Students present vision for revitalization

March 15, 2008 05:01 pm

— By Melissa Dunson
mdunson@joplinglobe.com
WEBB CITY, Mo. — Drury University architecture students visited Friday to present options for what the city’s downtown could look like in 20 years.
It marked the second public meeting for the students and the Webb City community since city leaders hired the group for $4,500 earlier this year to create a vision for downtown revitalization.
The students divided the downtown area into five sections — a gateway, northern and southern transitions, the core area and a place for festivities. During Friday’s meeting, the students showed several possible options for each of the sections.
The ideas for the gateway area all surround connecting King Jack Park with the downtown area because the students said Highway 171 was serving as an invisible barrier between the two. To solve that, students suggested lowering the plane of the highway slightly and creating archway overpasses to connect the two sides of Main Street.
Another idea is to create a hybrid roundabout with green space in the middle at the intersection of Main and Highway 171.
The students suggested the northern transition could be parking lots and green space and the southern transition could be the new city hall and a place for monuments.
Another option would be to have the northern area opened up into a public plaza for large gatherings and events and turn the southern portion into a civic-themed area where the city hall, police department and public works department would be located.
The students want to make the core of Main Street more pedestrian friendly and offered ideas to extend sidewalks and use parallel parking, move all parking to side lots and create a greenery wall between the street and sidewalks and one that reroutes all traffic to side streets and turns all of Main Street into green space for walking and biking.
The festivities center would be the four blocks between Broadway and Austin Street and would provide a public gathering place, artistic street elements, a park and a cafe. Route 66 would also be incorporated into the theme through signs, street inlays and a tourist center.
The complete report with the students proposals is due out later this summer.