illustrated how there were few structures mostly clustered around the old Interurban Railroad and hitching post towns. The base data in the map was from 1961 and the items in purple were mapped in 1970. What that means is one can see what was built from 1961 till 1970 ie anything in purple. There wasn't much purple even back then.
The area along I-29 was even more rural. These aerials from 1964 show the area between Cookingham Drive on the top and Tiffany Springs Parkway on the south. The old Bonnie and Clyde Red Crown Tavern would have been just to the top of these aerials.
The two pictures split at 112th Street. The north-south (up and down) road is Amity.
Some things stand out. I-29 was just a four lane highway. Multiple connecting streets had not been severed or removed by the airport. The TWA overhaul base was full and employing thousands of folks. TWA eventually built a headquarters in the top picture on the east side of I-29. MoDOT upgraded the highway to an interstate with frontage roads.
Things lo0k a lot different today.
Comments