The New York Life Building: Eastern Money Arrives in Kansas City
Near Kansas City, Missouri
In the summer of eighteen eighty-nine, Kansas City got its tallest building, its first elevators, and its first unambiguous signal that the moneyed East was paying attention.
The New York Life Building on West Ninth Street was designed by Frederick Elmer Hill of McKim, Mead and White, the most prestigious architectural firm in America. It was not the sort of commission the great firm usually took in Kansas City. But the New York Life Insurance Company was making a calculated statement: by erecting a twelve-story tower here, they were announcing that this prairie city was a real place, worthy of eastern capital. The building went up in Italian Renaissance style, faced in rich brick and brownstone, with barrel-vaulted ceilings, mosaic floors, and lavish marble and cherry-wood finishes inside. A Kansas City Star writer later called it the city's single finest building.
At the entrance, perched above the main doors, stood the building's most famous feature: a massive bronze eagle cast by sculptor Louis Saint-Gaudens, brother of the more celebrated Augustus. The eagle spreads its wings over a nest of eaglets. It weighs about two tons. For generations of Kansas City residents, the eagle on the New York Life Building was one of the defining images of downtown.
The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy and has served various institutional uses since. Since the diocese bought it in two thousand ten, it has functioned as the Catholic Center of the Diocese of Kansas City. But the eagle still stands watch above the entrance, still bronze, still tending those eaglets, as it has for more than one hundred thirty years.
