By Leslie Collins
Northeast News
Feb. 2, 2011

Forget the ho-hum, typical bike racks.

Northeast Community Leadership Action Team (NCLAT) wants to install bike racks with flare to attract people to Historic Northeast.

“Anybody can put an inverted ‘U’ in concrete,” said Rebecca Coop, NCLAT member and Northeast Chamber of Commerce director. “If it’s a bike rack, so what? But, if you’ve got some bike racks in the shapes of people, animals, abstracts, interactive kinds of things, it makes it more of a destination point.

“I’m all for making Northeast a destination point.”

NCLAT’s goal is to install at least three bike rack sculptures with trash receptacles this year, with the first one completed by June. Proposed locations include the Kansas City University of Medicine and Bioscience, Kansas City Museum and Budd Park.

They’re asking local artists to submit designs and each bike rack will cost $10,000, which includes the cost of fabrication, installation, city permits, and artist and sponsor plaques. NCLAT is currently raising funds through private and public donations.

“It’s an open license to use their creativity,” NCLAT member Melenda Shahane said of the artists. “We’ve also asked them to take into account the historic context of where the bike rack will be placed.”

An informational meeting with local artists is slated for Feb. 7 and a local judging panel will choose the winning designs. The panel will be comprised of NCLAT members and representatives from the Kansas City Museum, Mattie Rhodes, Kansas City Parks and Recreation Department and Kansas City Bicycle and Pedestrian Coordinator Deb Ridgway.

Asked how NCLAT came up with the bike sculpture concept, Shahane said NCLAT members became inspired when they attended the NeighborWorks Community Leadership Institute last year in Louisville, Ky. The city utilized abstract bike racks, she said.

This year’s NeighborWorks Community Leadership Institute will be held in Kansas City in October and institute organizers will scout out the city in June for possible tours.

Shahane said NCLAT wants to unveil the first bike rack in June and hopes it will encourage the Leadership Institute to place Northeast on its tour.

“My dream is if we have enough of these bike racks you could do an entire tour to visit the different sculptures,” Coop said.

Not only will the creative bike racks promote healthy living and Northeast as a bicycling destination point, it also promotes beautification, Shahane said.

“We’re really focusing on sustainable beautification projects and we feel that when you have a blighted area, that is when crime comes in,” she said. “We’ve done a lot of cleanups in the area and we want to continue to do that, but we also want to look beyond just the cleanup and create beautification through art for our neighborhoods to take pride in, keep things clean and hopefully keep crime away from our neighborhoods.”

For more information or to donate, call (816) 547-7513 or mail donations to: Westside Housing Organization 919 W. 24th St., Kansas City, MO 64108. Westside is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation and contributions are tax deductible.

Caption: NCLAT is hoping to create artistic bike racks, like the one above, throughout the Historic Northeast. Submitted photo