J. C. Nichols
J. C. Nichols | |
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Born | Jesse Clyde Nichols August 23, 1880 Olathe, Kansas, U.S. |
Died | February 16, 1950 Kansas City, Missouri, U.S. | (aged 69)
Resting place | Forest Hill Calvary Cemetery Kansas City, Missouri, U.S. |
Citizenship | American |
Alma mater | University of Kansas (B.A.) Harvard University (B.A.) |
Occupation | Real estate developer Urban planner |
Spouse |
Jessie Miller (m. 1905) |
Jesse Clyde "J. C." Nichols (August 23, 1880 - February 16, 1950) was an American urban planner and developer of commercial and residential real estate in Kansas City, Missouri. Born in Olathe, Kansas, and a student at the University of Kansas and Harvard University, his most notable developments are the Country Club District and the Country Club Plaza shopping district in Kansas City, which are considered among the most influential and beautiful planned suburban landscapes in the country.
Nichols transformed Kansas City—a once muddy, dusty cowtown of the mid 19th century—by purchasing cheap farmland in the first half of the 20th century, then designing whole neighborhoods and erecting opulent upper-middle-class homes in architectural styles ranging from Tudor Revival to Moorish Revival to Arts and Crafts, to name a few. Many residences feature servants' and chauffeurs' quarters, screened-in porches, two-story carriage houses and commodious, landscaped lawns and gardens with fountains and statuary.
Nichols and associates, from lenders to construction companies to landscape architects, planned and built unique middle-class communities as well, on thousands of acres, primarily in southwestern metropolitan Kansas City, with sylvan parks, social and recreational clubs, neighborhood associations, shopping villages, golf courses, playgrounds, schools, churches, swimming pools, fountains, sculpture, tree-lined boulevards, winding picturesque roads, cul-de-sacs and infrastructure—civic planning ahead of its time that would become the premier model for cities across the country into the 21st century.
Nichols served in leadership roles in local and national real estate organizations, where, beginning in the early 20th century, his ideas about real estate and planning helped shape methods for racist and anti-Semitic restrictive covenants and zoning that also discriminated against people who were economically disadvantaged.
His legacy has come under increasing scrutiny for these covenants, which prohibited Black people, Jews and other minorities, including the economically disadvantaged, from living in these neighborhoods.
Nichols was a protégé of the elder newspaper mogul and real estate developer William Rockhill Nelson. Nichols' firm, the J. C. Nichols Company, was in business in Kansas City urban planning and real estate development for nearly a century.
Early life
[edit]Jesse Clyde Nichols was born in 1880, a son of farmers living near Olathe, Kansas.
His father was an Ohio-born Union veteran of the American Civil War who leased out his family’s farmland to neighbors, managed a Grange store and co-owned a meat-packing house in Olathe.
His mother‘s family were Southerners, affected by the devastation of Sherman’s March to the Sea.[1]
Young Jesse worked various jobs while attending high school, and worked for a year after graduation selling wholesale meat.[2]
While he matriculated at the University of Kansas, he managed the college football team, reported for a newspaper, and served as class president.[2] Graduating at the top of his class with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1902, he accepted a one-year scholarship at Harvard University, and earned a second Bachelor of Arts degree there in 1903. Nichols returned to Kansas City and joined some college friends to establish Reed, Nichols & Company, operating as real estate developers. In 1905, he married Jessie Eleanor Miller, a woman from Olathe, Kansas. They had three children: Eleanor, Miller and J. C., Jr.[3]
Subdivision development
[edit]Nichols called his method for establishing residential subdivisions "planning for permanence", for his objective was to "develop whole residential neighborhoods that would attract an element of people who desired a better way of life, a nicer place to live and would be willing to work in order to keep it better". His philosophy about subdivision planning greatly influenced other developments in the United States, including the Beverly Hills and Westwood neighborhoods of Los Angeles, Highland Park neighborhood of Dallas, and the River Oaks neighborhood in Houston, Texas.[4]
He purchased thousands of acres in South Kansas City and eventually planned and built more than 6,000 homes and 130 apartment units, with subdivisions in Johnson County, Kansas, including Prairie Village and Mission Hills, among many other places. His Brookside Shopping District, which opened in 1920 at 63rd St. and Brookside Boulevard, was the City's first suburban shopping center. With shopfronts in the Tudor revival architectural style, Brookside was designed with the automobile in mind though most Kansas Citians at the time did not own automobiles, but accessed the center by the City's enviable trolley system.
Nichols learned much from, and was promoted heavily by, William Rockhill Nelson, founder of The Kansas City Star and developer of several early subdivisions including the Rockhill Neighborhood, a community south of Kansas City’s downtown area, begun in 1904. [5]
Later, when Nichols got going, Nelson ordered his foreman to lend equipment for Nichols to pave his streets. “[Nelson] was an ardent believer in better residential areas, and better planned cities,” Nichols wrote years later in an unpublished memoir. “He encouraged me greatly by telling me that anything would be better than the use of the land made by the pre-Civil War owners.”
According to The Kansas City Star, the legacy of their relationship "rippled across the decades in Kansas City, laying the foundation for a system that denied Black families access to a housing market that created wealth for generations of white families."
Nichols advocated preservation of trees and natural contours, while proscribing gridiron street networks.[6] His Country Club District, with beginnings in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1906, placed many restrictions on the use of the properties, which Nichols believed made the lots more valuable to potential homeowners. His advertisements promoted permanence.[7] All homeowners were required to belong to the Country Club District's homeowners association, which monitored how well homeowners maintained their lawns, but also provided services like garbage collection and street cleaning. Builders were required to observe large minimum lot sizes and large setbacks from the street. Nichols also imposed racially based covenants on all properties in the Country Club District.[6]
The place evolved into Nichols's master-planned community and inspired River Oaks in Houston, Texas. Will Hogg, his brother Mike, and Hugh Potter visited the District and sought the advice of Nichols while they were planning River Oaks. Nichols had a short list of exemplary communities, and urged Potter to visit them. These included Forest Hill Gardens in Queens, New York; Palos Verdes Estates in Los Angeles County; Roland Park in Baltimore, Maryland; and Shaker Heights in Cleveland, Ohio. Potter eventually was appointed President of the River Oaks Corporation, and continued to seek the advice of Nichols during his tenure.[4]
Innovations and leadership
[edit]Nichols originated the percentage lease, where rents are based on tenants' gross receipts.[8] The percentage lease is now a standard practice in commercial leasing across the United States. Modern outdoor shopping centers, now common in the United States, share a common ancestor in the Country Club Plaza, which opened in Kansas City in 1923. The Urban Land Institute's J. C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development was awarded annually in his honor for years. It has been recently renamed The ULI Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development.[9]
Nichols was a prominent civic booster in Kansas City and involved with the creation of projects including the Liberty Memorial, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, MRIGlobal, as well as the development of Kansas City University, now the University of Missouri-Kansas City.[10][citation needed]
Nichols served in leadership positions of local and national real estate and planning organizations. He was a member of the General Committee of the National Conference on City Planning.[11] He headed the Kansas City Real Estate Board and the National Conference of Subdividers.[12] He was a founder of the Urban Land Institute[13] and chaired its Community Builders’ Council .[14]
In 1947, the Institute released The Community Builders Handbook, a detailed, professional advice guide concerning every aspect of suburban development--the result of the efforts of the 27-member Community Builders' Council though the document ostensibly expressed "the strengths and weaknesses, as well as the theory and practice of the council’s chairman, J.C. Nichols."
It called not only for "well-built and affordable suburban homes, but also for whole neighborhoods planned to be true walkable communities with a range of income groups, convenient retail facilities, and schools, parks, and other public amenities that guaranteed lasting value." [15]
He also chaired the Home Builders and Subdividers Division of the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB),[16] chaired NAREB's War Service Board,[17] and served as NAREB director.[18]
Racist restrictions
[edit]J.C. Nichols relied on restrictive covenants to control the uses of the lands in the neighborhoods he developed. Most of the covenants restricted the lands to residential uses, and contained other features such as setback and free space requirements. However, homes in the Country Club District were restricted with covenants that prohibited Black people from owning or occupying the homes;[19][20] and likewise in his Johnson County, Kansas, developments. The covenants had language prohibiting Jews as well. Nichols did not invent the practice, but he used it to effectively bar ethnic minorities from living in his properties during the first half of the century.
By 1949 the Kansas City metropolitan area had more than 450 subdivisions with racial covenants covering more than 7,000 acres of suburbanizing land. Moreover, for J.C. Nichols’s own firm, at least through 1949, “his property deeds always warned buyers that ‘none of the lots hereby restricted may be conveyed to, used, owned, nor occupied by negroes."[15]
His restrictive covenant model was later adopted by the federal government to help implement similar policies in other regions of the United States. Ultimately, the 1948 Supreme Court decision Shelley v. Kraemer made such covenants unenforceable. Nevertheless, language referencing these covenants remained on the multitude of deed documents for decades after the Supreme Court decision because the relative difficulty of revising them one by one could be used covertly to continue existence of the covenants.[7] The deed restrictions in most neighborhoods renew automatically every twenty to twenty-five years unless a majority of the homeowners agree to change them with notarized votes, about which fact publicity is assiduously avoided. In 2005, Missouri passed a law allowing (but not requiring) the governing bodies of homeowner's associations to delete restrictive covenants from deed restrictions without a vote of the members. The Country Club District is predominantly white, and it is among the wealthiest, most sought-after neighborhoods in the United States.[21]
Death
[edit]Nichols died of cancer on February 16, 1950, at his home at 1214 West 55th Street. He was 69. He was buried at Forest Hill Calvary Cemetery in Kansas City.[22][23] His home is on Ward Parkway in Kansas City.
Legacy
[edit]In addition to nearly single-handedly funding and developing the bulk of residential and business areas of South Kansas City that made he and his family very wealthy, Nichols' real estate policies created a racial and economic divide to split Kansas City in half along Troost Avenue for the indefinite future. This eventually crashed the home values on the east side where Black people and Jews were allowed. When nationwide racial integration laws came in the 1960s, this total divide thwarted their adoption by Kansas City's public education system, and ensured that KCPS's racial population will remain mostly non-white.[20]
In mass resentment of this legacy, intensified in 2020 by the George Floyd protests, Kansas City removed his name from the historic fountain and road in front of Country Club Plaza.[20][24]
In 1970, members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were charged with pipe bombing places in Kansas City, including the home of his son Miller Nichols, then president of the J.C. Nichols company.[25] Three SDS members were convicted.[26]
In literature and film
[edit]In 1948, W. G. Pinkard published a two-page booklet entitled, "Buy Now In the Negro Country Club District."[27] It was a promotional leaflet advertising housing development in Kansas City, with text from its library entry reading: "Buy now in the Negro Country Club District, Kansas City, Kansas, beautiful homes and building lots, splendid transportation service, bus and street car. Ex-service men use your bonus money to protect your family with a home." There appears to be only one existing copy of the pamphlet remaining, held at Columbia University Libraries, New York City.
Nichols’ Country Club District provides the setting for Mrs. Bridge, author Evan Connell’s classic 1959 autobiographical novel concerning the malaise of a Kansas City suburban housewife, India Bridge, and its effects upon her husband, son and two daughters in between the first and second World Wars. Connell's 1969 novel, Mr. Bridge, follows the family patriarch, Walter, through the same episodes of familial, social and business life.
The two novels were made into an award-winning Merchant-Ivory film, Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, released in 1990. It was shot on location in homes that Nichols' built and the neighborhood he designed, the Country Club District, the largest planned community built by a single developer in the United States.
Nichols' life inspired, in part, the fictionalized, autobiographical 2005 novel,The King of Kings County, which tells the story of racial covenants used to build a segregated suburban empire. The first-person, coming-of-age narrative concerns the son of a real estate developer in the Kansas City area in the mid 20th century, including the titular and fictional "Kings County," based upon Johnson County, Kansas, with its subdivisions Mission Hills and Prairie Village. The story includes a Nichols-like character, Prudential Bowen, the wealthy developer who built the city’s unique central "Campanile," a County Club Plaza-like shopping plaza and most of its exclusive, racially-segregated, residential neighborhoods.[28]
References
[edit]- ^ JESSE CLYDE NICHOLS (1880-1950) Memoir. Western Historical Manuscript collection – Kansas City.
- ^ a b Ford, Susan Jezak (2003). "Biography of J. C. Nichols (1880-1950), Developer". Kansas City Public Library. Archived from the original on February 11, 2017. Retrieved December 18, 2014.
- ^ Worley, William S. (1993). J.C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City: innovation in planned residential communities. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press. p. xiii. ISBN 9780826209269.
- ^ a b Ferguson, Cheryl Caldwell (October 2000). "River Oaks:1920s Suburban Planning and Development in Houston". Southwestern Historical Quarterly. Vol. 104. p. 201.
- ^ Haskell, Harry. City of the Future: Kansas City's Progressive Utopia. Western Historical Manuscript Collection Kansas City. Charles N. Kimball Lecture. April 10, 2008.
- ^ a b Jackson, Kenneth T. (1985), Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, New York: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-504983-7, p.178.
- ^ a b Worley, p.196.
- ^ Morton, LaDene (2010). The Brookside Story: shops of every necessary character. Charleston, South Carolina: History Press. p. 36. ISBN 9781596293007.
- ^ "J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development". Urban Land Institute. Archived from the original on January 7, 2016. Retrieved December 18, 2015.
- ^ Kimball, Charles N. (1985). Midwest Research Institute: Some Recollections of the First 30 Years, 1945-1975. Kansas City: Midwest Research Institute. LCCN 85-61137.
- ^ Weiss, Marc (1987). The Rise of the Community Builders. New York: Columbia University Press. p. 58. ISBN 0-231-06505-1.
- ^ Weiss, p.48
- ^ Jackson, p.178
- ^ Weiss, p.68.
- ^ a b "J.C. Nichols's America: The Suburban World of The Community Builders Handbook". ULI Americas. December 21, 2016. Retrieved August 11, 2024.
- ^ Weiss, p.45. Not to be confused with the National Association of Real Estate Brokers.
- ^ Weiss, p.59
- ^ Weiss, p.48.
- ^ Worley, pp.145-146.
- ^ a b c Moxley, Elle (2020). "Who Was J.C. Nichols? The Mixed Legacy Of The Man Whose Name Could Be Taken Off Kansas City's Most Famous Fountain". KCUR. Retrieved July 5, 2020.
- ^ Worley, Chapter 5
- ^ "Wide Regret on Death". The Kansas City Times. February 18, 1950. p. 3. Retrieved October 8, 2022 – via Newspapers.com.
- ^ Worley, p.xxv.
- ^ "Fountain in Mill Creek Park - KC Parks and Rec". kcparks.org. Retrieved August 30, 2023.
- ^ "The Kansas City Times from Kansas City, Missouri · Page 4". Archived from the original on April 2, 2015.
- ^ United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri, Western Division (Kansas City), Criminal Case Files (1879- 1972), Case 23498.
- ^ Pinkard, W. G.. Buy Now: In the Negro Country Club District. United States, n.p, 1948.
- ^ Hoedel, Cindy (August 1, 2022). "IN Conversation with Whitney Terrell". IN Kansas City Magazine. Retrieved July 27, 2024.
Further reading
[edit]- McKenzie, Evan. Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government. Yale University Press, 1996.
- Pearson, Robert and Pearson, Brad. The J. C. Nichols Chronicle: The Authorized Story of the Man and His Company, 1880–1994. Lawrence, Kansas: Country Club Plaza Press—distributed by the University Press of Kansas, 1994.
- Schirmer, Sherry Lamb. A City Divided: The Racial Landscape of Kansas City, 1900-1960. Columbia, Missouri : University of Missouri Press, 2002.
External links
[edit]- Community Builder: The Life & Legacy of J.C. Nichols. Documentary, PBS, 2006.
- Nichols' Folly: A Century of the Country Club Plaza. Documentary & Website, Kansas City PBS, 2023.
- J.C. Nichols and the Country Club District: Suburban Aesthetics and Property Values | The Pendergast Years". pendergastkc.org. Retrieved August 7, 2024.
- "J.C. Nichols Company Records". The State Historical Society of Missouri. Retrieved December 18, 2014.
- Planning for Permanence: The Speeches of J. C. Nichols. The State Historical Society of Missouri. Retrieved August 14, 2024.
- J. C. Nichols: A Vision in Real Estate and Redlining. Kansas City Public Libraries.
- Kathrens, Michael C.. Kansas City Houses 1885-1938. United States, Bauer and Dean Publishers, Incorporated, 2018.
- Morton, LaDene (June 1, 2015). The Country Club District of Kansas City. Arcadia Publishing. ISBN 978-1-62585-448-3.
- Stauch, Jose (May 10, 2021). Country Club District Of Kansas City: History And Significant Stories: Kansas City History Facts. Independently Published. ISBN 979-8-5021-0052-6.
- Pama, Danille. Country Club District, Kansas City: Home To Many Of Kansas City's Commercial Properties: Country Club District Kansas City Real Estate. N.p., Independently Published, 2021.
- Morton, LaDene. The Brookside Story: Shops of Every Necessary Character. United States, History Press, 2019.
- Worley, William S. J.C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City: Innovation in Planned Residential Communities. United States, University of Missouri Press, 2013.