Letter to the Editor

To the editor:

Historic Route 66, aka Watson Road, runs through the heart of Crestwood.

If you owned property with a vein of gold running through it, you’d mine that gold. Why is Crestwood ignoring its most valuable asset?

Let’s recast the city of Crestwood as being at the heart of Route 66.

We should aggressively develop the Watson Road/Route 66 corridor with period-style venues like roadside diners, motels and the like that harken back to Route 66’s heyday.

Let’s find a developer that would be interested in using part of Crestwood’s prime real estate, currently 47 acres of dirt, to build a recreation of the Coral Court Motel, functioning as both a motel and a Route 66 museum.

Rather than develop a “Crestwood City Center,” why not create a “Historic Route 66 Town Square” — a venue for festival events with live music, art fairs, food-truck events and so on?

When people hear “Route 66,” they should immediately think “city of Crestwood.”

That’s a plan that would revitalize the Watson Road/Route 66 corridor.

It would bring people from surrounding communities to Crestwood, along with visitors from around the country and the world who travel through the Midwest following historic Route 66.

Wake up, Crestwood. City leaders dropped the ball with their redevelopment plan for the mall site.

he site is cleared, and no new tenants have signed up.

It’s time for plan B — turning our vein of gold, historic Route 66, into an engine of prosperity.

Here’s my design of a new City of Crestwood logo to get the ball rolling.

Dale Taylor
Crestwood