Perhaps the first of her improvements to strike the visitor is her system of parks. I am informed that the parked boulevards of Kansas City exceed in mileage those of any other American city. These boulevards, connecting the various parks and forming circuits running around and through the town, do go a long way toward making it "a good place to live in." Kansas City has every right to be proud, not only of her parks, but of herself for having had the intelligence and energy to make them. What if assessments have been high? Increased property values take care of that; the worst of the work and the expense is over, and Kansas City has lifted itself by its own bootstraps from ugliness to beauty. How much better it is to have done the whole thing quickly--to have made the gigantic effort and attained the parks and boulevards at what amounts to one great municipal bound--than to have dawdled and dreamed along as St. Louis and so many other cities have done. The Central Traffic Parkway of St. Louis is, as has been said in an earlier chapter, still on paper only. But the Paseo, and West Pennway, and Penn Valley Park, in Kansas City, are all splendid realities, created in an amazingly brief space of years. To make the Paseo and West Pennway, the city cut through blocks and blocks, tearing down old houses or moving them away, with the result that dilapidated, disagreeable neighborhoods have been turned into charming residence districts. In the making of Penn Valley Park, the same thing occurred: the property was acquired at a cost of about $800,000, hundreds of houses were removed, drives were built, trees planted. The park is now a show place; both because of the lesson it offers other cities, and the splendid view, from its highest point, of the enterprising city which created it. Another spectacular panorama of Kansas City is to be seen from Observation Point on the western side of town, but the finest views of all (and among the finest to be seen in any city in the world) are those which unroll themselves below Scaritt Point, the Cliff Drive, and Kersey Coates Drive. Much as the Boulevard Lafayette skirts the hills beside the Hudson River, these drives make their way along the upper edge of the lofty cliffs which rise majestically above the Missouri River bottoms. Not only is their elevation much greater than that of the New York boulevard, but the view is infinitely more extensive and dramatic, though perhaps less "pretty." Looking down from Kersey Coates Drive, one sees a long sweep of the Missouri, winding its course between the sandy shores which it so loves to inundate. Beyond, the whole world seems to be spread out--farms and woodland, reaching off into infinity. [Illustration: Looking down from Kersey Coates Drive, one sees ... the appalling web of railroad tracks, crammed with freight cars, which seen through a softening haze of smoke, resemble a relief map--strange, vast, and pictorial]