Country Club District
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Country Club District is the collective name of a group of neighborhoods comprising an upscale, historic residential district in Kansas City, Missouri, and Johnson County, Kansas, USA. The Missouri neighborhoods are Sunset Hill, Hampstead Gardens, Wornall Manor, and Greenway Fields. The Kansas neighborhood is the city of Mission Hills, Kansas.
The district was developed in stages by noted Kansas City developer J.C. Nichols between 1906 and 1950. It is bordered by U.S. Route 56 to the north, Meyer Boulevard to the south, Belinder Avenue to the west, and Brookside Boulevard to the east (see external link below for an original map of the district). Ward Parkway, a wide, manicured boulevard, traverses the district running south from the Country Club Plaza. According to the United States Census, the residents of the Country Club District (comprising ZIP codes 64112, 64113 and 66208) have the highest per capita income in the Kansas City Metropolitan Area. As of 2000, the city of Mission Hills, Kansas was among the top 250 richest cities in the United States, according to Forbes magazine.
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[edit] History
J.C. Nichols began developing Countryside and Sunset Hill in 1906. As his development expanded, he dubbed it the "Country Club District" because it was centered around what was then the Kansas City Country Club, located on the battlefield from the Battle of Westport in the American Civil War. In 1919, the club moved several miles west to Mission Hills and its former grounds became Loose Park and a portion of what is today the Wornall campus of the Pembroke Hill School. Nichols also built the nearby Country Club Plaza, which was the first shopping center in the United States designed to accommodate patrons arriving by automobile. Because Nichols developed all the neighborhoods in the Country Club District, today it is considered one of the largest, contiguous master-planned community in the United States.
Self-perpetuating restrictive covenants, or "deed restrictions", were used in each property in the district. The restrictiveness of such covenants, however, varies from neighborhood to neighborhood. Restrictions as to race or ethnicity, particularly the prohibition home sales to African-Americans and Jewish Americans, are quite common, although such restrictions have been unenforceable since the Supreme Court of the United States's 1949 decision in Shelley v. Kraemer. Historian William S. Worley, however, notes that Nichols was among the first of his contemporaries to abandon the practice of not selling to Jews (Journal of Southern History, Vol. 58, No. 3. Aug., 1992; pp. 566-568).
On the Missouri side, many residents formerly sent their children to Southwest High School, a public school in the Kansas City School District. After the end of racial segregation in schools in Brown v. Board of Education, however, the school experienced considerable "white flight". As a result, today nearly all Missouri residents send their children to private schools, including the Pembroke Hill School, The Barstow School, Rockhurst High School, and Notre Dame de Sion. Today, according to the United States Census, the Country Club District has nearly no African-American residents.
For two weeks in October of 1977, renowned artist couple Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped Loose Park's 4.5 km of footpaths in 12,500 square meters of saffron-yellow coloured shiny nylon fabric. The project cost $130,000.
[edit] Homes and residents
The district includes many homes by or after plans of many noted architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, McKim, Mead, and White, Louis Curtiss, and Mary Rockwell Hook. Many homes are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and/or its subset, the National Register of Historic Homes.
Notable residents of Sunset Hill include or have included Mayor Harold Roe Bartle, Mayor Richard L. Berkley, H&R Block founder Richard Bloch, Senator Kit Bond, author Evan S. Connell, Hallmark Cards founder Joyce Hall, composer John Kander, businessman R. Crosby Kemper Jr., UCLA chancellor Franklin David Murphy, Kansas City Star founder William Rockhill Nelson, political boss Tom Pendergast, Ambassador Charles H. Price II, designer Kate Spade, columnist Calvin Trillin, professional golfer Tom Watson, and Mayor Charles Wheeler.
[edit] Further reading
- Evan S. Connell, Mrs. Bridge (North Point Press, 1959) and Mr. Bridge (North Point Press, 1969).
- Novels set in the Country Club District between the 1920s to the 1940s, with frequent references to the district and the Country Club Plaza.
- Evan McKenzie, Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government (Yale University Press, 1996).
- Robert Pearson and Brad Pearson, The J. C. Nichols Chronicle: The Authorized Story of the Man and His Company, 1880–1994 (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas).
- Sherry Lamb Shirmer, A City Divided: The Racial Landscape of Kansas City, 1900-1960.
- William S. Worley, J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City: Innovation in Planned Residential Communities (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1990).
[edit] See also
- Quality Hill
- Kansas City neighborhood which was the predecessor to the Country Club District
- List of neighborhoods in Kansas City, Missouri
- Mr. and Mrs. Bridge
- Merchant-Ivory film based on Evan S. Connell's novels, set in the Country Club District and filmed largely on location
[edit] External links
- University of Missouri-Kansas City: "Ward Parkway: a Grand American Avenue"
- Original Map of the Country Club District -- produced by the J.C. Nichols Company early on in the development
- Planning for Permanence -- the speeches of J.C. Nichols
- Homes Associations of the Country Club District Home Page
- Lists all neighborhoods comprising the Country Club District in both Missouri and Kansas, with links to their association web sites.
- Community Builder: The Life & Legacy of J.C. Nichols
- A documentary produced by PBS in 2006
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