Squier Park

Squier Park is a residential neighborhood immediately east of Troost Avenue in midtown Kansas City, Missouri, developed between roughly 1887 and the 1920s on the country estate of cattle buyer and banker James J. Squier. Its winding, topography-following streets — laid out by Squier’s son-in-law Robert V. Jones through the Manheim Realty and Investment Company — make it an unusual survivor of pre-grid subdivision planning on the east side of Troost. The Squier Park Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on April 24, 2012, becoming only the second residential district east of Troost Avenue to receive the designation.¹²

Boundaries

The Squier Park Neighborhood Association defines the neighborhood as the area between 36th and 41st Streets and between Troost Avenue on the west and The Paseo on the east.¹

The historic district is a smaller, sixteen-block area than the association’s neighborhood: the National Register listing is bounded by Armour Boulevard on the north, 39th Street on the south, Troost Avenue on the west, and The Paseo on the east.³² Readers should not treat the two footprints as identical.

Squier Park sits directly across Troost from Hyde Park, whose own eastern boundary is Troost Avenue — the two neighborhoods face each other across the corridor that functioned for most of the twentieth century as Kansas City’s racial dividing line (see troost-corridor). Manheim Park adjoins Squier Park on the south, sharing the same Troost-to-Paseo band.

Name and origin

The neighborhood is named for James Jordan Squier (1836-1900), born in Pennsylvania, who managed a hardware store with his father in Cambridge, Ohio before moving to Chicago and then, in 1872, to Kansas City to buy cattle for the Fowler packing house.¹⁴ He co-founded two cattlemen’s banks — Citizens’ National Bank in 1882 and Interstate National Bank in 1889.⁴

In 1881 Squier bought 160 acres from William Stewart, an early settler who had come from Kentucky in 1836 and assembled one of the largest landholdings near Kansas City, for $10,000.⁴ Squier first used the ground as a country estate; in 1887, within two years of the city limits reaching 31st Street, he filed two subdivision plats under the name Squier Place.⁴

Squier died in 1900, leaving the estate to his wife and his only daughter, Cora. Cora married Robert Valentine Jones, a residential developer, in 1902; the lots were still largely empty when the couple returned to Kansas City in 1908.⁴ Jones formed the Manheim Realty and Investment Company that year and replanned the tract with streets that followed the natural topography rather than the city grid — a romantic, curvilinear approach comparable to what J.C. Nichols was doing in the Country Club District.³⁴ The Jones-Squier family home occupied a full city block with grounds of another 52 acres; after the Joneses divorced in 1925 they sold the estate to a developer who proposed a “Squier Manor Community Center” of apartments, shops, a theater and a hotel. The scheme never materialized, and the estate lot was subdivided for houses by 1930.¹⁴

Architecture and housing stock

The National Register nomination counts 234 contributing resources built between 1880 and 1935, alongside 28 noncontributing buildings.³ The nomination describes the range directly: “Many different architectural styles popular in the early twentieth century are represented in Squier Park, including Late Victorian, Prairie School, Craftsman, Classical Revival, Colonial Revival, and Shingle Style.”³ Most houses are frame on limestone foundations, with brick, stucco and wood cladding also present.³ The Squier Park association adds Folk Victorian, Tudor Revival and International styles to the list, and notes the local Kansas City Shirtwaist variant as common.¹⁵

Jones required that each house in the subdivision have a unique design, which is why the built-out streets read as a collection of individually architect-designed dwellings rather than a repeated pattern; Louis S. Curtiss and Nelle E. Peters are among the architects associated with the neighborhood.⁵⁴ Early houses offered hot-water heat, sleeping porches, and multiple bathrooms.⁴ Original owners were upper-middle-class professionals — architects, attorneys, artists, and executives — who rode the Troost streetcar downtown.⁴ Construction of Bishop Lillis High School began in 1940.¹

Decline and revival

The Great Depression forced many original owners out, and from the 1950s through the 1970s the neighborhood lost white residents to newer suburbs as the restrictive covenant regime hardened Troost into a racial boundary.⁵⁴ Squier Park lies on the east side of that line. (A widely mirrored Clio entry describes Troost as separating “Whites living east and Blacks west” and places Squier Park “just west of Troost”; both statements are reversed, and the corrected geography is documented on troost-corridor.)

The neighborhood revived beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s.⁵ The Squier Park Neighborhood Association — motto “Pride, Preservation, Participation” — organizes events, funds neighborhood improvements, and holds open community meetings.¹⁵ The 2012 National Register listing was pursued as part of that revival and places the district within the National Park Service’s Historic Residential Suburbs in the United States, 1830-1960 multiple property submission.²

Sources

Footnotes

1. Squier Park Neighborhood Association — “History of the Squier Park Neighborhood.” Boundaries (36th to 41st, Troost to The Paseo); James Jordan Squier (1836-1900); 1872 move to Kansas City; banks 1882 and 1889; 1900 death; Cora and Robert V. Jones; Manheim Realty and Investment Company 1908; 1925 divorce and sale; 1930 subdivision of the estate lot; 1940 Bishop Lillis High School; architectural styles; NRHP listing April 24, 2012 and “second residential district east of Troost Avenue”; association activities and motto ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

2. National Park Service, NPGallery — Squier Park Historic District asset record. National Register Information System reference number 12000232; listed April 24, 2012; “Roughly bounded by Armour Blvd., The Paseo, 39th St., & Troost Ave.”; part of the Historic Residential Suburbs in the United States, 1830-1960 multiple property listing; periods of significance 1875-1899, 1900-1924, 1925-1949 ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Living Places — “Squier Park Historic District, Kansas City, Jackson County, MO,” reproducing text from the National Register nomination. Sixteen blocks; 234 contributing and 28 noncontributing resources, 1880-1935; the quoted styles sentence; frame construction on limestone foundations; the 1908 Squier Manor plat and its topography-following streets ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

4. Clio — “Squier Park Historic District” (entry 141019). Stewart’s 160 acres sold to Squier for $10,000 in 1881; Squier’s Ohio and Chicago hardware years and Fowler packing-house cattle buying; Citizens’ National Bank 1882 and Interstate National Bank 1889; 1887 Squier Place plats; Cora’s 1902 marriage; the 52-acre estate grounds; 1925 divorce and the unbuilt Squier Manor Community Center; occupations of original owners; house amenities. Retrieved by direct HTTP request (the page returns HTTP 403 to some automated fetchers; it was read via a browser user-agent request) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

5. Wikipedia — “Squier Park, Kansas City, Missouri.” Sixteen blocks bounded by Armour, 39th, Troost and Paseo; developed 1887-1915; Prairie School, Craftsman and Kansas City Shirtwaist; architects Louis S. Curtiss and Nelle E. Peters; Depression and postwar decline; late-1990s/2000s revival; association motto ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵