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Underground Economies: Infrastructure, Equity, andAccess in Kansas City 1871-1939 Julia Barnard The first sewers were built in infrastructure was established and Kansas City in 1871 and, until around improved, and for what ends. 1920, when the city began to gear up for Kansas City 1871-1920s the Ten-Year Plan, the city did not invest The first sewers in Kansas City in any substantial way in the sewers and were constructed in 1871. The well- water systems. The Ten-Year Plan, a known City Beautiful Movement had partnership between the Kansas City transformed Kansas City's suburban Chamber of Commerce and the districts into lovely subdivisions with Pendergast political team, expanded green spaces and single-family homes, Kansas City's waterworks and sewer equipped with toilets and water coverage system and drew money during the yet in 1910, many of Kansas City's urban Depression toward the metropolitan city poor in the West Bottoms and the larger on the rocky bluffs. The Plan can help us Northwest District were still without understand the real impetus behind sewers and other basic sanitary services, public works projects in Kansas City and let alone planned neighborhoods (Figure the way in which these projects changed 1). I will argue that the Ten-Year Plan the social geographical distinctions in the unknowingly participated in the city. The Plan, that Kansas City passed correction and the institutionalization of during the 1930s and that became a some of these inequalities. Not for blueprint for the national New Deal. environmental reasons, but rather for I present the Ten-Year Plan as an personal profit and development during a example of a successful re-imagining of time of great economic stress. urban space in the first part of the The Country Club Plaza, has long twentieth-century. Not without its faults, been an infamous example of racist the project extended basic services to housing policies put forward by urban those who badly needed them and governments in the early twentieth sheltered Kansas Citians from the hard century. The deeds drawn up in the early brunt of the national Great Depression. part of the twentieth century lasted until The plan re-imagined not only urban the 1960s and restricted racial minorities space and infrastructure, but also from purchasing properties in the changed governmental decision-making Country Club Plaza district. In the same and opened up public access to power by period, Kansas City's parks and boulevard allowing Kansas City women, select projects razed many neighborhoods that leaders of the black community, and labor minorities, immigrants, and the working representatives to participate in a project poor called home.1 A 1911 report from that had real meaning for the entire the Kansas City Board of Public Welfare, Kansas City community. In this way, the heavily influenced by Jacob Riis' 1890 Ten-Year Plan was truly unique and can publication How the Other Half Lives, serve as an example of flexible and open states that "boulevards have been pushed democratic governance. The Plan also through parts of the city where there helps us understand why environmental were formerly bad housing conditions."2 94 These "bad housing conditions" were Welfare reported that "It is not to the most often in poor and working class credit of Kansas City that we continue communities and were underserved by supine and tolerate the existence of more city sewerage and water. The report than 15,000 privies." The report states exemplifies the relocation of one black that "actual inspection and tabulation family in Kansas City by contrasting a force us to admit that...51.7 per cent of photograph of a mother with four of her our contrivances for the disposal of children with a photograph of the same human waste are of the kind which space after it had been razed for a sanitary science pronounces an absolute boulevard (Figure 2).3 menace to health."4 In this era of Kansas Displacement like Kansas City's of City's "progress," the benefits of modern the poor for the benefit of the sanitation practices were reserved for infrastructure of the white and wealthy, less than half of Kansas City residents. especially boulevards and roads, Engineers, city planners, and happened in many major cities in the politicians in this period focused on the nineteenth and twentieth cities. City Beautiful Movement, the birth of Famously, it happened in the mid- suburbanization, and beautiful parks and twentieth century in New York City boulevards. The citizens in Kansas City during Robert Moses' controversial urban who were excluded by suburbanization renewal project that resulted in the and wealth were also excluded from construction of the Brooklyn-Queens many basic sanitary services and were Expressway, or BQE, and in Los Angeles disproportionately poor and working to the Mexican-American community in class immigrants and minorities. Most of the Chavez Ravine, razed to make space the time they were just underserved, but for Dodger's Stadium. In this sense, in some cases, the sewage pipes were Kansas City was an early variant of literally funneling sewerage into their national efforts to "renew" urban spaces, neighborhoods. often reinforcing and creating social The engineers in the late dislocation and geographical segregation eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries based on race and class. The picture of the did not fully consider the health of the family was likely taken in the first decade natural environment either and believed of the twentieth century, more than thirty that the healthiest way to dispose of years after Kansas City built its first wastewater was to release it into rivers sewers and roads, and illustrates the without treatment. Even during degree to which "development" was subsequent renovations, the effect of reserved for the white and wealthy. sewers and pollution on rivers was not a Several images in the Annual large topic of discussion, though it was Report from the Kansas City Board of now and then mentioned.5 Although there Public Welfare illustrate the degree to were always voices for sewage treatment, which the poor residents of Kansas City for almost a century the government was were living without basic services. Many content with temporary and fleeting of the shanty-districts of Kansas City, repairs. Why, when the negative effects of Missouri were home to only one sewer the water and sewer systems of Kansas vault connection and most commonly City were clear to many, did the city so shared one privy vault as a toilet for persistently neglect to update its sanitary several families. The Board of Public system? 95 Until the 1930s, Kansas City public works projects. This simple fact governments focused primarily on reveals something larger about the aesthetic concerns, informed by the City impetus behind public works projects in Beautiful movement in Kansas City, and 20th century Kansas City. on suburban development [rather than on The next phase of the development improving working class neighborhoods. of Kansas City's sewerage lies with the so- The beautification of the area around the called "Ten-Year Plan," passed by the Blue River, for example, figured most public by a four-to-one margin in 1931. prominently in the minds of the With a long history of voter fraud in politicians who asked Kansas Citians for Kansas City, and a political system run by tax money to make improvements. The "Boss Tom" Pendergast and his machine, districts that would benefit directly from the story of the Ten-Year Program is the work were meant to pay the proposed much more intriguing than it may seem at funds. This meant that districts that did first glance. It is a story full of corruption, not or could not pay, including poor but also full of large Depression-era districts, could not access services or spending projects that put many men to expect improvements. Before 1930, work during a time of widespread despite widespread sewer failures and unemployment and anticipated the inadequacies, bonds intended for more Keynesian strategies of the national New expansive sewer construction did not Deal.8 The Ten-Year Plan thoroughly pass.6 In such a time of neglect, the social changed not only the economic landscape geography of Kansas City—the lines of of Kansas City, but also its social race and class-can be understood by geography, largely institutionalizing the looking at maps of sewer coverage. separation between Kansas Citians of Pendergast and the Ten-Year different classes and races. Plan The Ten-Year Plan, as writer By 1930 the population of Kansas Amahia Mallea explains, was a truly a City was almost at 400,000 residents.7 coalition formed of unlikely allies, a The density and growth necessitated "bipartisan campaign of hundreds of more sanitation and water development. individuals and organizations that pushed Enter the Pendergast machine, a political for voter approval of a 'unified plan' for juggernaut that ruled Kansas City for city building."9 The Planning Committee many years through the concentrated was run by a "Pendergast-leaning" power of Boss "Tom" Pendergast. Republican and Chamber of Commerce Although there was rampant corruption President Conrad Mann, who established in the Pendergast machine, the machine the "Committee of 1,000" to oversee the also made important contributions made production and determine the areas of to the working-class community. The need that were affected by the final Ten- Pendergast family was more concerned Year Plan.10 The Committee of 1,000 was than its predecessors, for whatever said to include "all elements of the reason, with public service projects in population and enlisted the best Kansas City than the old pre-boss politics engineering, business and political minds had been.