Northeast News
April 20, 2016

Having lost the house of cards public art project at 7th street and Indiana to demolition crews in 2015, the area’s art community took the necessary steps to secure the public art boards done by community art volunteers at the 3512 Independence Avenue site.  City attorneys and bureaucrats promised that the hand-painted boards would be given back to the community for future use, since they were the ones who put the effort into the beautification project. The rest of this dog’s story is exactly why we’ve abandoned any kind of participation in any public city planning exercises, Independence Avenue included, given the city rarely abides by its commitment to the plan, much less to the community groups who participate. The city simply doesn’t honor or value the will of the people. Case in point: the Nelle Peters apartments on the Plaza and the city’s hasty abandonment of the Plaza-Midtown Area development Plan, which called for preservation and adaptive reuse of historic structures. In short, the city caved to developer threats of protracted litigation if the city didn’t approve some hot-shot developer’s plan to raze the structures.

This time, though, commitments made by authorities at the Land Bank and city attorneys to director of Northeast Arts KC Rebecca Koop to save the window dressings at 3512 Independence Avenue were not honored, and the publicly produced art pieces were sold as part of the demolition contract. This newsdog spoke with Ed Cates, Midland Wrecking’s head honcho, who said the boards were sold for $600 to a presently unnamed buyer.

The city communicated nothing of their agreement with Koop to Cates, but to his credit, Cates is diligently working to retrieve the art boards. Buyer X however isn’t playing ball, and wants to hold the boards as ransom now that he knows they have value. Quite frankly, had the city honored their commitment to HNE’s art community, we wouldn’t be playing ransom games with Buyer X for some public pieces of art. Just another shining example of how the city fails to honor their commitment to the public.