Fire Station No. 21 / Police Station No. 3 (Brookside)

A Tudor-style building at 22 West 63rd Street in Brookside housed a combined Kansas City fire station and police station — a deliberate piece of J.C. Nichols’ development strategy for the city’s first suburban shopping district, and a rare instance of KCFD and KCPD sharing a single roof.

History

J.C. Nichols and the Brookside Shops

J.C. Nichols began developing the Brookside Shops in 1919, breaking ground September 1, 1919, as Kansas City’s first suburban shopping district.¹ As part of the development strategy, Nichols arranged for the city to receive a lot at 63rd Street specifically for a combined fire-and-police station — a calculated move: basic public-safety infrastructure made the new subdivision more attractive to prospective residents. It is described as the first south-side combined police and fire station.²³

Construction

One source states the Nichols Company donated the land in 1911, but the building itself was not completed until around 1917; this date is not independently corroborated by a primary source and should be treated as tentative.³ The architect is unidentified in any source found; Edgar P. Madorie — who designed both Kansas City Police Station No. 4 (1916, Mission Revival) and Hose Company No. 31 (1931, Italian Renaissance) — is a plausible era-appropriate candidate for a KC municipal public-safety building of this period, but this is inference only, not a documented fact.⁴

Possible alternate name: “Country Club Station”

A Kansas City Police Historical Society photo-gallery caption independently lists a “Country Club Station,” in use 1917–1977, at 63rd Street — matching this building’s location and operational dates closely enough that it is very likely the same building under a colloquial name (Brookside sits within the historic Country Club District). This has not been independently confirmed.⁵

A genuine numbering discrepancy

Two independent catalog listings from a local tax-photo archive identify the building as Fire Station No. 21 paired with Police Station No. 3.⁶ However, other sources — including search-indexed captions attributed to the Kansas City Public Library’s photo archive and a real-estate history article — instead refer to “Police & Kansas City Fire Station No. 23.” This discrepancy could not be resolved with the sources available; it may reflect two different numbering conventions used at different times, or an error somewhere in secondary reporting.²⁷

Architecture

The building is a two-story Tudor-style brick structure, roughly 3,815 square feet on the first floor and 2,450 square feet on the second, per recent commercial listings.⁸

Closure and later occupants

The station closed as an active fire/police facility by 1979.² Afterward it housed a car dealership and a bank before local florist Fiddly Fig occupied it from 1995 until March 2020, when the business relocated to south Kansas City.² In July 2022 the building was purchased by Brookside Broadway Partners II 2022 LLC and 22 W. 63rd 2022 LLC in a sale brokered by Block & Company, with the buyers stating an intent to find a long-term tenant that would “be part of the Brookside neighborhood for many years to come.”² As of the most recent listing found, the roughly 6,265-square-foot building (across two floors plus basement) is marketed as available retail, office, or event space.⁸

A preservation campaign

The papers of Jane Fifield Flynn — the first administrator, and later president, of the Kansas City Landmarks Commission — held at the State Historical Society of Missouri, explicitly document “efforts to save the Brookside Fire and Police Station,” dated to the collection’s 1978–1989 span.⁹ The outcome of that campaign, and whether the building ever received formal Kansas City Register of Historic Places or National Register of Historic Places status, could not be determined; no such listing was found in any source.

Cultural significance

The building stands as physical evidence of a distinctive era in Kansas City’s urban development — where a private developer’s civic infrastructure strategy (Nichols routinely built or arranged for schools, parks, and public-safety facilities alongside his subdivisions) directly shaped which public institutions got built where, and in this case, combined two departments the city otherwise kept administratively and even architecturally separate.

Sources

Footnotes

1. kcbackstories.com — “Brookside’s Birthday Close-Out Special.” https://kcbackstories.com/2021/07/17/brooksides-birthday-close-out-special/ ↩

2. Block & Company — “Brookside’s Iconic Police/Fire Station changes hands.” https://www.blockandco.com/kc/news/display=246 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. kcbackstories.com — “Brookside’s Birthday Close-Out Special” (as above). ↩ ↩²

4. Wikipedia — “Kansas City Police Station Number 4.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_Police_Station_Number_4 ↩

5. Kansas City Police Historical Society — Galleries. https://kcmophs.org/galleries/ ↩

6. kc1940.org — “Fire stations.” https://www.kc1940.org/subject/fire-stations; kc1940.org — “Police stations.” https://kc1940.org/subject/police-stations ↩

7. kc1940.org — “104-22 West 63rd Street.” https://kc1940.org/district-no-12-map-kansas-city-jackson-county-missouri/tax-assessment-block-folder-kansas-city-mo-district-12-block-288/104-22-west-63rd-street ↩

8. LoopNet — “22 W 63rd St, Kansas City, MO 64113.” https://www.loopnet.com/Listing/22-W-63rd-St-Kansas-City-MO/27302686/ ↩ ↩²

9. State Historical Society of Missouri — “Jane Fifield Flynn Papers (K0737).” https://collections.shsmo.org/manuscripts/kansas-city/k0737 ↩