J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City: Innovation in Planned Residential Communities

2. The City of Kansas

2 THE CITY OF KANSAS When readers ofthe Kansas City Times opened their newspapers Thanksgiving morning, 1984, they discovered an entire section of the issue devoted to an analysis ofthe current importance and historical background ofthe J. C. Nichols Company. The piece was of interest on that particular day partly because the centerpiece ofthe Nichols Company's empire, the Country Club Plaza, would that night be the focus ofthe city's most important rite ofChristmasthe turning on ofthousands ofcolored lights outlining the buildings ofthe shopping center. The special section ofthe paperon the Nichols Company was primarily concerned with the degree of control this privately held company had exercised in the 1980s on land use and commercial properties in Kansas City and the immediately adjacent counties.l The justification given for the investigative report was that the Nichols Company controlled land and institutions that had come to be thought ofas "owned" by the public in Kansas City. The Country Club Plaza, where the lighting ceremony was imminent, had become a second downtown for the metropolitan area. Indeed, its shops encompass more square feet of retail space than the original downtown retail section. Further, unlike the first downtown area, which had become almost exclusively a "daytime only" environment for office workers and convention participants, "the Plaza," as Kansas Citians prefer to call it, offers extensive shopping, restaurants , entertainment, and office space that are open well into most evenings. The Plaza has even become something of a convention center, with two Nichols-owned hotels and several other hotels around its periphery. While Kansas Citians tend to identify the Nichols Company primarily with the Plaza, the shopping center is only the tip of an iceberg-shaped wedge of urban development stretching eight miles to the southwest across the Kansas state line. 1. Paul Wenske, "Fulfilling a Vision: The J. C. Nichols Company; A Family's Vision Helps Shape a City." 37 38 J. C. NICHOLS AND THE SHAPING OF KANSAS CITY Christmas lights on the Country Club Plaza, about 1935. This trademark of the Nichols Company, which has become the central feature attracting holiday shoppers to the Kansas City area, began with just a few strings ofelectric lights in 1929. By the mid-1930s, it was already a tradition. In the foreground is an example of one of Nichols's "decorative filling stations," located approximately in the spot occupied by Swanson's in 1990. The larger building with the tower is the Plaza Theatre, Kansas City's first showplace theater to be constructed outside the downtown area, completed in 1929. KC54n55. The company has not developed all the land inside that wedge, but its practices and communities have greatly influenced even the development done by others. When Jesse Clyde Nichols opened his first small development in 1905, there were a few scattered farmers' settlements inside the southwest wedge south ofBrush Creek. The only real attraction was the Kansas City Country Club, which occupied the site ofpresentday Loose Park. Nichols knew an attraction when he saw one; he made the most ofproximity to one ofthe area's most exclusive clubs by naming his developments "the Country Club District" in 1908. Twenty-five-year-old Nichols recognized between 1905 and 1908 that the residential patterns of the wealthy were changing. As was THE CITY OF KANSAS 39 occurring in many other American cities, the old elite neighborhoods adjacent to the original downtown center were deteriorating rapidly. Many of these privileged people, who could choose where they wanted to live, had already demonstrated their willingness to move straight south from their former neighborhoods. Nichols used the magnet ofthe Country Club, along with carefully planned land development, to lure them on across Brush Creek, then a sluggish little trickle meandering from Kansas across the southern limits ofthe city toward the Blue River valley to the east. Between 1905 and the growing impact of the Great Depression in 1930, Nichols and his company transformed a ten-acre tract of residential lots into homes, parks, new country clubs, and shopping centers for more than twenty-five thousand ofthe more prosperous citizens of the Kansas City metropolitan area. By the time of his death in 1950, the number of residents was approaching fifty thousand. It is important to note that Nichols's home developments and shopping areas held their appeal from the earliest years well into the 1980s. While previous neighborhoods such as Quality Hill, just west ofthe downtown...