Country Club District
The Country Club District is the name of a group of
History
J.C. Nichols began developing the district in 1906 with a neighborhood he called Bismarck Place. As his development expanded to include Countryside, he began to develop a master plan, which he dubbed the Country Club District because of its proximity to what was then the site of
Restrictive covenants
Nichols used
A controversial aspect of the covenants in the district, however, was the use of racial restrictions that prohibited ownership and occupation by
While he utilized the restrictive covenant model to bar non-whites from his neighborhoods, Nichols was not the first in Kansas City to engage in the practice. In fact, such practice had been in full force in Kansas City since the time Nichols was born in the 1880s. Moreover, although Nichols's covenants were discriminatory, Kansas City historian William S. Worley noted that Nichols was among the first of his contemporaries to abandon the practice of barring sale to Jews.
Today the Country Club District is still predominantly white, and still is home to Kansas City's wealthiest residents.
School desegregation and white flight
On the Missouri side, many Country Club residents formerly sent their children to Southwest High School, a public school in the Kansas City School District. At its peak in the mid-1960s, Southwest enrolled more than 2,400 students, 20% of whose parents were Southwest alumni. After the end of racial segregation in schools under Brown v. Board of Education, however, Kansas City, Missouri, experienced considerable "white flight." It wasn't until the 1970s Southwest High School experienced large scale desegregation. The 1972–1973 school year, Southwest was 2% Black. In the following years, the school saw increases of Black students until becoming predominantly Black in the late 1970s. This was due to full scale busing which began in the 1975–1976 school year. By the 1997–1998 school year, Southwest's final year in existence, enrollment had dropped to below 500. As recently as 2008, nearly all residents of the Missouri side of the Country Club District sent their children to private schools, including
Homes and residents
The Country Club district includes many homes by or after plans of many noted
- Mayor Harold Roe Bartle
- Mayor Richard L. Berkley
- Henry Bloch
- Senator Kit Bond
- Major League Baseball Hall of Famer George Brett
- author Evan S. Connell
- Donald J. Hall, Sr.
- Hallmark Cards founder Joyce Hall
- composer John Kander
- businessman R. Crosby Kemper Jr.
- pharmaceutical magnate Ewing Kauffman and his wife Muriel Kauffman
- United States Senator Claire McCaskill
- UCLA and KU chancellor Franklin David Murphy
- political boss Tom Pendergast
- Ambassador Charles H. Price II
- columnist Calvin Trillin
- professional golfer Tom Watson
- Mayor Charles Wheeler.
Trivia
For two weeks in October 1977, renowned artist couple Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped Loose Park's 4.5 km of footpaths in 12,500 square meters of shiny, saffron-yellow nylon; the project cost the artists $130,000.
In 1970, members of the
Further reading
- Evan S. Connell, Mrs. Bridge (North Point Press, 1959) and Mr. Bridge (North Point Press, 1969).
- Novels set in the Country Club District between the 1920s to the 1940s, with frequent references to the district and the Country Club Plaza.
- Evan McKenzie, Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government (Yale University Press, 1996).
- Robert Pearson and Brad Pearson, The J. C. Nichols Chronicle: The Authorized Story of the Man and His Company, 1880–1994 (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas).
- Sherry Lamb Shirmer, A City Divided: The Racial Landscape of Kansas City, 1900-1960.
- William S. Worley, J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City: Innovation in Planned Residential Communities (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1990).
See also
- Mr. and Mrs. Bridge
- Merchant Ivoryfilm based on Evan S. Connell's novels, filmed largely on location
- Quality Hill
- Kansas City neighborhood which was the predecessor to the Country Club District
- List of neighborhoods in Kansas City, Missouri
External links
- University of Missouri-Kansas City: "Ward Parkway: a Grand American Avenue"
- Original Map of the Country Club District—produced by the J.C. Nichols Company early on in the development
- Planning for Permanence—the speeches of J.C. Nichols
- Homes Associations of the Country Club District Home Page
- Umbrella organization to all homes associations in the Country Club District, covering 22,000 homes
- Community Builder: The Life & Legacy of J.C. Nichols
- A documentary about J.C. Nichols produced by PBS in 2006
- O High School, My High School!
- Essay by Gerald Shapiro appearing in the Colorado Review about Southwest High School, the Country Club District, and racial segregation in Kansas City, Missouri