"The story of the transformation of Kansas City during the last decades of the nineteenth century from muddy squalor to a gleaming paradigm of the City Beautiful holds inspiration for those who seek examples of transcending vision and resolve in city leadership. The development of Kansas City's interlocking system of parks and boulevards enhanced virtually all elements of urban life then, as it still does today" "The City Beautiful movement was fundamentally important to Kansas City. It remade an ugly boomtown, giving it miles of graceful boulevards and parkways flanked by desirable residential sections, acres of ruggedly beautiful parkland dotted with recreational improvements, and several neighborhood playgrounds in crowded districts. Its results received attention and praise from city planners across the United States. It gave scope to the ambition and talent of George E. Kessler, whose success in Kansas City was the gateway to nationwide recognition in the professions of landscape architecture and city planning. Its boulevards helped define the natural demarcations among commercial, industrial, and residential sections, and were a boon to neighborhood stability in the years before effective zoning. It reached into every part of the city, establishing unity through its own pervasiveness. In later years another set of city planners would find the much maligned City Beautiful architects had willed them a boulevard grid to ease the mounting loads of automobile traffic, had pointed the way to greater use of the park and boulevard system's recreational opportunities, and had left to them a precious legacy of urban beauty." by William Wilson in "The City Beautiful Movement in Kansas City."

1893 Report Board of Park & Boulevard Commissioner 1920 Souvenir Booklet Maps of the Kansas City System Miscellaneous Pictures of the Kansas City System Plans of the Kansas City System People Who Made Kansas City's System Possible Publications

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