(gentle music) - [Female Narrator] We have this 100 year history now that there really is this generational pull and identity to the plaza.

Whether it was going to see the lights turn on on Thanksgiving night or just going down at Christmas time to shop, seeing the bunnies at Easter, whatever it may be, there's something that is so intrinsically Kansas City about the Country Club Plaza that's important to recognize and protect.

- [Male Narrator] Really I think there's this idea that the plaza isn't just property, but that it belongs to everyone, it belongs to this community and I think after a while it kinda does.

I certainly think that after a century Kansas City has some claim to ownership.

(gentle music) (gentle music continuing) (upbeat music) - Kansas City in the first couple of decades of the 20th century was seen as one of the great growth cities of the country.

The plaza is both the cause of and the product of Kansas City sprawl.

- [Female Narrator] You have J.C. Nichols, who was one of the leading developers of the day, who was beginning to develop land out to the south.

- [Male Narrator] He started planning the plaza in 1912.

It takes him 10 years to get control of the land and also to get rid of a couple things, like there was a brick factory up on the hill.

He didn't get that done until 1921.

I've never been able to find any evidence exactly that would say there was a pig farm here.

- And there was a hog farm, and it was swampy.

- The short answer is, hell if I know.

- And then he wanted an architectural theme to tie it all together so it stood out from other developments that were happening, it was identifiable, and he worked with local architect, Edward Buehler Delk and assigned him the task of like traveling to Spain and in particular Seville, to study the architecture there and bring that back to Kansas City.

- [Male Narrator] The projected scale was not known generally until April 1922 when he ran the announcement in "The Star."

- It was designed as the first outdoor shopping center in the country, and by the early 1920s automobiles were much more perceived as buyable, especially for the clientele he was aiming at which was upper middle class and up.

Even though he had built up all of the things in terms of transit connections, at that point he's really projecting the plaza as an automobile destination.

They always are emphasizing free parking and more of it.

- And he realized that these folks who were gonna be living out past the end of the streetcar line needed a place to shop, so initially it was a very local, very functional collection of businesses.

It was more about the service stations and the grocery stores, very practically oriented.

- It was all designed to come down, get all your essentials, have your fun and it was close to your home.

- In the process of acquiring land for the plaza he also acquires land to build apartment buildings.

Housing, want of a better term, we'd say is a captive audience for the plaza, is extremely important in his planning.

One of the issues to begin with with the plaza was trying to attract tenants.

- It was criticized for being too far away from downtown when he first built it.

- This was on the edge of the city at that time.

It was kind of an unproven concept.

There was a sense that what Nichols was doing was too speculative and too experimental, and almost certainly couldn't work in the long run.

But Nichols' Folly is a nickname that seems to have stuck for a lotta folks.

- It was sour grapes.

- In many cases I think it was an instance of wish fulfillment, that they wanted it to be that.

And that would be particularly true with regard to downtown merchants and even more so downtown property owners.

The way in which the plaza fits into all of that is as time goes on and you begin to have downtown coming to the plaza.

(gentle music) - He got called by Commerce Trust, who had done his financing, and it was one of those ominous calls during the Depression, you know.

"Come on down, we gotta talk."

- When Nichols was not making all of the payments that he was supposed to be making and goes into William D. Kemper's office, throws the ring of keys on the desk and says, "You want the plaza, you've got the plaza."

And of course, that scared Kemper because Kemper didn't want the plaza, he wanted the money.

And so he starts back pedaling immediately.

The specific tenants in the 1930s that contributed regularly to the income that helped keep the company afloat were the gasoline stations.

- In 1938 he went to a downtown meeting and he told them that they were gonna have to put in free parking downtown if they wanted to keep the merchants and they just laughed him out of the room.

They said, "J.C., we don't need parking, "we've got the streetcars."

Well how'd that work out?

(gentle music) - One of the things that happens after World War II is a trend toward department stores.

- We had the first Sears in a suburban shopping area in the United States.

That was a terrific victory because it really meant that we had arrived.

- My dad started our store in 1954 after he came home from the war.

He was working in a cigar store and he was a partner in a cigar store and at that time there were a lot of cigar stores in downtown Kansas City.

He wanted to break away from downtown.

And I think he saw some upside to the plaza.

At the same time Tivols left that same building, the Altman Building, downtown and came to the plaza.

- And it was all because of the automobile.

People who lived in Mission Hills in the Country Club District of Missouri and Kansas, why would they drive all the way downtown to shop when they'd have to drive by the plaza to get downtown?

- It's like my father said.

You know, if you don't have people living downtown, then you have a nine to five economy down there.

So if you are a retailer or a restaurateur, you know, that won't work for you.

So a lotta people saw the plaza as that opportunity to have sorta this financial district, but where they could have their business close to the community that was going to be purchasing items from 'em.

- I was always cautioning many of my friends who were black, stay away from the plaza.

And so don't drive through the plaza because if you did you would more than likely get stopped, either by the police or by private security.

And of course, being young and adventuresome sometimes we drove through there.

I never did that.

I pretty much listened to my folks.

But, others did and they, in most cases, got stopped and harassed just by driving through.

So the word got around and you just didn't go there.

I do know this though.

When you went to many of the stores on the plaza as being black, you were followed throughout the store by either security or off duty police officers or staff.

I mean, that was my experience as an adult.

I was on the police department at the time, but I never had a chance to patrol that area because that was off limits for black police officers during my tenure in the police department, 1954 to 1964.

- That begins to break down because of demonstrations that occurred in a variety of places in Kansas City as elsewhere in the 1960s.

And I'm sure that to some degree the riot of 1968 is something of a demarkation point on this as well.

- I recall that there were attempts by some of the folks who were engaging in the civil unrest to come to the plaza, and they certainly blocked that and most of the rioting actually took place in the inner city, the Prospect area, 31st Street area.

- Miller was clearly beside himself with regard to that.

He got the governor to literally put tanks on the east edge of the plaza.

- But also, one of the commanders of the police department had assured the business people at the plaza that we've got them contained down there, they won't get out here.

There was certainly the feeling that all the attention was given to the plaza, but very little was given to folks who lived east of Truth, and that was a fact.

- Growing up in the '60s it was a center of some controversy.

There was always a little bit of racial issue in going to the plaza, and being black and hanging out with some kids from my high school, who were all white, kind of gave me a little bit of a pass.

But, it was always a little bit of a sub rosa feel that I had on the plaza.

And at the time that I was in high school, during the '60s, I graduated in 1969, the plaza was a totally different place than it is now.

I remember the plaza as being kind of the downtown experience for urban kids.

- It was certainly a volume of local merchants, you know, without a doubt.

And we had a movie theater.

We had a Woolworth's on the plaza.

There was Putsch's 210 and Putsch's Cafeteria, and there was a bowling alley.

- Bowling alley.

- There was a bowling alley.

- A bowling alley.

- I had some reprobate friends that would steal the bowling balls out of the bowling alley and then they'd go up to the top of Wornall Hill, south of the plaza and let 'em roll down the hill.

- Many Kansas Citians awakened Tuesday morning unaware their city had experienced a disaster.

- We got 11 inches of rain in about three hours.

I mean, it was coming down in buckets.

- A wall of water like five foot high came rolling down Ward Parkway and slammed right into Plaza Three.

There were people still in there eating.

- And if you think about it, you were on the plaza in five feet, almost six feet of water.

- The parking garages had like 10 feet of water because it just found the garage and went straight down into it.

It started a bunch of gas fires.

There was I think like 60% or more of the businesses, like 150 businesses, that were damaged by the flood.

I mean, it was really a mess, stuff everywhere, cars that were pushed up against the buildings.

- As we drove into the plaza we were on the south side of the creek, so it was about three doors down from our store then.

As we drove by that the memory that I have is a car that was half in and half out of the plate glass window that used to be there.

But, that's not what got me the most.

It was the car on top of that car that really stuck with me.

- Well the flood is the reason I ended up running for public office, because 20 people died including a minister who I knew, and I remember a group of us sitting around talking about the plaza and people were telling me, "We have floods like this "all the time, but never this bad."

And I said man, this is crazy, somebody oughta do something.

He said, "Well you live here now, "why don't you do something?"

- Now it has to be said, Brush Creek did not flood in those days anywhere near as much as it has more recently for the simple reason that everything in its watershed to the west was basically vacant ground, or for the most part.

And so it soaked up the water.

As that whole area gets built up and you have concrete and houses and everything else shoving more water into the watershed that the possibilities for flash flood increase greatly.

- [Female Narrator] It had a major change when retail consumer behavior really changed a lot in the '80s and that's when it went much more upscale and all those neighborhood uses were kind of gone.

- [Male Narrator] The plaza was so unique.

There was nothing like it in America and it just naturally attracted blue blood retailers.

- As more and more development occurred around the plaza and more and more high rise buildings, more expensive development, there was an attraction by the bigger and better retailers to want to be there, whether it was a Saks, or we can go through all the different names.

That would be the one place they'd come.

- There was certainly that reputation that the plaza was you know, an upper tier place.

- And while other downtowns were using high end retail to revamp their downtown to get people to come back, downtown didn't move fast enough in Kansas City to do that and the plaza jumped on that trend right away.

And it's what a lotta people criticize about it now is it knocked out a lotta mom and pop shops that everybody likes, but that kept them alive for another 20 years.

- I had lunch at Miller Nichols' home, probably in early 1980s.

I don't think he was thinking about the plaza being sold or that he would relinquish the ownership.

I think at the time he's thinking you know, we're gonna be around for a couple hundred years and I wanna try to put things in place to protect it.

- Over the years there are folks who have looked to do incredibly dramatic things near the plaza.

I believe there was a project in the mid 1980s that looked to build a giant office tower very close to the plaza.

And I remember the debate that the Council had, the whole city was having, frankly, about the Sailors Project.

- And of course, the arguments were out of control.

- It was gonna destroy the plaza.

It was gonna destroy the world and little children would never eat again and horses won't run and so forth.

There was a horror story.

- This is the plaza, we live here.

That should go downtown.

That's not here, that's not Kansas City.

- If you start putting up these monstrosities it's gonna mess up the skyline.

We won't be able to see the plaza in the neighborhoods, and it'll become simply another part of downtown Kansas City.

- But, what that showed was that the plaza's actually pretty vulnerable to major development that's too big or too massive for the area.

- People wanted to protect this area.

I mean, they actually all over, no matter where they lived, felt like this was the crown jewel of Kansas City.

- So some of the differences in other cities is the plaza's part of a neighborhood.

It's not separated where you drive to it, park, walk around and shop and then get in your car and drive back to the suburbs, which is partly why people feel strongly about it.

- The powers that be, residential groups, Historic Kansas City, Save the Plaza, all those groups got together and said we need to have a plan.

We don't want this tunnel effect going down 47th Street and we wanna protect the bowl of the plaza, the bowl of the plaza being where the shops are, in essence, between 47th and Ward Parkway.

- One of the reasons the plaza works is that what's become known as the bowl, or the base of the plaza now, and that was his term, is no more than two or three stories, except for some of the towers and decorative things that come up vertically.

In mid '90s another company came in.

Nichols sold it to Highwoods.

- Highwoods were not good owners.

They were office building people.

They had absolutely no feeling for retail.

It was very financially advantageous for the family in the short run, it just was a disaster in the long run.

I think it was a real mistake for the family to sell the plaza.

- And they came in immediately said, well gosh, this is great territory, this is wonderful value for the land.

We could be you know, like 5th Avenue.

We'll just leave these little guys on the first floor and go up 20 more floors for you know, apartments and luxury housing and on and on.

And that's where the real battle started over again.

- They, I can tell you point blank, they asked me 'cause when we were workin' on the Polsinelli Building I said, "Well what other sites do you have?"

They said well we've got this one.

We're thinking about knocking down Classic Cup and this and that.

I said, "Oh," I said, "that may be worse "than the one you're proposing across the street."

Because that was in the bowl of the plaza and that would've been like the sword in the throat kind of you know, you can't do anything worse than that.

I think they just didn't understand how many people believed the plaza is theirs, whether they have money in it, whether they don't have money in it, it's all about their opinions.

- That's probably the most controversial issue we dealt with in Kansas City, high rise development and the Country Club Plaza.

- There was the challenges when the young folks showed up en masse on the plaza and there was all kind of you know, inappropriate behaviors on the part of the teenagers who lacked other recreational options.

- And there had been calls from the plaza merchants to have something done, a curfew of some sort or something done about the kids that were on the plaza.

Unfortunately it was a very racially tinged conversation.

The kids that they were complaining about were black.

I resisted initially the calls for curfew, until I went down to the plaza with a group of ministers and some police officers and others, interested people, to see for myself.

And what I saw was somewhat revealing.

There was a mob of kids.

So we started going over there and as we turned the corner by the Cheesecake Factory and I looked back to the west, three gunshots, bang, bang, bang.

- Kansas City Mayor, Sly James, pushed down to the ground last night as the teens were shot on the Country Club Plaza.

- First you have to understand that the plaza was like a beacon for kids that lived on the east side.

There was no movie theaters on the east side.

There was no real shopping on the east side.

So if you had an opportunity to use the plaza movie theater as a gathering point, that's what happened.

- 40Max news reporter, Dia Wall, joins us now live from the plaza.

And Dia, we've been expecting this news for some time.

We knew the plaza was for sale.

So what do we know at this point?

- - Well what we know right now is that these two companies are Taubman Centers and also Macerich.

Now neither one of them is local, but combined they own more than 70 shopping and retail centers, both in the United States and Asia.

- I think one thing about any major project like that that does not have some ownership roots in the local community is subject to whimsy and problems.

- Since Miller passed away there's nobody who's been in management of the plaza who loves it.

And I think they just saw the plaza as sort of a cherry on top of the banana split.

- The movie theater that was a draw for these young people was gone.

- The theater's closing is to help make room for Nordstrom.

- Taubman and Nordstrom were still trying to come to terms and they ultimately couldn't.

- We lost our uniqueness by chasing the profit of making sure that there were stable companies that had the roots of being nationwide, but we lost the feel of hometown Kansas City.

And now it's time for the plaza to take off its tuxedo.

- Yeah absolutely, and put on a hoodie.

The plaza, it is this place of celebration, but again, it's is this place to say, you know what, this is wrong, this is what we stand for, this is what we believe.

- I've gone to that park since I was in high school to protest things, the Vietnam War, the draft.

I've walked through there many times on the AIDS Walk.

It's always been the place in Kansas City where people go to make those types of protests.

- Four years after Dr. King had died I organized a group of people who spent the night every night in Mill Creek Park.

The purpose was to dramatize the disparity between the people who were buying on the plaza and the people who were living across the street from the plaza, who could not afford to go across the street to the plaza.

And we drew a distinction.

We also drew FBI undercover agents and we drew a great deal of criticism from the Nichols Company and their lawyers.

People are not doing it now so much because the plaza is there, but because of the traffic that comes through there.

And it is a good spot.

I don't wanna, I'm not encouraging anybody, but I'm just saying, it's a pretty good spot.

- After days of protest at the J.C. Nichols fountain and marches along the J.C. Nichols Parkway, some want the name scrapped.

- It was time for a rebranding.

It was time for an honesty check.

And is this somebody that we still should celebrate?

And I thought not, and so I drove that issue home.

I voiced my concerns to my fellow board members and finally getting the approval of even his own family.

- You know, it was really the only thing to do.

- It's symbolism, it's an effort by Kansas City to say we're not the same city that we were.

We no longer have covenants in neighborhoods that would restrict the selling of a house to a Jew or an African American.

And I think Kansas City was trying to come out of that old image.

And I think in many ways it has and I think the Park Board did the right thing.

- But then J.C. Nichols had built a really neat thing on the plaza, so I think you can have people who do good things and also do bad things.

We can honor 'em for the good.

I don't think we need to honor 'em for the bad.

- What does J.C. Nichols mean to Kansas City today?

First I know that there's still family of his here in town.

But, it does mean a level of exclusivity, but I don't think it's how we live today.

It does mean successful development that stood a test of time, if you looked at suburbs that he helped develop and the Country Club Plaza itself.

But, I think it's something that's also not necessary for us to celebrate in the same way.

Kansas City has had an important role in helping the plaza survive and thrive.

And so it's my view that we need a place that says you are welcome to every Kansas Citian.

And it's fair to say sometimes that the Nichols' name may not.

- It's still one of our, you know, one of our gems and I would hope that we can write a different future.

- The plaza is still the jewel of Kansas City, still the place I wanna be.

- It's always been owned by private interests.

They first and foremost, wanted to make money, and in order to do that there is constant change.

- The plaza to me just feels very not populated by Kansas Citians.

There's no draw for me.

And that makes me sad.

- The future of the plaza is not just a plaza discussion.

It's something that impacts I'd argue, everyone, not just in Kansas City, but more broadly in our region.

- It needs an advocate.

And it needs an advocate at City Hall and it needs advocates in the community.

And everybody still talks about it, so I don't think that's gonna be a problem.

It's a big discussion.

(gentle music) - I know the family still doesn't own it, but I feel it's our gift to Kansas City.