Santa Fe Place

Santa Fe Place is a residential neighborhood and National Register historic district on the East Side of Kansas City, Missouri, listed on the National Register of Historic Places on May 30, 1986. Laid out at the turn of the twentieth century as an exclusive subdivision on the former Lockridge farm, it was placed under a racially restrictive covenant in 1931 barring Black residency for thirty years. Dr. D.M. Miller and his wife broke that covenant in 1948; the Missouri Supreme Court struck it down in 1949, and Santa Fe Place became the first major residential area in Kansas City where middle- and upper-class Black families could buy homes matching their means. Satchel Paige bought a house here in 1950 and lived in it for the rest of his life.¹²³

Boundaries

The Santa Fe Place Historic District covers roughly 160 acres and is bounded by 27th Street on the north, Linwood Boulevard on the south, Prospect Avenue on the west, and Indiana Avenue on the east.⁴ The district contains more than 800 properties.² The neighborhood sits well east of Troost Avenue, inside the East Side geography shaped by covenants and redlining.

Before the subdivision

John Thornton filed the first claim on the 520 acres now known as the Santa Fe area in 1827, using the ground for a distillery and grain mill serving Santa Fe Trail traffic and the Westport and Kansas City settlements.¹ In 1835 the land was bought by Jones and Rachel Lockridge, who worked it with enslaved African Americans.¹⁴ Their son Thomas Lockridge extended the farm between 1850 and 1860; during the Civil War he sold most of it, keeping the homestead, which under his father’s will could pass only between Lockridges and not be sold.¹ After Thomas died in 1868 relatives had the will revoked, and in 1893 they began developing an exclusive residential neighborhood called Santa Fe Place.¹

The National Register documentation dates the platting to 1897 and describes Santa Fe Place as “one of the first planned neighborhoods in Kansas City” — and the only early planned community in the city to have retained its architectural character.² The 1893 and 1897 dates come from different sources and are not reconciled here.

Architecture

The district’s period of residential development runs 1883 to 1930, and its architectural cohesiveness — a high concentration of Kansas City Shirtwaist and Bungalow houses — is what distinguishes it physically from the surrounding neighborhoods.²⁴ The National Register listing rests on Criteria A and C, with areas of significance in community planning and development, architecture, and social and humanitarian history.²

By 1915 Santa Fe Place had a reputation as “the place to live” for Kansas City’s rich and powerful.¹

The 1931 covenant and the 1948-1949 break

In 1931 the Santa Fe Place neighborhood adopted a covenant providing that “no real estate in Santa Fe Place could be sold, given, rented to or occupied by black people for a period of thirty years.”¹ This was the standard instrument of the period in Kansas City; see restrictive-covenants-kc.

In 1948, Dr. D.M. Miller and his wife became the first African American family to establish residency in Santa Fe Place, in defiance of the covenant.¹ The Missouri Supreme Court ruled the covenant unconstitutional and illegal in 1949, and by the 1950s affluent Black families were moving in.¹ The break came in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1948 decision in Shelley v. Kraemer, which held that state-court enforcement of racially restrictive covenants violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment — a case that itself originated in Missouri.⁵

The National Register documentation states the district’s exceptional importance plainly: Santa Fe Place became the first major residential area in Kansas City where educated, middle- and upper-class Black residents could establish homes reflecting their professional standing, and that concentration produced the first geographic separation of upper-class Black residents from working-class Black neighborhoods in the city.² Priscilla Jackson-Evans, history consultant to the Black Archives of Mid-America, framed the same point as the moment “the issue of racism and housing came to a head.”¹ The district’s period of exceptional significance to Kansas City’s Black community is dated from 1931 to the present.²

Residents

Leroy “Satchel” Paige bought the house at 2626 E. 28th Street in 1950, shortly after the neighborhood integrated, and made it his Kansas City home for more than thirty years.³ The house, built in 1910, sat vacant from about 2004 and was heavily damaged by fire in 2018; the Kansas City Missouri Homesteading Authority acquired it, and in 2022 the City Council rezoned the property into an urban redevelopment district for a roughly $3.5 million conversion into a museum, office and event space.³

The UMKC HistoryMakers program also names members of the Disney family among earlier residents of the Santa Fe neighborhood; that claim is repeated here with attribution and is not independently corroborated.⁶

The neighborhood today

The National Register documentation describes Santa Fe Place as continuing to be a center of Black political, business and religious leadership in Kansas City.² The Santa Fe Area Council, based at 3007 E. 32nd Street, is the neighborhood organization; its stated work covers maintaining the physical environment, improving social conditions, and reducing crime, and it runs volunteer small-home-repair, trash-removal, garden and art-gallery programs.⁴ The council and the City have pursued rehabilitation of historic houses and construction of new single-family homes in the district.⁴

A National Register nomination update and a set of Santa Fe Place Historic District Design Guidelines were produced in 2005, along with memoranda of agreement relating to the district and files on the Lovett Place Apartments demolition project; the papers are held by the State Historical Society of Missouri as collection K0456.⁷

Sources

Footnotes

1. African American Heritage Trail of Kansas City — “Santa Fe Neighborhood.” John Thornton’s 1827 claim on 520 acres; the distillery and grain mill; Jones and Rachel Lockridge’s 1835 purchase and their enslaved workers; Thomas Lockridge 1850-1860 and the Civil War sales; the 1868 death and revoked will; 1893 start of the Santa Fe Place development; the 1915 “place to live” reputation; the full quoted text of the 1931 covenant; Dr. D.M. Miller in 1948; the 1949 Missouri Supreme Court ruling; the Priscilla Jackson-Evans quotation ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

2. National Register of Historic Places official Flickr (National Park Service) — “Santa Fe Place Historic District, Kansas City, Jackson County, Missouri.” Listing date May 30, 1986; Criteria A and C; residential development 1883-1930 and exceptional importance to Kansas City’s Black community 1931 to the present; over 800 properties; Shirtwaist and Bungalow concentration; platted 1897 and “one of the first planned neighborhoods in Kansas City”; areas of significance (community planning, architecture, social and humanitarian); the first major area where upper- and middle-class Black families could live and the resulting class separation; continuing Black leadership ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

3. KCUR — “Kansas City moving forward with plan to turn Satchel Paige’s home into a museum” (2022-07-22). The house at 2626 E. 28th Street in the Santa Fe neighborhood, built 1910; Paige’s 1950 purchase after the 1948 Supreme Court ruling; vacancy from about 2004; the 2018 fire; Kansas City Missouri Homesteading Authority acquisition; 2022 rezoning into an urban redevelopment district; roughly $3.5 million cost and two-year construction estimate ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. United Way of Greater Kansas City — Santa Fe Area Council community-partner profile. District boundaries (27th Street north, Linwood Boulevard south, Prospect Avenue west, Indiana Avenue east); 160 acres; 1986 National Register listing; the Lockridge farm from 1835; the council’s mission, volunteer programs and contact ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

5. Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948) — U.S. Supreme Court holding that judicial enforcement of racially restrictive covenants constitutes state action barred by the Fourteenth Amendment; the case arose from St. Louis, Missouri. Official United States Reports text via the Library of Congress ↩

6. UMKC HistoryMakers Internship Program — Santa Fe neighborhood posts. The 1931 thirty-year covenant, the 1948 arrival of a prominent African American physician, the Missouri Supreme Court reversal, bungalow architecture, farmland and Santa Fe Trail supply-outpost origins, and the claim that Disney family members and Satchel Paige lived in the neighborhood ↩

7. State Historical Society of Missouri — Santa Fe Place Historic District Collection (K0456), 2004-2005, 0.3 cubic feet. Contains the district National Register nomination update #2 (2005), the Santa Fe Place Historic District Design Guidelines, memoranda of agreement, and Lovett Place Apartments demolition project files ↩