‘Friday the 13th’ films an apt analogy for Wichita’s Crystal (Prairie) Lake Park | Opinion
At this week’s Wichita City Council meeting, council member Brandon Johnson made an intriguing suggestion for the long-awaited Crystal Prairie Lake Park in northwest Wichita.
“If we removed ‘Prairie,’ then it’s ‘Crystal Lake,’ and art-wise we could put a life-size statue of Jason at the bottom of the lake as a tourist attraction,” Johnson suggested.
It would be an homage to the long-running “Friday the 13th” teen-slasher movie series, and it might be the perfect symbol for Wichita’s new park, planned for the corner of K-96 and Hoover Road.
Jason, the hockey-masked supernatural serial killer from the movies, gets killed himself on a regular basis, but always arises for another sequel. Kind of like Crystal Prairie Lake Park.
In the long history of disappointing park development plans in Wichita, Crystal Prairie Lake Park could be at the top of the list.
In 1987, (six years after Jason killed his first teenagers), the city bought what was then called the Kingsbury Tract with an eye toward expanding the Brooks Landfill.
Not surprisingly, nearby homeowners and housing developers took a dim view of the mile-long, 24-story mountain of garbage the city wanted to build. So in 1997, that plan was scotched in favor of shipping our trash out of town.
Nothing much happened there until 2004, when two construction companies, Cornejo & Sons and Ritchie Bros., competed for a contract to dig out the sand at the site and create a man-made lake that could be turned into a park. Cornejo offered more per ton, but Ritchie would have taken the sand out faster, meaning the park could have been started about 10 years sooner.
City staff steered the contract to Cornejo through the simple expedient of altering the company’s bid, grafting Ritchie’s sand-production figures onto Cornejo’s financial offer. It ultimately took 20 years to finish mining operations, which is about what Cornejo originally projected.
Meanwhile, in 2007, the city hired a consulting firm to design the eventual park. The design included a mammoth glass-fronted beachhouse/event center, a concert amphitheater, scuba diving, sail boating, a rowing race course, a swimming beach, fishing areas, and a cable wakeboard park where you could water ski or wakeboard being pulled along by an overhead rope instead of a boat.
The architects who drew up the plans won awards for it from the American Society of Landscape Architects. But it will never be built, because in the time it took to dig the lake, costs have escalated to a prohibitive level. So the plan is being scaled back to basically a passive park with a swimming beach and boat ramp.
There is finally some good news here.
Wichita developer Jay Russell, who’s been selling new homes nearby for years with the promise of eventual proximity to a lakefront park, has agreed to donate $1 million to help jump-start the process.
On Tuesday, the City Council accepted that donation and set plans in motion to finally open the park to the public.
But it’s a bittersweet beginning.
The first thing the city plans to build is — wait for it — a bike path. But instead of building a bike path in the park, it’ll be a path to the park, along North Hoover Road and under the K-96 freeway.
As was explained to the council Tuesday, the new bike path will link Sedgwick County Park to Crystal Prairie Lake Park, because somebody apparently said they want to be able to ride a bike between the two.
Nobody asked this: If you’ve just ridden your bike to the park, why do you need to ride it to another park?
But as noted in another column earlier this week, the Spandex-shorts cyclist caste in Wichita wields outsized influence over city government, far beyond what its numbers justify.
The other two improvements listed in “phase one” will be a temporary gravel parking lot at the park’s southwest corner and fencing to keep park users from straying into the adjacent Brooks Landfill.
In addition to suggesting the Jason sculpture (the plan includes $50,000 for public art, so it’s a doable thing), Johnson also asked if the new park would have a zip line.
He was told that will be considered in future phases of park development, timing to be determined.
For now, the least they could do would be to put in a tire swing. The park’s right next-door to the landfill, so they’d have plenty of tires to choose from.
This story was originally published January 10, 2025 at 5:09 AM.
