The Country Clubber

Most Sears, Roebuck & Co. stores are plain, functional buildings with big show windows and large, eye-hitting signs. But last week the mail-order chain opened a new store that was a sport; it had only a few small windows and it looked like a citadel in Spain. Its single sign was restrained and inconspicuous.

That was the architectural price Sears paid to get into the Country Club District in Kansas City, Mo. The District is the second biggest, and, with its Plaza shopping center, the most successful privately run residential development in the U.S. Sears figured the price was small enough for a chance to tap the area's purchasing power. Sears was right. Opening day, 100,000 potential customers came to gawk at the tile and ornamental grillwork. Many went inside and spent a total of $185,000.

Raw Land. Such a performance was an old story to Jesse Clyde Nichols, long-range planner who has expanded a ten-acre plot into the Country Club's 5,000 acres with 10,000 homes and apartments, 17 schools, 15 churches, five golf courses and 50,000 well-heeled residents. Nichols, who has proved himself a top city planner as consultant on scores of real estate developments, holds strong views on city planning and architecture. He habitually forced them on customers and tenants.

Again & again he had proved that his well-integrated city-within-a-city (it comprises the richest tenth of Kansas City's residential area) paid off: profits to merchants; the good life to residents.

Nichols, son of a well-to-do Kansas storekeeper, first learned about neat, compact towns on a trip to Europe. At Harvard he wrote a thesis on the development of raw land. In 1904, with $21,500 put up by farmers, he began to develop raw land himself at Olathe, Kans.

When the venture proved a success, he bought ten acres, then more, on the south side of Kansas City. With a partner, John Cyrus Taylor, now president of the J. C. Nichols Co. (Nichols is chairman), he worked at building sidewalks, sewers, etc. by day, sold lots in the evening.

He restricted merchants to eleven compact areas, built them shopping centers (against rent and a percentage of gross receipts) in Spanish, Elizabethan and Colonial styles. Home builders got a choice of one of three areas (large, medium-sized or small houses), where each could build a house according to his own pocket-book--and Nichols' choice of architecture.

Decorated Town. In return, Nichols Studded the area with Grecian urns, Italian marble fountains, Spanish gates and birdbaths imported from Europe. Sixteenth Century Italian columns bought from the William Randolph Hearst collection adorn a Kroger superstore. Though these ginger-bready decorations are anathema to severely functional planners such as Frank Lloyd Wright, the Country Club residents like them. Despite his weakness for the 16th Century, Nichols has also pioneered some 20th Century improvements, such as shopping areas in outlying districts, parking lots, rigid zoning laws.

At 67, "J.C." Nichols, whose holdings are conservatively estimated at $15,000,000, lives with his wife in a mansion in the Country Club District (his two sons are in the building business), but he still spends most of his days and three evenings a week behind his office desk on city-planning projects. J.C. thinks they are of prime importance because "when you rear children in a good neighborhood, they will go out and fight Communism."

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