PARK(ing) Day KC Festival

Start: Saturday, September 18, 2021 10:00AM
End: Saturday, September 18, 2021 6:00PM

Come celebrate KC's first PARK(ing) Day when we open three blocks on Walnut Street to residents, artists, businesses, and organizations and highlight the need for more pedestrian-friendly downtown spaces. PARK(ing) Day began in 2005 in San Francisco and grew into a global event celebrated annually by hundreds of cities to highlight the need for more urban open space. At noon, KCMO Councilman Eric Bunch will present a proclamation declaring the third Saturday of September to be KCMO’s official PARK(ing) Day. Great cities have great streets and the DNA wants the Kansas City community to rethink their streets, not only as spaces for machines but places for people. KCMO has underutilized land devoted to storing cars. These overabundant parking lots waste valuable downtown space, make housing more expensive, produce added traffic congestion, and worsen environmental problems. We hope the festival will highlight the need for the city to explore opportunities to transform parking spots into more productive spaces, create more pedestrian-friendly urban spaces like bike lanes and wider sidewalks, and move the parking reform ordinance forward. We want the city to enforce its parking ordinances like towing illegally parked vehicles. Stop the weekend joy riders that disrupt our sleep and make the streets unsafe. The Downtown Neighborhood Association's mission is to build a vibrant, safe, and friendly neighborhood by nurturing a sense of community for all its residents. PARK(ing) Day is their neighborhood block party! Nearly 28,000 residents live in greater downtown, a 30-percent increase since the last decade, according to the 2020 Census. Greater downtown encompasses the River Market, West Bottoms, Columbus Park, the Central Business District (CBD), Crossroads, Westside, Crown Center, Union Hill, and Hospital Hill neighborhoods, according to the Downtown Council.