Country Club District

The Country Club District is a group of neighborhoods forming a historic upscale residential district in Kansas City, developed by noted urban planner and real estate developer J. C. Nichols.

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. Called "a vast expanse of sylvan beauty," the District is home to approximately 60,000 and includes such well-known Kansas City neighborhoods as Sunset Hill and Brookside in Missouri, Mission Hills, Fairway, and the oldest parts of Prairie Village in Kansas. 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. By the time developer Nichols died in 1950, the Country Club District covered more than 6,000 acres, making it the largest contiguous planned community built by a single developer 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. It was on a bluff overlooking the creek with a view of the estate and imposing limestone mansion of Nichols' mentor William Rockhill Nelson, forty years Nichols' senior, a real estate developer and the publisher of unusually lucrative daily newspapers, including The Kansas City Star.

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. Two years later, he platted the neighborhood he called the Country Side District. That year, 1908, the Country Club streetcar line was extended to 51st and Brookside. As Bismarck Place expanded to include Country Side, he began to develop a master plan for an all-white, primarily Protestant-only suburb that he dubbed, in 1908, the Country Club District because of its proximity to what was then the site of Kansas City Country Club, now Loose Park.

Eventually, Nichols acquired a tract of land crossing from Missouri into Kansas, which now includes the neighborhood of Sunset Hill (in Missouri) and the cities of Mission Hills, Westwood Hills & Mission Woods (in Kansas). In April 1917, the District advertised subdivisions Sunset Hill, Mission Hills, Hampstead Gardens, Wornall Manor and Greenway Fields. By 1919, the company marketed estates in Indian Hills. Nichols also built the nearby Country Club Plaza, the first shopping district in the United States designed to accommodate patrons arriving by automobile.

Inspired by cityscapes and landscapes that Nichols experienced during visits to Europe in 1900 and 1921, the District's roads emulate lanes of villages in the English countryside: they are winding and tree shaded, lined with stone walls and arched bridges; some are named after English towns such as Huntingdon, Stratford and Dartmouth. Street corners are often marked by carved stone statuary, copies of old-world masters. Pergolas, cherub-studded water fountains, terraces and elaborate landscaping grace the entrances to titled subdivisions, which include Armour Hills, Armour Hills Gardens, Armour Estates, Holmes Park, Romanelli Gardens, Brookside Park, Ward Estates, Crestwood, Fairway, Sagamore Heights, Sunset Hill West and Westwood, to name a few.

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.

J. C. Nichols eventually planned and built hundreds of middle class and upper-middle-class homes in architectural styles ranging from Tudor Revival to Georgian to Colonial Revival to Spanish Architecture to Egyptian to Prairie School to English Gothic to Arts and Crafts to Moorish Revival, to name a few. 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; Nelle Peters; and Mary Rockwell Hook. Several homes are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Notable residents of the Country Club District have included: