The "slogan" of Kansas City suggests that of Detroit. Detroit says: "In Detroit life is worth living." Kansas City is less boastful, but more aspiring. "Make it a good place to live in," she says.
As nearly as I can like the "slogan" of any city, I like that one. I like it because it is not vainglorious, and because it does not attempt cheap alliteration. It is not "smart-alecky" at all, but has, rather, the sound of something genuinely felt. And I believe it is felt. There is every evidence that Kansas City's "slogan" is a promissory note--a note which, it may be added, she is paying off in a handsome manner, by improving herself rapidly in countless ways.
Perhaps the first of her improvements to strike the visitor is her system of parks. I am informed that the parked boulevards of Kansas City exceed in mileage those of any other American city. These boulevards, connecting the various parks and forming circuits running around and through the town, do go a long way toward making it "a good place to live in." Kansas City has every right to be proud, not only of her parks, but of herself for having had the intelligence and energy to make them. What if assessments have been high? Increased property values take care of that; the worst of the work and the expense is over, and Kansas City has lifted itself by its own bootstraps from ugliness to beauty. How much better it is to have done the whole thing quickly--to have made the gigantic effort and attained the parks and boulevards at what amounts to one great municipal bound--than to have dawdled and dreamed along as St. Louis and so many other cities have done.
The Central Traffic Parkway of St. Louis is, as has been said in an earlier chapter, still on paper only. But the Paseo, and West Pennway, and Penn Valley Park, in Kansas City, are all splendid realities, created in an amazingly brief space of years. To make the Paseo and West Pennway, the city cut through blocks and blocks, tearing down old houses or moving them away, with the result that dilapidated, disagreeable neighborhoods have been turned into charming residence districts. In the making of Penn Valley Park, the same thing occurred: the property was acquired at a cost of about $800,000, hundreds of houses were removed, drives were built, trees planted. The park is now a show place; both because of the lesson it offers other cities, and the splendid view, from its highest point, of the enterprising city which created it.