‘Architecture junkies’ tour past and future of historic Pickwick Plaza

Jan Bentley’s shoes left prints on the dusty marble and granite floors as she walked past crumbling plaster and stepped over plywood patches covering holes.

What she saw, however, was a past reaching into Kansas City’s future.

The board member of Historic Kansas City was among 25 on a Saturday morning tour of the Pickwick Plaza. The westward-facing, 86-year-old structure has stretched the length of McGee Street from Ninth Street to 10th since its opening in 1930. Used most recently for subsidized housing, it has closed and been marred by fire.

Now it is coming to life again amid a $65 million restoration and renovation by Gold Crown Properties.

“It’s going to be a wonderful, enormous project that will save a magnificent building,” Bentley said.

Seeking more than a sightseeing event, the Urban Explorers Tour listened to the structure’s backstory and even learned how it got its name from a bus line out of San Diego.

“It was fabulous because most of us even who are architecture junkies in town weren’t quite aware of this huge, massive building,” Bentley said at the tour’s conclusion.

Pickwick Plaza emerged from farmland and rural housing amid the shadows of the 1929 stock market crash and opened in 1930. Its massive clock, now missing a panel and frozen at 4:27, originally informed passengers stretching their legs outside the building’s Union Bus Terminal when it was time to reboard.

The complex spanned the block with a three-bay bus terminal and 400-space garage flanked on the south by a twin tower hotel and on the north by the Pickwick Building offices. Developers Tom and Bryan Smith, father and son, expect the north building to open in November as 45 residential units — among them two-bedroom corner units with massive windows on adjacent walls — and commercial space suitable for retail, restaurants and offices.

In March, the south towers will open, adding more residential units and commercial space as well as a large saltwater pool surrounded by a deck contained by a glass wall and sporting a view of Ilus Davis Park to the east.

“We are probably about 50 percent complete with the renovation of the Pickwick Hotel historic conversion project,” Tom Smith said. “We’ve got a long way to go.”

At the tour’s outset, Historic Kansas City’s Lucinda Rice-Petrie recounted the San Diego bus line story. Buses left from the Pickwick Theater, rolling north and reaching a hotel in San Francisco. As the line grew, it stretched east to Kansas City, St. Louis and eventually New York. The Pickwick State Line stopped at Kansas City’s Union Bus Terminal, built as part of the Pickwick Plaza now being restored.

Rice-Petrie also shared how the Pickwick Hotel provided solitude to Harry Truman before he became president, while he decided whether to run for the U.S. Senate. He was trying to reconcile his personal ethics with the realities of politics, she said. Truman’s writings at the hotel have come to be called the Pickwick Papers.

At one point during Saturday’s tour, visitors were told that the floor where they stood would be ripped out. It had been added along the way, disrupting the ceiling vault of the hotel lobby below. Crews are using the floor to easily reach the tops of the lobby columns, where they are painstakingly restoring handcrafted plasterwork at each column’s apex. Only after they are done will the interposing floor be removed and the lobby’s grandeur returned.

“We’re just thrilled to bring it back to life,” said Dave Boux, co-owner of Plasterkraft & Mural Masters.

This kind of detail wouldn’t happen without support from tax credits that help finance the restoration work, William Hayes of Gold Crown Properties told the tour group.

“It’s too expensive. These projects would never happen,” he said.

This story was originally published June 11, 2016 at 5:18 PM with the headline "‘Architecture junkies’ tour past and future of historic Pickwick Plaza."