Fake apartments in Midtown? Here’s the story behind Kansas City’s viral TikTok building
The lights are on, but no one’s home at the intersection of Baltimore Avenue and Armour Boulevard in Kansas City.
A TikTok by user @laurenislosingit made its rounds this week revealing a little known feature of the Public Storage building at 3440 Main St. in Midtown.
The townhomes right behind the building on Baltimore Avenue are a part of the storage facility itself. They’re fake apartments, used for storing, not living. The windows? Boarded up. The front door? Just for show.
And the gates separating the homes from the sidewalk? Unless you want to hop the fence, there’s no way to get in.
Why in the world is this building trying to trick us?
We dug into The Star’s archives and reached out to the Old Hyde Park Historic District Neighborhood Association to learn more about this building carrying more than meets the eye.
Here’s the deal.
Before Storage Trust Properties renovated and redeveloped the building in 1998, it used to be a car dealership called Sonny Hill.
When Storage Trust proposed to turn the dealership into a 100,000-square-foot building with an add-on spilling onto Baltimore Avenue, neighbors were concerned that the new development would disrupt what was otherwise a residential neighborhood, according to a story by Joe Gose published by The Star on Oct. 14, 1997.
The leaders of the Old Hyde Park Historic District opposed the development plan and the way it would change the rules for what kinds of buildings could go up in the neighborhood.
“The proposed zoning change in itself is alarming,” John Gladeau, president of the Old Hyde Park organization in 1997, told The Star in the story published on Oct. 14, 1997. “We’re concerned that it could set a precedent for further commercial zoning in a residential neighborhood.”
Putting fake apartment buildings on the front of the facility was Storage Trust’s path to getting approval from the neighborhood association, and eventually, the green light from city council to go ahead with their plans.
The story from The Star states: “The company has added faux facades to the planned operation so that about half of the building along Armour and all of the structure on Baltimore would look like typical apartments or homes in the neighborhood.”
“That was kind of a compromise,” said Nadja Karpilow, current secretary of the Old Hyde Park Historic District Neighborhood Association.
Well, the compromise worked.
“The (city planning) commission’s blessing came after Storage Trust revised the plans several times and after several meetings with the surrounding residents,” Gose from The Star reported on Sep. 16, 1997.
At the time, it cost about $3 million to make the renovations that would blow Kansas City TikTok’s mind.
The building was how it is now—fake apartments and all—when Karpilow moved to the district in 1998. She said that her daughter walks by the building on the way to school and didn’t realize the homes were fake until recently.
Do you have a question about another building or landmark in Kansas City that you always wonder about when you walk or drive by? Ask us at kcq@kcstar.com or with the form below, and we can look into it with our friends at the Kansas City Public Library.
This story was originally published January 13, 2022 at 6:41 PM with the headline "Fake apartments in Midtown? Here’s the story behind Kansas City’s viral TikTok building."