The Country Club Plaza and the Covenants Underneath It
Near Kansas City, Missouri
The Country Club Plaza opened in nineteen twenty-three as what its developer, Jesse Clyde Nichols, called the first automobile-oriented shopping district in the United States. Nichols designed it with Spanish Renaissance architecture, fountains imported from Seville, and underground parking structures that anticipated car culture a generation before the suburbs spread across America. It was, by the standards of nineteen twenty-three, a genuinely innovative piece of urban design, and it has been continuously occupied and admired since it opened.
What made the Plaza possible, and what sustained the residential neighborhoods surrounding it, was a legal mechanism that Nichols also pioneered: the racial covenant. Beginning in the nineteen tens, Nichols's real estate company sold homes in the neighborhoods surrounding the Plaza with deed restrictions that prohibited purchase, occupancy, or rental by, in the standard language of the documents, any person not of the Caucasian race. The restrictions ran with the land. They were legally enforceable, and they were enforced.
The Nichols Company developed roughly five thousand acres of residential land in Kansas City using these covenants, making the southern and southwestern Kansas City neighborhoods one of the most comprehensively racially restricted residential areas in the country. When the Supreme Court ruled in Shelley versus Kraemer in nineteen forty-eight that racial covenants could no longer be judicially enforced, the covenants remained in the deeds as language, but lost their legal teeth. The residential segregation they had enforced did not disappear with the ruling.
Nichols received the Urban Land Institute's distinguished service award and is credited in planning histories as a visionary of mixed-use commercial development. The covenant system he built and promoted is documented in those same histories, without always receiving the same prominence. The Plaza fountains still run. The documents that restricted who could live near them are in the property records at the Jackson County courthouse.
