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Brookside contains a dispersed collection of small decorative fountains spread across its commercial blocks, residential streets, and neighborhood parks. Developed as a sub-neighborhood of the Country Club District from the 1910s onward, Brookside inherited the J.C. Nichols Company’s design philosophy of embedding fountains as landscape elements throughout planned residential communities. A complete site-by-site inventory of Brookside’s fountains has not been published; the locations below reflect documented or widely noted installations.

Summary

The Fountains of Brookside are distributed across three general settings within the neighborhood:

  • Brookside Shops area — small commercial-area fountain installations near the main retail corridor
  • Residential streets — garden and courtyard fountains on Country Club District-style properties
  • Parks and public spaces — small commemorative and decorative fountains at neighborhood park locations

Together these installations connect Brookside to the broader KC “City of Fountains” identity and complement the larger Country Club Plaza fountain concentration one mile to the north.

Documented fountains in and adjoining Brookside

[!note] Sourcing note, 2026-07-31 The City of Fountains Foundation’s regional gallery for this area is titled “South Plaza, Westwood, Brookside to Mission Hills.”1 Its 28 entries were enumerated in full; none carries a “Brookside” address, and most sit in Mission Hills KS, along Ward Parkway, or further afield. The fountains below are the Foundation-documented pieces closest to, or on the streets of, Brookside and the adjoining Armour Hills / Armour Fields subdivisions. The vaguer, unsourced descriptions retained further down this page have not been corroborated.

FountainLocationDateOwner
Armour Center Fountain2W 69th Street, Brookside Road and Edgevale Road, KCMODedicated April 24, 1924; sculpture replaced 1954Armour Hills Homes Association
Romanelli Island Fountain3W 69th Street, Edgevale Road and Wornall Road, KCMOInstalled 1925; restored 1993; conserved with new sculpture 2007Armour Fields Homes Association
Stratford Gardens Fountain4W 63rd Street and State Line Road, KCMO1927; restored 2017Stratford Gardens Homes Association
Sixty-Ninth Street Fountain5Ward Parkway at W 69th Street, KCMOInstalled 1930Armour Fields Homes Association
Wornall Fountain (aka Armour Fields Fountain)6Wornall Road and W 67th Street, KCMOInstalled 2004Armour Fields Homes Association

The Armour Center Fountain is the clearest documented instance of the pattern this page describes: a gift from the J.C. Nichols Company to commemorate the opening of the Armour Hills subdivision, possibly conceived as a companion piece to the Romanelli Island Fountain across Brookside and Wornall. Its original Carrara marble group of two children and an eagle, bought in Venice, was vandalised and removed in 1954 and replaced by the present bronze.2 The Romanelli Island Fountain was bought in Florence in 1925 and carved by Romano Romanelli in travertine; its travertine sculpture was replaced with a bronze replica by Robert Ojeda and Marretta Kennedy during the 2005-07 conservation.3

Background

Country Club District context

Brookside developed as a planned sub-neighborhood of the Country Club District under the J.C. Nichols Company beginning in the early 1910s. Nichols’s planning philosophy treated fountains as standard residential-landscape elements — not exceptional civic monuments — and distributed them through commercial nodes, neighborhood entrances, and parkways across the District’s many sub-neighborhoods. Brookside received this treatment alongside Crestwood, Sunset Hill, and other District neighborhoods.7

The Foundation’s own entries bear the pattern out in the surrounding subdivisions: the Armour Center Fountain was an explicit J.C. Nichols Company gift marking the opening of Armour Hills;2 the Colonial Court Fountain in Mission Hills was bought by the Nichols Company from a New York art dealer and set in a linear park;8 and the Swan Fountain and Verona columns were purchased in Verona in 1925 by landscape architect Herman Hare on Nichols’s behalf.9

Installation period

The core period of fountain installation in Brookside followed the neighborhood’s primary development arc from the 1910s through the 1940s, with some later additions. Commercial-area pieces near the Brookside Shops and park installations at neighborhood green spaces date primarily to this era. Private residential fountains on individual properties were added over a longer span and are harder to date precisely.

The documented dates for the fountains nearest Brookside do cluster in that window — 1924, 1925, 1927, 1930 — with one modern addition in 2004.23456

Long-term significance

Neighborhood aesthetic element

The Brookside fountain collection forms a low-key but consistent thread through the neighborhood’s streetscape. Unlike the Plaza’s concentrated showpiece fountains, the Brookside installations tend toward modest garden-scale pieces that read as part of the landscape rather than focal monuments — consistent with Nichols’s residential-district aesthetic throughout the Country Club District. (Editorial assessment. The documented pieces are indeed small pedestal, urn and traffic-island fountains held by homes associations rather than the city,2356 but no source characterises them collectively this way.)

Contribution to KC fountain tradition

Brookside’s fountains contribute to Kansas City’s decentralized fountain tradition: the city’s identity as the “City of Fountains” rests partly on this kind of neighborhood-scale dispersal rather than civic-plaza concentration alone. The Brookside cluster, alongside the broader Country Club District residential fountains, extends that tradition into everyday residential fabric.

Sites associated with Brookside fountains

The three entries below are the page’s original, uncorroborated inventory. They are retained rather than deleted, but no source located supports any of them; the sourced inventory is the table above.

  • The Brookside Shops area — commercial-area fountain installations
  • Country Club District-style residential streets in the Brookside core
  • Brookside park and public-space locations

Sources

Footnotes

  1. City of Fountains Foundation — “South Plaza, Westwood, Brookside to Mission Hills” regional fountain gallery. https://cityoffountains.org/south-plaza-brookside-mission-hills/ — asserts: the Foundation’s fountain gallery for this quadrant contains 28 entries — American War Mothers Memorial, Antioch Park, Armour Center, Belinder Circle, Brookwood, City of Westwood Hills, Colonial Court, Eubank Memorial, Helen Cuddy Rose Garden, Joe D. Dennis Park, Laura Conyers Smith, Loose Park Lake, “Adam and Eve” Loose Park Wall, Marlborough Plaza, Merriam Bear Pit, Meyer Circle Sea Horse, Mission Hills City Hall, Prairie Village Gateway, Romanelli Island, Romany, Sixty-Ninth Street, Stratford Gardens, Swan, Tomahawk, Ward Parkway Mirror Pool, Westwood Kansas, Wornall, and 49/63 Neighborhood. (Negative evidence: enumerated in full 2026-07-31 and cross-checked against a complete map of the Foundation’s site URLs — no entry carries a Brookside address, and the Foundation publishes no “Brookside fountains” grouping.) ↩

  2. City of Fountains Foundation — “Armour Center Fountain.” https://cityoffountains.org/armour-center-fountain/ — asserts: a gift from the J.C. Nichols Company commemorating the opening of the Armour Hills subdivision, possibly a companion piece to the Romanelli Island Fountain across Brookside and Wornall; sculpture on a pedestal in a square basin within a barbed-quatrefoil pool, cast-concrete base and basins with a marble statue base doubling as a saucer; the original Carrara marble statue of two children and an eagle, purchased in Venice, was vandalised and removed in 1954 and replaced by the present bronze of a boy with a bird and a goose; location W 69th Street, Brookside Road and Edgevale Road, Kansas City, MO; dedicated April 24, 1924; owner Armour Hills Homes Association. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  3. City of Fountains Foundation — “Romanelli Island Fountain.” https://cityoffountains.org/romanelli-island-fountain/ — asserts: the island at W 69th, Edgevale and Wornall marks the entrance to the former Romanelli Gardens subdivision, now part of Armour Fields, and was dedicated Romanelli Island in 2007; the fountain was purchased in Florence, Italy in 1925 and created by Romano Romanelli in travertine, a traditional pedestal type with three cherubs around a goose; installed 1925, restored 1993, conserved with a bronze replica sculpture by Robert Ojeda and Marretta Kennedy placed in 2007, with a maintenance endowment created; owner Armour Fields Homes Association. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. City of Fountains Foundation — “Stratford Gardens Fountain.” https://cityoffountains.org/stratford-gardens-fountain/ — asserts: dates to 1927; the lower basin is an antique Carrara marble horse trough reportedly first used in a public square in Rome, with a smaller trough above it for human use, both ornamentally fluted; fallen into disrepair and out of service until the Stratford Gardens Homes Association restored the troughs in early 2017 and returned it to service that spring; location West 63rd Street and State Line Road, Kansas City, MO; owner Stratford Gardens Homes Association. ↩ ↩2

  5. City of Fountains Foundation — “Sixty-Ninth Street Fountain.” https://cityoffountains.org/sixty-ninth-street-fountain/ — asserts: installed by the J.C. Nichols Company in 1930 in the median of Ward Parkway between West 68th Terrace and West 69th Street; a pedestal fountain on a stone base in a 30-by-36-foot pool; owner Armour Fields Homes Association. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. City of Fountains Foundation — “Wornall Fountain” (aka Armour Fields Fountain, Wornall and 67th Street Fountain). https://cityoffountains.org/wornall-fountain/ — asserts: sits on a triangular traffic island on the west side of Wornall Road at 67th Street; an urn on a pedestal with a waterspout, overflowing into a triangular brick-lined pool; landscaped by the Armour Fields Homes Association, with Christ Community Church behind; ownership of the fountain and island is disputed between the association and the City of Kansas City, with the association maintaining it; installed 2004. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. William S. Worley — J.C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City: Innovation in Planned Residential Communities (University of Missouri Press, 1990; ISBN 978-0-8262-0744-9). Library record and borrowable scan: https://archive.org/details/jcnicholsshaping00worl — bibliographic pointer, not consulted: the standard scholarly account of the Country Club District’s planning, including Brookside. This remediation pass did not read the book; the Nichols landscape-philosophy paragraph above rests on it only by general reputation and is corroborated for individual fountains by 2, 8 and 9. for a page citation. ↩

  8. City of Fountains Foundation — “Colonial Court Fountain.” https://cityoffountains.org/colonial-court-fountain/ — asserts: sits at the east end of Colonial Court, a linear park on 59th Street from Oakwood Road to Overhill Road; believed hand-carved in the 19th century and purchased by the J.C. Nichols Company from an art dealer in New York; Carrara and creme perla marble with a rough-hewn stone pool; struck by vehicles more than once, the upper basin destroyed twice, restored in 1989 with a new creme perla marble upper basin replacing a concrete birdbath-style substitute; designer given as Edward Buehler Delk; installed 1920s; owner City of Mission Hills, KS. ↩ ↩2

  9. City of Fountains Foundation — “Swan Fountain.” https://cityoffountains.org/swan-fountain/ — asserts: stands in an oval pool at Verona Columns Park, 6310 Ensley Lane, Mission Hills, KS; nearly ten feet tall, two tiers, the central column ringed by four swans with a swan on each foot (the foot swans replaced in 1986); the fountain, the eight Verona-marble columns and the urn were purchased in Verona, Italy in 1925 by landscape architect Herman Hare on behalf of J.C. Nichols; fountain and urn designed and created by Romanelli Studios; dated 1925; owner City of Mission Hills. ↩ ↩2

See also

Categories
  • Entity
  • Fountain
  • Pendergast
  • Postwar
  • Modern

On the record — ks.city/wiki/fountains/brookside-fountains · last revised 2026-07-31