It’s difficult to overstate the importance of the Country Club Plaza to Kansas City’s identity. From the hours we spend at the shopping district’s annual Christmas lighting ceremonies and late-summer art fairs, many of us count its streets and sidewalks as integral threads of our civic fabric.
We also tend to forget it is, and always has been, a money-making operation. “I think there’s this idea that the Plaza isn’t just property,” Mayor Quinton Lucas told Kansas City PBS, “that it belongs to everyone, that it belongs to this community.”
Only it doesn’t. J.C. Nichols — inarguably the most influential local real estate developer of the 20th century — began “planning for permanence” in the area in the early 1900s with his eye fixed firmly on commerce. By 1923, the first Plaza shops opened for business. Today, it’s generally considered the first specifically-planned outdoor shopping center in the country, with its Spanish-inspired architecture and discreet hidden parking making it more aesthetically pleasing than the hodgepodge that springs up without a careful and specific plan…