Photo Credit: Courtesy of Lee’s Summit Parks & Recreation
For more than 40 years, South Lea McKeighan Park was the home to youth baseball in Lee’s Summit, Mo. When the leagues relocated to a new sports-complex venue—700-acre Legacy Park—the 11-acre McKeighan Park site was relegated to a practice field that needed some updating. The park’s highly visible location at the corner of two busy arterial streets on the fringe of the city’s downtown district gave vision to a special type of park redevelopment.
Design Development
After 4 years of neighborhood feedback, planning and design workshops, charettes, and consultant refinements, parks and recreation staff members focused on a master plan, with the assistance of Bowman, Bowman, and Novick Architects of Kansas City. Careful attention was given to the park’s context within the older, neighboring residential area to the south and west of the park, while also being responsive to the adjacent land uses of a high school to the north and commercial and retail businesses to the east. The park needed a welcoming feel from the street while also conveying a sense that this was an oasis in a bustling, high-traffic urban area. One of the overriding concepts in the redevelopment was environmental sustainability through the use of stormwater-management practices (parking lot bio-retention swales), use of native plant materials, and low-impact development by making minimal grading and infrastructure improvements.
Another important consideration was to acknowledge both the recent history of the park with baseball, but also the site’s historical significance in the area’s early settlement prior to the Civil War. A small commemorative plaque was erected on the site of one of the field’s old home plates, along with interpretive boards explaining the site’s history.