J.C. Nichols blazed a trail through Kansas City well before the Plaza was born

J.C. Nichols and his “first shopping center”? The mind leaps to the oh-so-familiar faux-Spanish architecture, fountains, high-end shopping and dining, and, yes, all those Christmas lights.

But Jesse Clyde had other “firsts.”

When the grand plan of the Country Club Plaza was announced in 1922, cash registers had been ringing for two or three years in his Tudor-styled Brookside location on 63rd Street.

And the first Crestwood shops on 55th Street had opened in 1921. The “Bunnies of the Damned” — as a wit at The Kansas City Star once dubbed the human-sized Easter decorations with their glowing eyes — would first appear there before hopping to the Plaza.

The earliest, however — 1907 — was the little strip center on East 51st Street. Getting its name, the Colonial Shops, for its distinctive square, white-painted columns (long gone), it was still south of the city limits by two blocks.

This was the then-last stop on what became the crucial Country Club Trolley line, electrified for suburbanite transit south from Westport.

Before its eight miles of track were civilized by the Metropolitan Street Railway, this “dummy line,” so called because its steam locomotive hid behind a trolley-car façade so as not to frighten horses, connected to Dodson, near Prospect Avenue and 85th Street, where it met the Missouri Pacific and other railroads.

Once blue collar, the little railroad got its executive-suite name from the Kansas City Country Club, just a half mile west, where Loose Park is today.

Just across the tracks from Nichols’ small sales office, the grocery and pharmacy served Bismark Place, which looked down on it from the hill to the west. Nichols and his partners back then graded out Walnut and Grand streets between 49th and 51st on 10 acres previously trod by dairy cows.

He settled his new bride, Jessie Miller, an Olathe banker’s daughter, at 5030 Walnut St., the third house he built up there. The one he’d planned for them sold before they could move in.

The 51st Street shops, later extended and remodeled in the 1950s, now are largely frequented by students, who didn’t show up until the University of Kansas City opened in 1933.

All this was only a couple of years after Nichols had transferred his hard work and aspirations from KCK to Kansas City, one of the first of his savvy moves.

“In 1903 there had been a most disastrous flood in the lowlands of Kansas City, Kansas … so we named our properties ‘The Highlands’ and had some circulars printed setting forth the wonderful advantages of our houses,” he recalled. “As destitute families left their flooded houses with their few belongings, we handed out these circulars. I have always felt a little ashamed of this.”

Oh, he was a promoter: Bismark Place was advertised in 1905 as “Kansas City’s choicest neighborhood,” a brash come-on considering the several existing mansion-filled districts flourishing to the north and the fact his wife had to draw their water from a spring not far from their house, beyond city services.

His detractors sniped that his properties were “like cemetery lots, which people might buy but had no wish to use.”

Bismark Place, only the first of dozens of neighborhoods that Nichols was about to roll out like tasteful green carpets across his “Country Club District,” was something of a disappointment.

Inheriting loose building restrictions, instead of being able to impose his later strict standards, Nichols lost control of the quality and conformity of surrounding properties, such as on Main Street, which he had wanted to remain residential.

Immediately, he took these lessons straight south: On the west side of Main was created Country Side; the east side, sloping down to the trolley line, he called Rockhill Park. This was baldly swiping the name of William Rockhill Nelson, who was developing his own neighborhoods north of Brush Creek. Nichols always insisted he had no idea it was part of the press baron’s name.

Leaving Bismark Place behind in the 1920s, he built another stone home for his family at 48 E. 52nd St.

In 1908, critical to our metro’s history, Nichols took a gamble that he could sell large lots in the sticks, that is, Kansas; he snapped up the Armour’s cattle farm just over the state line and named it Mission Hills.

He also hooked the back holes of the Country Club, which included the polo grounds. This led to more Trumpian superlatives: “Sunset Hill is conceded by other cities to be the finest residential property in America.”

It was and is very fine indeed. As much as we’ve researched, however, we find no concession letters from those other cities or their developers in the Nichols archives.

By 1909, he had grown from that first 10 acres to overseeing 1,000 — still just a small fraction of his future, nationally acclaimed, footprint.

Nichols hadn’t yet played his ace in the swampy hole: the Country Club Plaza Shopping Center.

This story was originally published March 18, 2018 at 9:00 AM with the headline "J.C. Nichols blazed a trail through Kansas City well before the Plaza was born."