Plenty of ideas for renaming J.C. Nichols fountain. But when will officials choose?
Suggestions for what to rename the former J.C. Nichols Memorial Fountain on the Country Club Plaza have poured into the Kansas City Board of Parks and Recreation Commissioners.
They include Dream, MLK, Unity. Some have suggested renaming it for the Kansas City Chiefs or the Royals. Others have said it should bear the name of no single person.
But the fountain won’t get a new name anytime soon, officials said this week.
The issue is not on upcoming board agendas. And renaming the fountain, which was dedicated in 1960 to real estate developer J.C. Nichols, is not an immediate priority, the board said.
Instead, the board’s current priority is to revisit the best way to honor the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. following a failed vote in November to rename The Paseo for the civil rights leader.
The board at its June 30 meeting voted unanimously to strike Nichols’ name from the fountain after a month of controversy over memorializing a man whose use of racial deed restrictions was seen as doing much to create Kansas City’s racial divide.
Nichols opened the Plaza in 1923. His housing restrictions were in place for decades in Kansas City neighborhoods that Nichols developed, including Brookside and Crestwood, and in cities such as Mission Hills and Prairie Village in Kansas.
The fountain, in Mill Creek Park, had become a gathering spot this spring for thousands of protesters supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, calling for social justice and the end to police brutality following the death of George Floyd, a Black man killed beneath the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer on Memorial Day. Similar protests occurred in some 2,000 cities nationwide.
Those protests ignited debates on razing or renaming memorials to figures from the Confederacy, slave owners or others associated with institutionalized or systemic racism.
In early June, Commissioner Chris Goode sent a memo to his fellow parks board members calling for Nichols’ name to removed from both the fountain and nearby parkway.
“The time has come for us to stop turning a blind eye towards racism of past and present,” Goode wrote. “There is no immediate resolution to racism, that of which has been deeply embedded for over 400 years into the fabric of this country. We can, however, make a collective decision to simply do the right thing, now.”
A plaque to Nichols at the fountain was removed on July 1, less than 24 hours after the board vote. J.C. Nichols Parkway on the western side of the park, so named in 1952, was changed to Mill Creek Parkway, its original name from 1913.
Goode had earlier suggested that perhaps the parkway could be named for King and the fountain be called The Dream Fountain, but he later withdrew the idea and said the board should simply concentrate on removing Nichols’ name.
Before the board’s vote, Nichols’ descendants said they supported removing his name from the fountain and parkway. Nichols died in 1950. The fountain was purchased by his children — Eleanor Nichols Allen, Clyde Nichols and Miller Nichols — placed in the park and dedicated a decade following his death.
The Nichols foundation pledged $100,000 for the fountain’s upkeep.
