The Creation of Leawood City Park: An Interview with Jean Wise
When you’re a kid, summer means swimming, and when I was growing up in Leawood I did most of my swimming at the Leawood City Park’s pool. I also spent a lot of time on the playground where Lee Boulevard and I-435 meet. Both the pool and playground were thoroughly remodeled in 1997, when I was eleven, and the original playground has long lingered in my memory as a lost paradise – a Shangri-Leawood, if you will. I liked the remodel quite a bit, but once I became an adult I found that every time summer rolled around I started thinking back to the city park as I originally knew it.
I remembered sand pits separated by concrete slabs connecting them that had tunnels big enough to crawl through. I remembered a small, stepped hill-sized structure with evergreen bushes on it. One could ... Read the full article on the jocohistory blog.»