From "A Machine for Forgetting: Kansas City and the Declining Significance of Place"

By Thomas Frank

Kansas City's peculiar brand of civic amnesia can be traced to the promethean efforts of a single individual in the early twentieth century, a developer and urban visionary named J. C. Nichols. All through the declining years of the last century the city's leaders embraced the total-planned vision of the City Beautiful Movement as a means of instant tranformation from frontier squalor into solid, investment-worthy metropolis. By the 1880s, only ten years after the railroad chose Kansas City as the place to bridge the Missouri, the dream of large parks, wide boulevards, and rigid delineation of affluent neighborhoods had become a sort of civic mantra, a recurrent political issue and the monotheme of editorials in the Star. But here, as everywhere else that the City Beautiful held sway, the authorities' ability to rewrite their town's geography was limited. Nichols discovered what is now the obvious solution to this impasse: restart the town elsewhere, with all-new neighborhoods, rigid restrictions, and no poor people. Imagining himself more a "city-builder" than a mere realtor, Nichols constructed fully one-tenth of Kansas City and in the process gave the world its first fully-realized modern suburb as well as its first shopping mall. He remains the single most significant figure in the city's history, a heroic warrior in the eternal battle to reign in the barbaric impulses and chaotic ways of the human imagination.

The man who initiated the suburbanization of Kansas City was obsessed, ironically, with exerting control over the very phenomenon which suburbia is often accused of accelerating. J. C. Nichols craved Permanence, an end to the incessant wrecking and building that characterizes American metropolises, the moving about and fluctuation in real estate prices that always threatens to deprive house-buyers of their investment. Eternal stability-of land values, of tastes, of the neighborhoods inhabited by the various social classes-are the high goals to which Nichols dedicated such careful and rigid planning: as early as 1913 a pamphlet for the Country Club District declared his intention "to so maintain this property that it will permanently remain Kansas City's best residential district...assuring buyers of home-sites that the high standards established will be forever jealousy guarded and protected against all undesirable conditions or any civic neglect."

But Nichols' effort to press the ordering capacity of human intelligence onto the riotous whirl of urban life had curious cultural consequences: Permanence was not a state hospitable, say, to the jazz subculture, to the tastes of the working class, or even to the city's traditional economic base. It was, rather, a scheme for reinforcing conventional hierarchical order when all the verities of bourgeois civilization were melting rapidly away, a vision that expressed itself with constant references to the distant European never-never lands of social regimentation. Permanence was a far-reaching scheme for the stabilization of society, a device for explaining the ways of Power to Man.

The Country Club District, a ten-square-mile area to the south and west of downtown that Nichols planned, constructed, and sold from 1908 until the 1940s was the realtor's lasting accomplishment and remains the definitive American statement of the suburban ideal: winding, tree-shaded streets, enormous lots with understated, solid-looking mansions, curious bits of old-world statuary dotting its immaculately-landscaped public areas, and vast open spaces (private golf courses, not parks) separating it from the surrounding metropolis on all sides.

The Country Club District is as much a machine for forgetting, for the making of solid, investment-worthy citizens, as it is a neighborhood for pleasant living. While others might plan and build subdivisions, Nichols was an ideologue of suburbia, a maker of cities in a larger sense, an architekton of values and folkways as well as of houses. The "Realtor," he told the 1925 convention of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, should be in the business of city planning on the grandest scale. "In every study of the city's transportation or traffic system; in every housing, sanitation, or building code commission; in every industrial survey, population density study, or investigation of freight rates affecting the city; yes, in every educational, cultural, and recreational activity," Nichols asserted, "the Realtor should lead." For the Realtor was a civic father, not merely a crafter of neighborhoods. "Are you creating the proper standards for developing the best child life in your community-for the future citizens of your city?" he asked his fellow developers. "Are you teaching them to be observant of the beauties and joys of life, appreciative not only of home, but of the...right order of things in neighborhood and civic development?" (emphasis added) Nichols had great plans for Kansas City itself. As his "authorized" biographers note approvingly, he aimed to "transform Kansas City from a cowtown into a midwestern hub of culture, education, business, and transportation."

Fortunately, Nichols had a brand new identity ready to go as the old one was left discreetly behind in the smelly old neighborhoods above the stockyards. You notice it as soon as you enter the Country Club District: antique columns, Renaissance well-heads, gigantic bird-baths, sun-dials, and other bits of generic baroquerie are everywhere, flanking street entrances, perched in the middle of busy intersections, mounted incongruously in somebody's front yard, giving the entire district an overpowering Europhilic reek. "Anywhere but here!" screams its architecture. Its houses, set on streets designed after those of rural England, replicate (with but a few exceptions) every architectural style but the local: Tudor, French provincial, and Spanish-there are even three copies of Mount Vernon. The nearby Country Club Plaza, the first shopping center to be built in conjunction with the surrounding suburb (and to provide parking lots), is designed entirely in an anomalous red-tile roof Spanish style, complete with a half-size replica of a tower in Seville. And if you still have doubts, Nichols company publications quote a number of outsiders as testimony to the beauty of the Country Club District.

In constructing his new, idealized Kansas City Nichols was extraordinarily thorough. A detailed examination of his developments can be positively hair-raising: there is literally nothing here that is not pretense or false front. No buildings not cluttered with unconvincing ornamental references to something that we imagine exists in a more sophisticated land far away; no natural-looking landscape that has actually been left unaltered, no roadside ancientness used for its original purpose. Nothing here rings true. Even the street names, which invariably refer to Spain, Italy, or fake-Indian whimsy, are in many cases not shared with the surrounding metropolis. "You should avoid using the name of a street which is extended through your property if the character of the property on that street further downtown, or elsewhere is of poor quality," Nichols informed his fellow realtors in 1939. "A street name should have a ring of dignity and a certain exclusiveness...."

As he is described in a recent adulatory authorized biography, Nichols himself seems to have been congenitally incapable of the genuine, a figure endowed with a mysterious sixth sense for the fake. Two of the largest civic ornaments with which Nichols decorated Kansas City illustrate his curious melding of fakery, elitism, and amnesia that he offered to the world. The Liberty Memorial is the nation's largest First World War monument, a gigantic civic project completed in 1921 under the leadership of Nichols and some other local businessmen. The structure itself is ludicrously oversized and comically phallic, a full 217 feet of column flanked by two squat museums filled with memorabilia from that ugly and jingoistic war. Nichols' biographers insist first that he argued "It should not be a monument to the dead but rather to Liberty," which would have made him just about the only person left in the nation who still believed in Mr. Wilson's hollow crusade. But that wasn't fake enough for J. C. Nichols. As the authors soon admit (and as Kansas Citytaxpayers would discover when the edifice began to crumble in 1995), the monument was actually designed entirely for show, like all of Nichols' projects. The important fact was not an empty abstraction like "Liberty," but that the memorial occupied the hill opposite the city's new and grandiose train station, and Nichols had long been "determined to bring about beautification of the Union Station site, feeling that the first impression that visitors received when arriving by train was important to Kansas City's image and what was good for Kansas City was good for the J. C. Nichols company, and vice versa." A close examination of the monument reveals a third-remove of fakery. Ordinarily monuments are instruments of civic memory: this one is more a testament to the past-effacing europhilia of the city's businessmen than to the fallen of World War I. A vast painting of the structure's dedication that adorns one wall of the flanking museum depicts the Kansas City powerful clustered around elaborately-decorated military representatives from glorious Europe, who graciously bestowed the blessings of the Old World on this still-raw river town. The faces of the Kansas Citians who were there that day are painstakingly rendered, and an accompanying diagram points out exactly who each one is-a sort of visual Social Register for establishing the bona fides of the local elite.

Concerned for the souls of his clients, at about the same time Nichols built a Country Club Christian Church to go with his Country Club District. It's hard to imagine a more gratuitous mixing of pretension and fakery than the one described, with astounding ingenuousness, by Nichols's biographers:

In 1920, J. C. Nichols himself, reared a Presbyterian but not a regular churchgoer, joined with 11 other millionaires to found the Country Club Christian Church. Members first met in the community hall of the Brookside Shopping Center, while planning and then erecting a cathedral-like stone church building with a Sunday school on a large Ward Parkway site at Huntington Road. Dr. George Hamilton Combs accepted the call to be its first minister. Highly literate and intelligent, a compelling speaker and leader, Dr. Combs served for more than 30 years a large congregation that probably included more influential and socially prominent individuals than any other church in the city.

As it approaches the present the Nichols family's "authorized biography" dwells ever more grovelingly on the bizarrely tasteless cultural accomplishments of J. C. and the rest of the clan. Gawk at the Plaza's cowboy statue or its rendering of Ben Franklin, its quaint stucco bridge lined with "lovely seasonal flowers," or the cute penguins incongruously "decked out" for the wedding of the Prince of Wales in London. One photograph of the book's realtor protagonists depicts them in the company of some of the various third-rate celebrities who occasionally pass through Kansas City, stars in the tired productions that make up the fare at the various Nichols-sponsored cultural institutions. This, then, was the bargain undertaken by Kansas City in the frantic race to make itself palatable to the outside world, the fruit of fifty years of Cupcake and Country Club: we traded Charlie Parker so that the local "Power Elite" could hobnob with Carol Channing.