Country Club District
It was developed in stages, between 1906 and 1950, for a predominantly white, Anglo-Christian, upper-class and upper-middle-class regional monoculture that still exists in large part to this day, well over a century after the first home was erected.
Ward Parkway, a wide, manicured boulevard, traverses the district running south from the Country Club Plaza, arguably the first multi-block, outdoor suburban shopping center in the United States.
In 1905, J. C. Nichols and two lawyers, the Reed brothers, bought ten acres south of Westport and beyond Brush Creek, what was then outside the city limits.
The following year, 1906, Nichols began what he called Bismarck Place, the development of a few small houses, one into which he and his wife moved for a time.
[3] Nichols also built the nearby Country Club Plaza, the first shopping district in the United States designed to accommodate patrons arriving by automobile.
Today, the Country Club District is said to be the largest contiguous planned community built by a single developer in the United States covering more than 6,000 acres.
Many residences erected in the 1910s and 1920s near the Country Club Plaza feature servants' and chauffeurs' quarters, screened-in porches, two-story carriage houses and commodious, landscaped lawns and gardens with fountains and statuary.
Many homes were designed by, or after plans of, many noted architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright; McKim, Mead, and White; Louis Curtiss; and Mary Rockwell Hook.
Its development was not only about the well-designed and permanent homes that Nichols' company erected, its urban design consisted of many smaller elements, the whole of which would become substantially greater than its parts and included sylvan parks, exclusive social and recreational clubs, neighborhood associations, community centers, shopping villages, golf courses, playgrounds, schools, churches, swimming pools, fountains, sculpture, sidewalks, tree-lined boulevards, winding picturesque roads, cul-de-sacs and infrastructure.
Its central traffic artery, the Ward Parkway, connects the entire District to the Country Club Plaza, and the Southwest Trafficway, which provides quick access to midtown and downtown Kansas City.
Nichols hired several landscape architects and urban planners, including George Kessler, considered the father of Kansas City's Parks and Boulevard system.
Historian and political analyst Thomas Frank grew up in Mission Hills, and in a 1995 article published in a magazine, he posits that J. C. Nichols designed the dream-like, suburban-scapes of the District so that its inhabitants would collectively begin a cycle of forgetting, about the increasing decay, at the time, of downtown Kansas City; its slaughterhouses and packinghouses and stockyards, a kind of whitewashing of the region's complicated, dirty, multiracial, often brutal history.
The 1948 Supreme Court decision Shelley v. Kraemer rendered such restrictions unenforceable, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited the future incorporation of such covenants.
At the same time, this practical difficulty has protected the other covenants from change, and thus has helped to preserve the essential character of the neighborhood and to resist encroachment by commercial developers.
After the end of racial segregation in schools under Brown v. Board of Education, however, Kansas City, Missouri, experienced considerable "white flight."
William purchased a four-bedroom, three-bath home on 57th Street, east of Ward Parkway in the Sunset Hill neighborhood of the District.
The house was erected in 1922 with two, second-story sleeping porches and a housekeeper's apartment in the basement, on a lot that was owned by the president of the Askew Saddlery Company.
In 1970, members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were charged with pipe bombing the home of the District's creator J.C. Nichols, in addition to other places in Kansas City.
