The journey to building a downtown Lenexa has taken 20 years, a lot of patience, the endurance of some setbacks and not a little bit of serendipity.Īll the while, city leaders watched as other Johnson County suburbs seemed to race ahead. The magazine cited the opening of the civic center as one of the amenities that Lenexa is offering to “give locals more to enjoy within its own borders.” In January 2018, Money magazine named Lenexa as the 59th best place to live in the U.S., the highest rank among communities in Kansas. “And we want to be right in the middle of it.” TRIAL, ERROR AND TIME This is what we’re building,” says Andy Huckaba, a Kansas Leadership Center coach and member of the City Council since 2003. So forget “Star Trek.” This is the stuff of “Field of Dreams.” If you build it, city leaders believe, they –developers, businesses and residents – will come.

“But we still wanted to differentiate ourselves from everyone else.”

“It’s good that we’re part of everything that’s going on in the metro area, because Kansas City’s kind of the thing right now,” says Mike Nolan, an assistant to Lenexa’s city administrator who has been heavily involved in bringing the project about. The vision? That the downtown will help Lenexa transform itself from just another fast-growing Johnson County suburb into something unique: a city in and of the greater Kansas City area, but with a distinct identity as a place for millennials and their young families to live, work and play for decades to come. The new civic center – a $75 million campus that includes a recreation center, parking garage and public market – represents a bet by Lenexa’s officials that by planting their flag here, on more than 80 acres just west of 87th Street Parkway and Interstate 435, that they can get private developers to follow and help create something the city hasn’t really had before: a thriving downtown. Viewed from a certain angle, the brand-new City Hall in Lenexa looksĪ bit like the Starship Enterprise, albeit with a Great Plains bent:Ī glass-and-metal saucer on the building’s west side sits atop an edificeĬlad in tan Kansas limestone – pointed, it seems, to the future.Īnd it is the future, or at least part of it.

Lenexa rec center