In late November, a squad of about 18 volunteers from Bridging the Gap fanned out along Wilson Avenue and Belmont Boulevard on the northern fringe of Kansas City to plant 31 trees on the public right-of-way adjacent to Congregation Beth Israel Abraham and Voliner’s Sheffield Cemetery.
It was the culmination of a multi-year effort to secure special funding from the city to upgrade the surroundings of one of the city’s oldest cemeteries.
Some buried there were born around the time of the Civil War.
The neighborhood, now somewhat blighted and industrial, once was home to Jewish Kansas Citians, recalled one Congregation Beth Torah member. His grandmother played in nearby streets around when the cemetery was consecrated in 1901.
Now, slowly spreading their roots in the soil are seven newly-planted redbuds, six trident maples, two lindens, two elms, two crab trees, six oaks and a few lesser-known tree varieties.
The project was funded by a special $18,500 grant approved by the Kansas City City Council as part of its plan to green the cityscape by planting 10,000 trees to fight climate change and heat islanding in lower-income sections of the city.
Mark Morales, president of the Sheffield Neighborhood Association, was on hand for the tree planting and said he was elated by the major neighborhood upgrade, a landmark day in his 15-plus years at the helm of the group.
He said he plans to bootstrap on the tree planting to mobilize other efforts to upgrade surrounding neighborhoods and join forces with others to rollback homeless encampments in the area which have led to vandalism. Area businesses have expressed interest in matching funds for such efforts, he said.
The tree planting initiative was launched three years ago when three redbud trees were planted along 6200 Wilson Avenue flanking the entryway to Sheffield near the cemetery’s then-newly refurbished chapel.
The trees were planted to honor the memory of Matilda Rosenberg, Peter Shemitz and Charles Megerman by their families.
Some congregants of BIAV, the Orthodox synagogue that owns the cemetery, remember that decades ago there were trees along Wilson Avenue that disappeared over the years as a result of bad weather and tree decline caused by blight and disease.
Now, with a new generation of families using the cemetery, there is heightened interest in greening the area to help screen nearby industrial complexes and soften the clamor of long freight trains that frequently rumble by.
City crews have been out to whitewash a railroad embankment covered with graffiti. Morales said he would like to engage local area high school art students with artists from the Jewish community to perhaps paint a mural there.
The city is putting heightened emphasis on rapidly expanding new tree planting initiatives to combat climate change and roll back the problem of “heat islanding” in the summer, when low-income neighborhoods largely devoid of tree cover experience measurable increases in temperature as the result of the lack of shade.
Forest Decker, director of Kansas City, Missouri, city government’s Neighborhood Services Department, said, “Additional emphasis is being placed on tree planting along several fronts and by multiple departments.”
