The city recently allocated money to redevelop a downtown corridor that will use a design by the students. Officials from the city and its landscape architecture firm, Schwab-Easton, Manhattan, met earlier this month to develop a final master plan for the renovation area: a railbed corridor downtown and an area south of Marysville’s City Park. The firm will mesh the K-State students’ design concepts with ideas from Marysville merchants and others. Wyatt Thompson, a May 2005 K-State graduate in landscape architecture, is a Schwab-Eaton staff member working on the renovation project.

Chip Winslow and Katie Kingery-Page, studio faculty in K-State’s landscape architecture and regional and community planning department, agreed to include the Marysville project in a third-year landscape architecture class.

Three student teams visited the town and made conceptual drawings to give the public, merchants and city officials ideas on how to make the corridor attractive as a visitors’ stop and as a downtown gathering place for residents.

The student proposals focused on the Marysville Main Street design committee’s three-fold program: to develop public plaza space in the soon-to-be-abandoned railroad right-of-way; to help strengthen Marysville’s community identity; and to create a strong pedestrian link between downtown, a nearby park and a proposed trail.

Included in the proposals was site planning to accommodate public gathering spaces, parking, vehicular and pedestrian circulation, site-specific sculptures and pavement designs, a bandstand and a rail-to-trail concept for the old railbed.

The students’ redevelopment design helped Marysville receive a Governor’s Award for Excellence at the annual Kansas Main Street and PRIDE conference. Of the 22 communities honored for rejuvenating their historic commercial districts, Marysville received special recognition for design and organization. The city was recognized, in part, for the K-State students’ Seventh Street corridor design.