For the KC/TSC Historians
 

Tried posting this in the stadium thread, but it didn't get any traction in the middle of that mess. I'm genuinely curious though, and I know there's gotta be some longtime residents of KC who could weigh in with some intelligent answers.

But seriously, why wasn’t the area around TSC ever built up over the past 50+ years? Adam’s Mark, Holiday Inn, Drury Inn, Denny’s, Taco Bell and a couple gas stations seems to have been the extent of “growth”. What happened?

It's Raytown, it's an area that has gone down as opposed to up.

It's an industrial park. Kansas City won't have any problem selling the land when the stadiums are gone. Various companies will scoop it for industrial business in a heart beat. Just doesn't have the demographic for development. The site would be laughed at today if it was suggested

Meth...

Location, location, location.

What more could you ask for than that glorious Taco Bell.

In some ways having that stadium where it is, is the most Kansas City thing ever.

I think it’s just tough to think that a sports stadium is going to cold-start a bunch of development in an area. The vast majority of days in the year neither stadium has a game. There are some big concerts that come through but not enough to carry a boom in economic growth. I actually like the location of TSC as a fan. Central to the entire metro, but with lots of roads leading in and room for parking. Love driving on I-70 and looking over to see Arrowhead and Kauffman. Two iconic KC venues full of amazing memories.

That’s the nice thing about the Legends idea; growth and development are already happening.

As sad as I will be to see Arrowhead go, I recognize that it is time. I am going to miss that view from 70 though. I lived in St. Louis for 17 years and every time I’d drive home to visit, it felt like I was home as soon as I turned that bend and that the stadiums came into view.

Here's a story that talks a little about the Truman Sports Complex. You can see from the drawings that it was basically in an area with lots of open space, but in reality, the area is a combination of industrial, residential, and undeveloped. My dad worked at GMAD Leeds, a big auto assembly plant that was pretty close to the stadium but which shut down around 1990. When the Truman Sports Complex opened, from what I recall as a kid who grew up near Paseo High School, was that the residential areas east and north of Truman Sports Complex were reasonably safe and more or less suburban. I saw a lot of games there as a kid and worked there as a food vendor from 1982 to 1988.

The Sheraton Royal (which became the Adams Mark) was a fairly nice hotel but was mostly catering to the sports events, which aren't particularly numerous--80-some baseball games and 10 or so football games a year-- and Truman Sports Complex was fairly close to some major shopping centers of the time, including Blue Ridge Mall and, a little further east, the shopping in Independence. There wasn't any particular reason to build much else near there. KC is very car oriented. I recall that when the city touted Truman Sports Complex, they talked about driving time between it and other tourist sports, like Worlds of Fun and KCI. They weren't thinking of it as a place to go to and hang out at, other than to see a game.

The fact that the city was so car-oriented was something I was very aware of, because even though my dad was an autoworker, neither he nor my mom drove, so we relied on the city buses to get around until my brothers and I started driving as teenagers. Getting to TSC for work before we drove was a bit of a challenge, especially getting there early enough for roll-call on weeknight games, when we had to take the Roanoke bus and then walk from Raytown Road, and on Sunday games, when we had to take the 39th Street bus and walk from Van Horn Blvd. Getting home from there wasn't that bad, because we could ride the Stadium Bus routes that were available then, which would drop you off at the Plaza and we could walk from there, or else if the timing was right transfer to the Troost or Armour-Paseo buses.

The Fellowship of Christian Athletes had a new building that opened up in 1979, which was north of Royals Stadium and alongside I-70, overlooking the left field. The little motels, Drury Inn and Holiday Inn opened up to take some of the sporting event trade and the higway travelers and whatever other business might be had out there, same as the Taco Bell and the Denny's.

Anyway, if those areas have since deteriorated, that is just begging the original question, as it should be the case that if showpiece stadiums spur development, then the area around those two beautiful stadiums should have benefitted or at least sustained themselves. I think the record on sports stadium is mixed but leans toward them not spurring development, particularly when they were built for a car-oriented fanbase like the Royals and the Chiefs have.

https://flatlandkc.org/news-issues/w...story-repeats/

Someone bought or otherwise sat on the land near the complex and became the 1970s/80s equivalent of the "**** you, I know what I've got," guy on Facebook marketplace.

ROFL

Is that right, though, that a lot of the land was held by one party? I know the Block folks had teamed up with Hunt to propose a mixed-use development around 2004, but that didn't go anywhere.
https://www.bizjournals.com/kansasci...mixed-use.html

Just looking at the map of the area, you can see why it was available rather inexpensively back in the 1960s and why it would face challenges for development unless a lot of stakeholders really teamed up to make it happen. It looks like it was designed to get traffic in and out in a hurry, not to be a welcoming place for folks to stick around and spend money.

There's a very interesting website called Historic Aerials where you look up an address and find aerial photographs going back many years. I looked up
i 70 and blue ridge cutoff kansas city mo
and found aerial photographs going back to the 1950s. You can see how the area around Truman Sports Complex changed through the years.
https://www.historicaerials.com/viewer

Or you can look up other addresses, of course!

Would be a great spot for the new jail

The old KCMO work farm if my memory is still ok used to be near the TSC near the KCPD HELI Port.

Yes, it was at 8100 Ozark Road. Originally, it was the Municipal Farm (a work farm for people convicted of smaller crimes or addicts) from 1909 to the early 1970s and the Municipal Correctional Institution from 1971 to the early 21st century. We would drive past it taking a shortcut through Eastwood Hills to get to Truman Sports Complex. It was on a hill south of Raytown Road. Now it's a community garden, I think. A brief history of the Farm can be found here, https://www.sos.mo.gov/CMSImages/Arc...G998_MS293.pdf