BY JOE ARCE AND COREY CRABLE
In late 2024, the Broadway Bridge in Kansas City, Missouri was replaced with a new bigger and better bridge, along with a new name to honor the late Buck O’Neil.
According to Missouri Department of Transportation’s website, the John Jordan “Buck” O’Neil Memorial Bridge is a triple arch bridge carrying U.S. Highway 169 over the Missouri River and serving as a key regional connection between downtown Kansas City and communities north of the river. While safe, the bridge, which opened in 1956, was nearing the end of its projected lifespan. Even though the bridge underwent a short-term rehabilitation to extend its service life in 2018, a new bridge was needed to provide a crossing that will support continued use well into the future. So the Missouri Department of Transportation along with the City of Kansas City, Missouri, worked together to procure the $220 million dollars (that includes a $25 million federal grant) for this future transportation facility to improve regional and local system performance. Massman-Clarkson, A Joint Venture, is the design-build contractor chosen for the project.
In an exclusive investigation report, KC Hispanic News noticed that the new construction of the Buck O’Neal Bridge was being tagged on a daily basics over the summer. As the New Buck O’Neil Bridge stretches the expanse of the Kansas City skyline, the Missouri Department of Transportation and city officials continue to be on the lookout for the many anonymous graffiti artists who deface the structure – and erasing the fruits of their labor is proving to be expensive.
At the city level, Mayor Quinton Lucas says the problem with graffiti and other such acts of vandalism is that finding the culprits can be difficult.
“I think probably one of our biggest problems in Kansas City, not just on the Westside, is that you let graffiti get out of control,” he says.
Lucas cites the Westside’s CAN Center as a valuable resource in battling graffiti in the Westside neighborhood but adds that there simply isn’t enough manpower available to check the security cameras installed throughout the city.
“We need people to actually check the cameras. That’s probably my biggest thing in Kansas City. We’ve got hundreds of cameras, but if there’s nobody who’s actually looking at it at the end of the day, then that’s not always something that we’re solving,” Lucas says. “I do have faith in our CAN Center officers, Chato Villalobos, and others, to make sure that we do address it, but we’re going to have to arrest people ultimately, and you’re going to have to actually be catching people who are in the act of creating these issues.”
The city’s police department and public works department often work in unison to address the issue of identifying where graffiti needs to be removed – and it often seems that just when a graffiti removal project has been completed on the Buck O’Neil Bridge, a new one must begin.
“Graffiti is a problem. We actually have a mural program that we’re doing in Kansas City to try to help combat graffiti across the entire city,” says Michael Shaw, public works director. “And this is just another one of those spaces where, with collaboration with MODOT, we can probably get somewhere with that.”
Shaw says that defacing public buildings and structures – especially those honoring Kansas City icons like Buck O’Neil himself – is an act of disrespect.
“We hope that people would honor and respect those individuals and their contributions to this community, but all that being said, it is sad to see those things that occur,” Shaw says. “We have to respond and do our best to help prevent and curtail those things.”
At least one local artist, muralist Vania Soto, says she doesn’t necessarily see tagging structures with graffiti as an offensive act, but that she understands that it is a sensitive issue.
“I don’t necessarily feel offended,” Soto says. “Art is rebellious, and I can see how (graffiti artists) feel like, ‘Cool, this is our city, so we get to tag on it. We’re paying for (these structures). We get to do whatever we want on it.”
Soto says she may just encourage such individuals to find another outlet for their creative processes.
“My message would be, ‘I know you want to continue the artwork that you’re doing,’” she says. “There’s just other locations where you can be doing it.”
Lucas says his two goals are enforcing anti-vandalism laws and policies aggressively, as well as cleaning up the site swiftly when graffiti does pop up – not just on the bridge and in the Westside, but everywhere in the city. That will require continued timely communication between the police department and public works.
“You don’t see this type of graffiti on the Plaza.
You don’t see this type of graffiti in other areas of the community. So the fix needs to be, one, a lot more enforcement,” Lucas says. “Two, I expect Parks Department to clean it up almost as soon as it gets up, because if you leave it up for too long, then that usually tells people, ‘All right, nobody cares about this neighborhood.’”
