Dorri Partain
Managing Editor

Lykins Square Park has experienced many recent improvements —  including new walkways, lighting and play equipment —- to create a welcoming neighborhood green space. 

At the park’s center — located between seventh and eighth streets at Myrtle and Jackson avenues — a new-completed art installation highlights the diversity of not just the Lykins neighborhood but of all Historic Northeast.

Designed to be a central plaza for the park, its visitors can walk through or sit down for a while. There’s also fun activity as the entire structure is decorated with handprints collected from neighborhood residents.

To collect the handprints, several events were held — inviting anyone willing to ink their hand and press it upon a white sheet of paper — to participate in this community art project. Lykins resident and artist Fai Beal assisted with the collecting process and the handprint images were transferred to six-inch tiles in muted shades of blue, red, yellow and green. 

Nearly 600 handprint tiles were created for this installation — including 350 collected from students at Whittier Elementary, which is within Lykins neighborhood boundaries. 

Intermixed with the handprint tiles are additional tiles that read “Neighbors helping Neighbors” in the various languages that are spoken within Historic Northeast: Arabic, Burmese, English, French, Karen, Somali, Spanish, Swahili and Vietnamese. 

According to Gregg Lombardi — Executive Director for the Lykins Neighborhood during the project’s inception — a group of 30 volunteer architects and designers worked with the neighborhood association to develop a master plan for park improvements in 2018.

“Rick Howell, a talented landscape architect with Plaid Design, was the lead architect in developing and implementing the Master Plan,” Lombardi said. “He has devoted well over 100 hours to the project — completely as a volunteer — and has done excellent work every step of the way.”

According to Lombardi, $600,000 in funding was allocated for park improvements. The Kansas City parks department provided $300,000, the Sunderland Foundation provided $260,000, the Kansas City Museum provided $10,00 and the remainder came from private donations.  

“When the project was created, the park was used primarily for drug dealing and human trafficking and children only played there infrequently,” said Lombardi. “The concept of the hand-print project was to make children feel at home in the park and give them a sense of ownership of the space.”