As massive Ward Parkway mansion emerges, so do neighbors’ opinions: ‘It’s a beast’
The sign at the construction site where, over the last year, a modern and nearly 10,000-square-foot mansion has been rising at 6315 Ward Parkway, delivers a friendly message.
“Hi, Neighbors!” reads the sign, put up by Kansas City’s sixtwentyone architecture and design, and accompanied by a rendering of a rectangularly shaped home cantilevered over a limestone wall. “We’re excited to add another special home to this historic community.”
Now, if only the neighbors were equally excited — which, while some are, others are not. Opinions are decidedly split on a project that is not likely to be finished until 2028.
“It’s going to be a good two years from now,” the owner, software developer Anthony Drake said Tuesday. “It’ll probably start looking finished, probably, by the end of the year.”
Loving what they see
In September, construction on the parcel — a 1.5-acre lot on the east side of Ward Parkway that in decades past contained the Georgian mansion of the late Richard Bloch of H&R Block — was heaped with towering mound of excavation dirt.
Neighbors in and around the Meyer Circle area of Ward Parkway — a mansion-lined boulevard that has historically been one of the most affluent areas of Kansas City— had little sense of the scale of the mansion to come. But as the home’s superstructure emerged, so have neighbors’ opinions — both laudatory and critical.
Scott Weidemeyer and his spouse, Miriam, for example, are enthusiastic. They live a few hundred feet from the three-level home, which is to have a pool, a pool house, five bedrooms and an elevator.
“I think it’s cool,” Scott Weidemeyer said. “It’s a beast. . . .But, hey, like I said, if you’ve got more cash than you know what to do with, I get it. It’s clearly a really nice mansion. I think having what I think is a four, five, $6 million house 100 yards or less from your front door can’t be terrible for property values.”
“I’d like to house sit, if he needs it,” Miriam Weidemeyer said of Drake, who, county records show, bought the parcel in 2022. The home’s construction has been estimated at $7,139,000.
‘It doesn’t fit’
Others, however, are not thrilled at what they are seeing, saying that the modern design is “ill-fitted” to a neighborhood that for 100 years has featured grand homes and mansions built in neoclassical, colonial, Georgian, English Tudor or French chalet-styles. A few blocks away, at 5650 Ward Parkway, sits the brick Pendergast mansion, built for political leader, “Boss” Thomas J. Pendergast in 1927.
“It doesn’t fit the architecture around it, especially when they put that wall up,” said Jeff Reeder, a Mission Hills resident who, with his spouse had pulled into the driveway of their daughter, whose home is close by the new mansion. The wall references a Missouri limestone privacy wall meant to surround the property.
“It just turns its back on everything,” he said. His grandchildren, raised on the block, agreed.
“I don’t think it fits in,” said granddaughter Hazel, 10. “It’s like made out of concrete and it doesn’t seem right for the neighborhood.” Her brother, Hugo, age 13, said, “I think it’s just too big and it’s a little bit ugly. I don’t like the contrast. Maybe in a different neighborhood, but not here.”
‘Huge, gorgeous. . .It could be worse’
Across from Meyer’s Circle, Beau Scanlon, 16, said he was a fan of the architecture. “I think it’s pretty cool. It’s just a lot more modern. I feel like all these houses are a little bit older-fashioned.”
His grandmother was circumspect in her evaluation.
“Well, it’s different than the others around here,” she said. “It’s going to be huge, I can see that. It isn’t in the style of the others that are here. I’m sure it will be a beautiful home.”
Eugene Goldman, age 75, has lived in his current home on West 63rd Street since 1958. His house faces the rear of the new home.
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“Oh, I think it’s huge, gorgeous and lovely. It would fit right in somewhere out south in Johnson County. I don’t think it fits the neighborhood,” he said.
That said, Goldman said he is grateful that the 1.5-acre parcel contains a single house and was not subdivided and sold off as multiple lots, as some had worried would occur. For 16 years, the parcel had remained empty.
Bloch mansion
Prior to 2009, it contained a 1926 English Georgian manor that for 50 of its final years, since 1957, had belonged to Richard and Annette Bloch. After Richard Bloch died in 2004, Annette Bloch sold the mansion in 2007.
The new owners were a partnership then headed by neighbors Michael J. and Sonya Tutera. (In a completely unrelated tragedy, Michael Tutera, 47, would be murdered in 2010 inside his own Plaza-area home during a burglary.)
Contemplating building anew, the new owners of the Bloch house gutted its interior. The partnership, however, eventually failed to pay a bank note. The home fell into such neglect and disrepair that in 2009, it went into foreclosure. It was bought for $1.15 million by SolutionsBank that deemed that the property was worth more without the house than with it.
Infuriated historic preservationists sought to save the home and to get it listed on the Kansas City Register of Historic Places. But before that could happen, it was razed to the ground.
“I don’t really relish the idea of having any neighbors there,” Goldman said. “This is really huge. I would rather it were smaller and I saw less house and more vegetation. I kind of liked being able to sit in my backyard and watch the colors in Meyer Circle. But, I mean, something was going to go in eventually. I suppose it could be worse.”
Paying homage
Drake acknowledged people’s mixed feelings about his new home.
“I think there’s a Facebook post from a Brookside neighborhood association, maybe a week or two ago. We had about 70 or 80 comments. Most of those are a lot more positive. A year or so ago, when some of the renderings came out, most of the people were not as nice on the postings about the architecture, which I get.
“It’s different for the neighborhood.”
But Drake said that he believes that as the house is finished, “I think people will warm up to it. I think they’ll see there’s a lot of time and effort put into using local materials. We’ve got Missouri limestone. All the vegetation is going to be local grasses and plants.
“So there’s a lot of work to try to make it fit in, although it’s obviously a completely different style. It’s supposed to pay homage to what was there, the neighborhood around it.”
