On April 30, 1922, J.C. Nichols announced plans in The Kansas City Star for the Country Club Plaza — the first planned outdoor shopping district in the United States designed from the outset for automobile traffic. Construction began later that year; the first building, the Suydam Building (now the Mill Creek Building), opened in March 1923. The Plaza established a Spanish Colonial Revival architectural identity modeled on Seville, Spain, and became the template for American suburban commercial development throughout the twentieth century.

J.C. Nichols’s Vision

Jesse Clyde “J.C.” Nichols had been developing the Country Club District — a master-planned residential community stretching across south Kansas City — since approximately 1908. By the early 1920s the district had grown to the point that its residents needed accessible commercial services; downtown Kansas City was inconvenient by the standards of the emerging automobile age.

Nichols’s solution was to build a planned commercial anchor at the district’s northern edge, oriented around the automobile rather than streetcar lines. In his April 30, 1922 announcement to the Kansas City Star, he described a center where buildings would “follow a general Spanish type of architecture” and achieve “the orderly effect so generally praised in Paris and certain other European cities” — a deliberate contrast to downtown commercial districts he described as developed “haphazardly.” Streets at the Plaza would be unusually wide to facilitate movement and parking; buildings would be capped at two stories to prevent congestion. The project was oriented to motorists from the start, with parking integrated as a feature rather than an afterthought.

The announcement was met with widespread skepticism in Kansas City’s real estate and business community. The proposed site sat on the southern fringe of developed land — the surrounding valley was associated with a country day school and pig farming — and an automobile-oriented suburban shopping center was an entirely unproven concept. The project quickly earned the nickname “Nichols’ Folly.”

The J.C. Nichols Company’s strategic interests aligned with the concept beyond residential goodwill: commercial development offered revenue diversification and reinforced land values throughout the Country Club District.

The Opening and Early Years

Nichols had engaged architect Edward Buehler Delk as consulting architect for the J.C. Nichols Company in 1920. To develop the Plaza’s design language, Delk traveled to Spain, South America, and Mexico — a study trip funded by Nichols — returning with firsthand knowledge of the Baroque and Moorish Revival architecture of Seville that would define the Plaza’s aesthetic.

Construction on the first block began in 1922. The Suydam Building — now known as the Mill Creek Building, standing at 4646 Mill Creek Parkway — opened in March 1923 as the Plaza’s inaugural structure. Delk designed it to echo the architecture of old California and Spain: a stucco façade, low-pitched roof clad in apricot and Indian-red clay shingles, ornate cornice detailing, glazed accent tiles in blue, red, green, and yellow, and metal balconies on the second level.

The building offered six commercial spaces. Its first tenants included:

  • Suydam Decorating Company — high-end home furnishings (the building’s namesake)
  • Claude Keyes Drug Store
  • A dry cleaner
  • E. Blanche Reincke — portrait photography studio
  • Mrs. M.C. Chisholm’s — millinery and sportswear
  • Marinello Beauty Shop — advertised as Kansas City’s first salon to offer a permanent wave

Early commercial activity was modest as the surrounding Country Club District residential population gradually built commercial demand. The Plaza expanded building by building through the mid-to-late 1920s, with Delk establishing the Spanish Colonial Revival vocabulary that subsequent architects — most notably Edward W. Tanner, who joined the Nichols Company after World War II — would carry forward. Tanner’s prolific Plaza work gave rise to the phrase “the Nichols towers with that Tanner wham.”

The Plaza Lighting Ceremony tradition began at the Suydam Building in 1925, when the shops decorated for the holidays and leasing manager Charles Pitrat hung a single strand of lights above the building’s doorway. The Plaza Art Fair followed in 1932.

Architecture and the Spanish Colonial Revival Theme

The Plaza’s architectural framework — established by Delk from the 1922 plans forward — drew directly on the Baroque and Moorish Revival style of Seville, Spain, which Nichols had admired during European travel and which Delk documented firsthand on his study trip. The defining elements:

  • Stucco exteriors with a warm Mediterranean color palette
  • Low-pitched red tile roofs of clay shingle in apricot and Indian-red tones
  • Decorative ironwork — Spanish-style balconies, gates, and ornamental grilles
  • Glazed tilework in geometric patterns on façades, cornices, and window surrounds
  • Towers and turrets providing vertical punctuation across the commercial blocks
  • Integrated public art — fountains, sculptures, and decorative elements woven into the streetscape from the earliest phases

The coherence of the Spanish Colonial Revival framework — maintained across decades of incremental expansion — distinguished the Plaza from conventional American commercial strips and became the foundation of its national reputation.

The most direct Seville reference came decades later: the Giralda Tower, a nearly half-scaled replica of Seville’s famous bell tower, was constructed in 1967 by Miller Nichols (J.C.’s son) at the corner of 47th Street and Mill Creek Parkway. J.C. Nichols had first envisioned an iconic tower after visiting Seville in 1922, but a site was never settled during his lifetime. The 1967 dedication formalized Kansas City and Seville as Sister Cities.

The Plaza Time Building, designed by Edward W. Tanner and opened in 1947, is among the most prominent mid-century additions to the Plaza. Its clock tower — featuring arched openings, terra cotta cornices, a decorative tile façade, and a rounded dome capped with blue and yellow tile — became one of the Plaza’s defining silhouette elements.

By the Plaza’s mature decades the complex encompassed fourteen blocks, forty statues and fountains, twelve towers, and at its peak approximately 180 shops and restaurants.

Historical Significance

The Country Club Plaza holds a recognized place in American urban and commercial history as the first planned outdoor shopping district in the United States built specifically for automobile traffic. Nichols’s integration of parking, wide streets, two-story height limits, unified architectural control, and curated tenant selection anticipated the design logic that postwar American suburban retail developers would apply at regional shopping centers across the country.

Nichols amplified this influence through his leadership roles at the Urban Land Institute and the National Association of Real Estate Boards, where the Plaza model circulated as a practical template. Scholars including William S. Worley (J.C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City, University of Missouri Press, 1990) and Sara Stevens (Developing Expertise, Yale University Press, 2016) have documented the Plaza’s role in shaping American planned-retail development.

The Plaza’s survival as a pedestrian-scaled, architecturally coherent outdoor commercial district — maintained through multiple ownership transitions after the Nichols Company era — also established a preservation precedent. Its Spanish Colonial Revival streetscape, maintained through design controls across a century of development, remains one of the most intact examples of early planned-commercial architecture in the United States.

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