The Paseo and Ward Parkway
Binding: Softcover
Details: Signed edition of 20
Contents: 41 Photographs
Dimensions: 8 x 8 inches
Publication date: August, 2022
I began taking these pictures in 2012. Describing the idea to people, I talked about the two street's similarities: their wide, park-like medians, how they rose in elevation as they went south from Brush Creek, how both have groves of plane trees and pin oaks, both have churches that take up whole blocks where on Sundays church members’ parked cars reduce the roads in front of the churches from three lanes to one. They are also coupled in Kansas City’s history. The Paseo was the first boulevard in the city’s 1893 plan to turn Kansas City into a more refined place, and Ward Parkway the endpoint of that desire.
I did not talk much about their differences, that was harder: one had a monument dedicated to “The Loyal Women of the Old South" and one was involved in a debate about whether to change its name from The Paseo to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
