NOTEBOOK: About the ‘Knapp Bridge,’ just call it bridge for now
KENT DARR Jul 27, 2016 | 8:57 pm
2 min read time
498 wordsBusiness Record Insider, Real Estate and Development, The Insider NotebookSometimes I slip up and do something stupid, such as pull an item out my notebook that should have remained there awhile longer, safe and sound.
Last week during all of the hoopla surrounding the announcement that Microsoft Corp. would build a third data center in West Des Moines, my mind drifted back over seven years of notes on the development of what has been informally called the Knapp Bridge and its place on a new a roadway that will loop through four counties.
You’ll meet Knapp property from where the highway currently ends at Maffitt Lake Road in Polk County, where it will be called Veterans Parkway, and you’ll meet Knapp property when the highway ends at Raccoon River Road in Dallas County, where it will be called Grand Prairie Parkway.
Construction of the highway has been advanced by 30 years or so as a result of the new Microsoft project. Rather than being completed in 2050, it will be completed by 2019. A key component is a bridge over the Raccoon River that ultimately will link the Grand Prairie Parkway in West Des Moines and Waukee, projected to be yet another multibillion-dollar development paradise. But that’s another story.
I first wrote about the proposed bridge in 2009. In my notes, it was called the Knapp Bridge, but we didn’t call it that in the article. A couple of years later I wrote another story about the bridge. Again, my notes said Knapp Bridge, the article did not. So it has gone during virtually any discussion about a bridge over the Raccoon River. “You mean the Knapp Bridge?” I would ask. “Yes,” would come the reply.
Jim Pollock, the late Business Record editor, and I talked a lot about the bridge. Jim liked to talk about bridges and highways, dilapidated parking ramps, that could be gateways to development. When Jim was alive, Veterans Parkway was still called the southwest connector. But the Knapp Bridge — well, the name is still around.
If Jim had been sitting in the newsroom last week after I attended the Microsoft announcement, the first thing I would have told him was that, guess what, the Knapp Bridge is going to be built. He would have found the data center interesting, but the bridge and the road leading to it would have intrigued him.
With that in mind, I wrote a story that you can read here that proclaimed that the bridge over the Raccoon River would be named the Knapp Bridge.
No lesser authority than Knapp Properties President and CEO Gerry Neugent called to say that that just isn’t so. He should know, having lorded the bridge project through early engineering phases, environmental impact reviews, even a search for brown bat nurseries, and the federal permitting process. These days he is working on the financing for the project. When Neugent says the bridge is nameless, nameless it is.
In my notebook, though, it’s still the Knapp Bridge.
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