From collection General Photograph Collection
Country Club Plaza 1947
The caption reads: City Within A City. This is an aerial view of Kansas City's Country Club Plaza, a shopping center built on SPanish lines by city builder J. C. Nichols and gatewaying his country club residential district. Free parking stations, circle drives and harmonizing architecture characterize the planned city within a city. Nichols, who first announced his plans for the plaza in 1922, got many of his ideas from the Old World. While a student at the University of Kansas he saved a hundred and twentyfive dollars, then worked his way to Europe on a cattle boat and toured that continent on a bicycle. Today the threehundred art objects in his onehundred residential parks and at street intersections are taken for granted by most Kansas Citians. They seldom give a second thought to the sixteenth century Italian marble columns that stand at a grocery store parking entrance. This and other imported outdoor art Nichols considers essential to the appearance of the district which Kansas City is inclined to call the fashionable South Side.
