Boley Building

The Boley Building at 1124–1130 Walnut Street in downtown Kansas City opened in 1909, designed by Louis Curtiss. One of the earliest metal-and-glass curtain-wall structures in the United States — and possibly the first — it predates the San Francisco Hallidie Building by nearly a decade and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places (1971).

History

The building was commissioned by Charles N. Boley, a former newspaper editor turned clothier, to house the Boley Clothing Company in the heart of the downtown commercial district. Construction was completed in 1909 during the height of Kansas City’s Gilded Age building boom, when the city was drawing ambitious young architects from across North America.

Louis Curtiss (1865–1924) had arrived in Kansas City in 1887 at age twenty-two, drawn by the same construction surge. After a partnership with Frederick C. Gunn dissolved in 1899, Curtiss practiced independently and over his career designed more than 200 buildings, roughly 30 of which remain extant in the city. The Boley commission gave him the opportunity to push well beyond the masonry conventions of the era.

The design was not widely celebrated at the time of construction; contemporary critics found the sheer glass facade stark and austere. Its commercial logic proved itself over time, however — the plate-glass curtain wall flooded the clothing showroom floors with natural daylight, a genuine retail advantage.

The building was later known for a period as the Katz Building before being acquired by Andrews McMeel Universal (AMU). A $13 million renovation transformed it into the company’s world headquarters, a project completed around 2006. AMU — parent to Andrews McMeel Syndication, Andrews McMeel Publishing, and GoComics — celebrated its tenth anniversary in the building in October 2016.

Architectural significance

The Boley Building’s claim to national importance rests on four interlocking innovations:

Curtain wall construction. Curtiss extended the concrete floor slabs beyond the steel structural frame and pinned nine-foot-square plate-glass windows directly to those slabs, joining them on the exterior with cast-iron spandrels and mullions. The facade carries no structural load — it hangs from the frame rather than supporting it. This is the defining principle of the curtain wall, which would become the dominant mode of commercial construction for the second half of the twentieth century. The Boley Building predates San Francisco’s Hallidie Building (1918), long cited as America’s first curtain-wall structure, by nearly a decade.

Rolled-steel columns. The building was the first known structure to use rolled-steel columns produced in a single piece, rather than steel plates riveted together — a stronger and more efficient structural approach.

Caisson foundations. Ninety-two caissons, each approximately 37 feet deep, carry the building’s load to bedrock — an early and technically careful application of caisson engineering for a commercial structure of this scale.

Cantilever floor slabs and suspended elements. Curtiss employed cantilevered floor slabs and experimental suspended building structures to achieve the sheer, column-free exterior he sought.

The building also carries Art Nouveau ornamental detailing in its white terra-cotta framing and round-arched entrances at the ends of each facade — evidence that Curtiss was integrating decorative ambition with structural experiment rather than abandoning ornament entirely.

The NRHP nomination form described the Boley Building as Curtiss’s “single most important work,” and architectural historians have echoed that judgment. The building has been studied in the context of the broader development of modernist commercial architecture in the United States, including comparisons with contemporaneous work by Louis Sullivan and early Chicago School practitioners.

Louis Curtiss and KC’s architectural heritage

Curtiss is sometimes called “the Frank Lloyd Wright of Kansas City” — a tag that acknowledges his innovative range while also reflecting the relative obscurity into which he fell after his death in 1924. He died seated at his drawing board and is buried in an unmarked grave at Mt. Washington Cemetery. His reputation languished for decades, in part because so many of his buildings were demolished, and in part because he left few writings or drawings.

The Boley Building is the most intact and most studied of his surviving works. It is the primary reason his name appears in surveys of American architectural history and in comparative analyses of curtain-wall origins. Other extant Curtiss buildings in Kansas City — including his own studio — provide context, but the Boley remains the anchor of his legacy.

Current use

Andrews McMeel Universal occupies the building as its world headquarters. The $13 million renovation preserved the historic exterior while modernizing the interior for office use. AMU later expanded into an adjacent building to accommodate its workforce of more than 200 employees. The building is managed by Copaken Brooks.

See also

louis-curtiss, downtown-kc, gilded-age-kc, pendergast-era, r-a-long-building, The KS.City Wiki

Sources