The River

What boggles my mind about the whole riverfront project I'm working on is that the city has hasn't put nearly the kind of effort into developing the site like other cities have. I mean, just look at the image above taken from the lookout of the Town of Kansas pedestrian bridge and tell me this is not a great place. And though you can't see it so well in the image, the entire opposite shore is actually somewhat naturalized! The shoreline has been allowed to develop however it wants to with a levee behind it that's covered all in native riparian trees. Whats even better is that the trees are all tall and dense enough that they almost completely block from view all the heavy industrial lands behind them. Kansas City is sitting on a gold mine with it's beautiful natural riverfront and almost nobody knows about it.
Just look at any major city in the Midwest with a major river running through it and both banks are usually packed with random industrial stuff with no signs of naturalness. But here, despite the fact there's a major industrial hub just north of the river and the city center sitting a mile to the south, the river itself is actually a very quiet, somewhat natural place with little view of heavy industry. Coming out here, you can almost get sense of what the place may have looked like 150 years ago when the city first started to develop. That is, not considering the three sets of bridges that jump out from the city to the south and disappear into the dense vegetation to the north.
For my site, the naturalness is much more diluted with 3 railroad lines running through it and a small coal power plant to the SE that supplies steam to most of the buildings downtown. Add to that an archaeological dig for the original town of Kansas, two power substations, and a recently created wetland from an old failed project on the site and you've got one fun riverfront project to work with. I guess its these kinds of projects that we live for as Landscape Architects though.

Anyways, Enjoy the picture and I'll add more from the site soon. In the meantime, we just got an inch or two of snow and I'm going outside check it out.