Jesse Clyde Nichols

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Portrait of J.C. Nichols

Jesse Clyde Nichols (August 23, 1880 - February 16, 1950), better known as J. C. Nichols, was a prominent developer of the segregation in Kansas City. He was born in Olathe, Kansas, attended the University of Kansas and Harvard University. His developments include the Country Club Plaza, the first suburban shopping center in the United States and the Country Club District, the largest contiguous master-planned community in the United States.

Method

Nichols called his method "planning for permanence," for his objective was to "develop whole residential neighborhoods that would attract an element of people who desired a better way of life, a nicer place to live and would be willing to work in order to keep it better." In other words, his "planning for permanence" was really a covenant that would not allow the "undesirable" African or Jewish families to reside in his Mission Hills neighborhood. His philosophies about city planning greatly influenced other developments in the United States, including Beverly Hills and the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, as well as Shaker Heights, Ohio.[citation needed] He advocated preservation of trees and natural contours, while proscribing gridiron street networks.[1]

Country Club Estates, Nichols' master-planned community in Kansas City, Missouri, was the inspiration of River Oaks in Houston, Texas. Will Hogg, his brother Mike, and Hugh Potter visited Country Club Estates and sought the advice of Nichols while they were planning River Oaks. Nichols had a short list of what he considered to exemplary communities, and urged Potter to visit them. These included Forest Hill Gardens in Queens, New York; Palos Verdes Estates in Los Angeles County; Roland Park in Baltimore, Maryland; and Shaker Heights in Cleveland, Ohio. Potter eventually was appointed President of the River Oaks Corporation, and continued to seek the advice of Nichols during his tenure.[2]

Nichols invented the percentage lease, where rents are based on tenants' gross receipts. The percentage lease is now a standard practice in commercial leasing across the United States. Modern outdoor shopping centers, now common in the United States, share a common ancestor in the Country Club Plaza, which opened in Kansas City in 1923. The Urban Land Institute's J. C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development[3] is named for him. Moreover, the New Urbanists, developers who design to combat suburban sprawl, look to the Country Club District as a model for modern developments.[citation needed]

Nichols was prominent in Kansas City civic life, being involved in the creation of the Liberty Memorial, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Midwest Research Institute, as well as the development of Kansas City University, now the University of Missouri-Kansas City.[citation needed] Nichols served in leadership positions of local and national real estate and planning organizations. He was a member of the Kansas City Real Estate Board, was director of National Association of Real Estate Brokers (NAREB), headed the National Conference of Subdividers, chaired the Community Builders’ Council of the Urban Land Institute, and was a member of the General Committee of the National Conference on City Planning.[4]

Controversial restrictive covenants

J.C. Nichols relied on restrictive covenants to control the uses of the lands in the neighborhoods he developed. Most of the covenants restricted the lands to residential uses, and contained other features such as setback and free space requirements. However, homes in the Country Club District were restricted with covenants that prohibited African Americans and Jews from owning or occupying the homes, unless they were servants. Nichols did not invent the practice, but he used it to effectively bar ethnic minorities from living in his properties during the first half of the century. His restrictive covenant model was later adopted by the federal government to help implement similar policies in other regions of the United States. Ultimately, the 1948 Supreme Court decision Shelley v. Kraemer made such covenants unenforceable. Nevertheless, covenants remained on the deeds to properties developed by J.C. Nichols for decades after the Supreme Court decision because of the practical difficulty of changing them. (The deed restrictions in most neighborhoods renew automatically every twenty to twenty-five years unless a majority of the homeowners agree to change them with notarized votes.) In 2005, Missouri passed a law allowing the governing bodies of homeowner's associations to delete restrictive covenants from deed restrictions without a vote of the members. To this day, the Country Club District is predominantly white, and it is among the wealthiest, most sought-after neighborhoods in the United States, and has still been plagued with numerous accusations of racial profiling against minorities by police and security officers in the area.

Impact

In 1970, members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were charged with pipe bombing the home of J.C. Nichols, among other places in Kansas City. Three SDS members were convicted. See United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri, Western Division (Kansas City), Criminal Case Files (1879- 1972), Case 23498.

He is mentioned briefly in Robert A. Heinlein's novel To Sail Beyond the Sunset.

References

Notes

  1. ↑ Jackson, Kenneth T. (1985). Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-504983-7. , p.178.
  2. ↑ Ferguson, Cheryl Caldwell (Oct 2000). "River Oaks:1920s Suburban Planning and Development in Houston". Southwestern Historical Quarterly 104,p.201.
  3. ↑ http://www.nicholsprize.org
  4. ↑ Weiss, Marc (1987). ‘’The Rise of the Community Builders’’. New York: Columbia University Press, p.48,58,68. ISBN 0-231-06505-1.

Further reading

  • McKenzie, Evan. Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government. Yale University Press, 1996.
  • Pearson, Robert and Pearson, Brad. The J. C. Nichols Chronicle: The Authorized Story of the Man and His Company, 1880–1994. Lawrence, Kansas: Country Club Plaza Press--distributed by the University Press of Kansas, 1994.
  • Schirmer, Sherry Lamb. A City Divided: The Racial Landscape of Kansas City, 1900-1960. Columbia, Missouri : University of Missouri Press, 2002.
  • William S. Worley (1993). "J.C. Nichols and the shaping of Kansas City : innovation in planned residential communities". University of Missouri Press. ISBN 9780826209269. Retrieved 2013-12-24. 

External links


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