Affordable housing remains a continuing issue in 2025 Kansas City.

So it was some 100 years ago, when a vibrant post-World War I economy and a migration of rural Americans seeking work and prosperity in emerging economic hubs like Kansas City created a need for properties that could be called home by those earning moderate to lower incomes.

In this “extra edition” E-Journal Ethan Starr, a Kansas City native who is the executive director of Historic Kansas City - the nonprofit organization that long has worked to protect and preserve local historic structures and landmarks - looks with fresh eyes at the residential homes and apartment units built by Kansas City developers eager to meeting that growing demand.

BY ETHAN STARR

Do you ever get that deja vu feeling while traveling around Kansas City? Even as constituent neighborhoods of the urban core are defined by their diversity, similarities abound among much of the city’s residential architecture. Without discounting the variation in building styles and patterns over a century of development, an informed observer knows that familiar residential building types are distinguished more by their sense of conformity than by singular, isolated characteristics. It can be positively disorienting to see what appear to be examples of the same building type—but in two different locations! Yet, upon inspection, the phenomenon is unavoidable. An appreciative examination of Kansas City’s repeated building patterns can help locals to re-define what constitutes the familiar, while also considering how the character of today’s building stock is a direct consequence of yesterday’s decisions.

Figure 1: A series of identical colonnaded apartment buildings populate the south side of 38th Street between Wyandotte and Central. Recent years witnessed replacement of most porch railings belonging to these half dozen buildings. Image courtesy of Ethan Starr.

What does “repetition” of “patterns” really mean in the context of historic buildings? This occurs when multiple buildings share common features of massing, material, and decoration. In a comparative exercise, it is easy to find two different homes that are three stories, adorned with a prominent front porch of brick or stone, topped with the flared eaves of a wood-clad upper story—the ubiquitous Kansas City shirtwaist, for example. But what about similarities that do more than conform to a generalized type? This article considers more extreme examples of pattern repetition; at a certain level of similarity, this building methodology might best be referred to as “copy-and-paste.”

Figure 2: A group of colonnaded apartment buildings—the Alamo, Waldorf, and Carpathia—exhibiting repetition of design features. Image courtesy of Ethan Starr.

Side-by-side examples, of course, offer the easiest clusters of repeated building designs for evaluating similarities. This is particularly the case when arranged as ‘twins’ or ‘triplets’ (and so on) or situated in a straight line, sometimes along the whole length of a city block. Anyone who has found their way through Hyde Park, toward the south side of West 38th Street between Wyandotte and Central has experienced the effect of same-ness (dare we say cookie-cutter?) construction that gave rise to a series of identical colonnaded apartment buildings (Figure 1). Round the corner by the adjacent Walgreens and you find another repeated set of colonnaded buildings: the Alamo, Waldorf, and Carpathia (and, differing only slightly, the Buford) (Figure 2). Pass through the Southmoreland neighborhood on 43rd Street and you can experience the same kind of effect: five identical buildings and their triple-decker porches as you head west from Oak (Figure 3). Turn the corner onto McGee and you will find two additional iterations, plus a truncated version with only one vertical porch stack on the southernmost end (counting 26 fluted columns and Corinthian capitals, in all) (Figure 4). Catty-corner, on the northeast corner of Oak and 43rd Street, sits Vanderbilt Place, columns bowing outward as they rise (called entasis) and sporting puffed-up entablatures that threaten to outdo the Carpathia and friends. They appear in a triad, one facing west on Oak and two grated together along 43rd Street (Figure 5).

Figure 3: Eight identical buildings and their triple-decker porches front on the south side of 43rd Street west of Oak and a section of McGee just to the south. Image courtesy of Ethan Starr.

All of the above are adaptations of the “double triple-decker” typology, a kind of walk-up building plan that “consisted of six (and sometimes eight) units, two per floor, three or four per side, connected by a central stair hall.” Historian Sally Schwenk articulates why it made sense for local developers to employ and replicate this formulaic building plan: “Replacing the working-class row house and tenement house, developers erected these buildings to accommodate moderate or lower incomes by reducing design and construction costs.”

Figure 5: Three colonnaded buildings lining the northeast corner of Oak and 43rd comprise Vanderbilt Place. Image courtesy of Ethan Starr.

These colonnaded apartments can be found around nearly every street corner in the older neighborhoods of Midtown, the East Side, Northeast Kansas City and have been an integral component of Kansas City’s housing fabric ever since. Kansas City’s colonnaded apartments are worthy of study and appreciation; their most thorough investigations took place in 1990 as a city-wide study conducted by Linda Becker and Cydney Millstein and a decade later with Sally Schwenk’s 2003 Multiple Property Documentation Form (quoted above). George Ehrlich’s Kansas City, Missouri: An Architectural History offers a brief treatment of the subject. It is important to note the key role repetition plays in defining these colonnaded buildings and their streetscapes. The phenomenon is visible not just among building components—classical revival motifs and column capitals, for example—but in the relation of one building to another. Even when colonnaded frontages do not span for entire blocks, these multi-family buildings can be found in twins or triplets nearly as often as they occur in isolated examples. Often these clusters are often slightly varied so as not to reproduce identical buildings in every detail. Yet it is the subtle variations from one building to the next that demonstrate just how formulaic patterns of construction had become among early 20th Century builders in Kansas City. This is the case for two groups of apartment buildings fronting onto the east side of Gillham Park, running along Kenwood from 40th to 41st Streets (Figures 6 and 7). Even the more grandiose expressions of the colonnaded apartment (including Midtown’s lost treasures, victims of demolition in the last half-century) like the Knickerbocker Apartments of Valentine neighborhood and Main Street’s Alameda Vista and Grandview Apartments (Figures 8 and 9) employed repetition as their central aesthetic feature.

This pattern of development was not exclusive to colonnaded apartment buildings, however. Repetition defined construction across all residential building types targeted toward working- and middle-class clientele, which picked up steam in the building boom that followed the First World War. This was an era of prolific builders catering to a pent-up demand for housing. The decade from 1920-1929, for example, brought “15,152 new apartment units and 1,092 new duplex housing units” onto the market, with 1923 marking the most fruitful year for construction. The new units arrived in more creative and diverse configurations than before, with ‘apartment courts’ and ‘apartment hotels’ joining the more standard walk-up ‘flats.’ The surge of apartment construction did not amount to an increase in the rate of building over pre-war years, but the typical unit count expanded from six to upwards of 18 per building. This increased economization of space, in concert with changing tastes, were surely factors in the de-popularization of the colonnaded apartment and its roomy porches. Amidst the advent of lofty apartment hotels and the looming threat of stricter zoning and building codes, construction of more self-contained ‘walk-up’ three-floor buildings (relatively ‘low-rise’) accelerated—characterized by an absence of elevators and lobbies, as well as straight, L-shaped, or T-shaped double-loaded corridors. Crucially, they were also of lower expense to construct. The frequency of new colonnaded buildings diminished, and their proliferation became increasingly supplanted by this simpler typology. Like their colonnaded brethren, most of these boxy ‘flats’—usually containing around six to12 units—wore brick cladding as a garment atop a wood frame skeleton. Not until the introduction of strict fire codes in 1924 did concrete construction become the standard.

Exterior cladding provided a canvas for designers, and some made good use of the opportunity. Flashy building ornamentation—terra cotta portals, column capitals, and dentilled cornices—were used sparingly, but in highly visible areas, connoting association with the Old World charm of a revival style. Alternatively, the building components could themselves be manipulated to convey a sense of distinction, like bricks arranged to create a tapestry effect or wood spandrel panels bearing an applique design. Stone sills and wide eaves were often combined to emphasize horizontality in the manner of the Prairie Style.

Figure 10: The Roanoke Court Apartments and adjacent buildings along Summit Street. (Southwest Trafficway) just north of 37th Street, all of which are included within the Nelle Peters thematic Certified Local District. Image courtesy of Ethan Starr.

The outcomes of these competing decorative methodologies were a hodgepodge of stylistic motifs, ornamental panels, or brackets conveying Revival styles of choice—employing Classical or Colonial, or turning to Tudor as the decade drew on—alongside an ever-more modern expression of building form as following function. In the words of Sally Schwenk, “Many architects experimented with fanciful combinations of these styles, often featuring an intentional combination of stylistic treatments and, as a result, residential designs no longer fitting neatly into stylistic categories.”

Figure 11: Examples of wood applique motifs, including variants of repeated arrow and rectangle patterns on spandrel panels. Image captured January 22, 2024. Image courtesy of Ethan Starr.

Figure 13: Examples of adjacent front entryways sporting different canopies, including one triangular pediment and one rounded top. Image captured January 22, 2024. Image courtesy of Ethan Starr.

One grouping of 1920s six-unit buildings that exemplify the “Low-Rise Walk-Up Apartment Building” typology can be found on Valentine Road just south of Roanoke Park, arrayed diagonally on the block bound by Terrace and Mercier Streets. Five buildings along Valentine Road and Terrace Street are fashioned with slight variations of a Classical Revival idiom with distinct Craftsman and Prairie Style influences. These five buildings employ a somewhat variegated, textured brick in their facades in tapestry-like patterns, with the most visible exterior ornamentation conveyed via applied wood elements. Differentiated mostly through deployment of the wooden decorative ornaments, their designers maximized the use of an efficient massing and ease for reproduction across multiple iterations. Their eaves and panels of applied wood ornament, in particular, reference both the wide overhangs and horizontal emphasis of Prairie aesthetics, albeit transmitted alongside traditional decorative elements of an entablature and dentilled cornice. Details like bracketing under eaves and patterned spandrel panels were a commonplace mechanism for adding some extra pizazz while avoiding the added expense of rendering designs through masonry. Like many apartment ‘flats’ of this type, brick cladding covered the majority of the exterior, while builders utilized a lesser material for cladding rear elevations. The potential of cost savings seems a clear motivation for this material and stylistic disparity of front and rear. The economization of resources also highlights the importance of presenting the best of ‘appearances’ toward the public, street-facing elevation—in the case of these five buildings, directly overlooking Roanoke Park—as a factor prioritized over uniformly sheathing the totality of a facade in brick.

Figure 13.1: Please see Figure 13 caption. Image courtesy of Ethan Starr.

Given the profound efficiency of this particular design, it seems intuitive that builders would have sought to replicate it elsewhere. Other applications of the near-identical building plans can be found just a quarter-mile away on Genessee Street or West 39th Street. Just a few blocks further south, still in the Volker neighborhood, a trio of the same six-unit design occupy the southeast corner of 41st and Mercier Streets. As a reader, if you’re racking your brains trying to remember just where you might have spotted one (or several) of these buildings across Kansas City, have a look at the table at the bottom of this article to peruse the 52 known examples and find which is most familiar to you.

This scale of architectural copy-and-paste is staggering, even for the early 20th Century dawn of mass production. Granted, this level of repetition might not have been out of step with broader trends in the house-building trade, considering Kansas City’s rapid pace of expansion in the 1910s and 1920s and its relatively small cohort of housing developers. South Kansas City residents might recognize the name Napoleon Dible, who built 4,000-5,000 homes, including a vast number of Tudor ‘kit’-type houses using techniques of mass production and, accordingly, repetition on the inside and outside. Surely, among the 4,000 or so Dible homes still at large, at least a few favorite patterns are now represented by dozens of examples?

Figure 14: Colonnaded apartment buildings on Benton Blvd (situated among other edifices identical in appearance) feature similar ornamentation to that of the boxy typology studied in the table below. Image sourced from Jackson County tax assessment survey, 1940. Image courtesy of Ethan Starr.

Many more clusters of buildings can be identified as broadly resembling the aforementioned six-unit apartment buildings (arrayed in a quintet along Valentine Road and Terrace Street, overlooking Roanoke Park from the south). Think of the apartment court and adjacent buildings along Summit Street (Southwest Trafficway) just north of 37th Street and included within the Nelle Peters thematic Certified Local District (Figure 10); they share many basic features with the repeated design examined here. Yet, can that not be said of most any boxy, three-story, walk-up building?

Figure 15: Another building typology appeared across Kansas City and produced by firms like the McCanles Realty Company, blending the ‘boxy’ design with massing reminiscent of a colonnaded building. Image courtesy of Ethan Starr.

Yet, for someone who encounters clusters of this same building design in different locations—not just Valentine Road and Terrace, but Mercier Avenue and 41st Streets (three buildings), 30th and McGee Streets (five buildings), and the vicinity of 27th Street and Benton Boulevard (five extant buildings), it becomes clear just how widely the methodology of copy-and-paste spread this singular design. You will notice that all these examples employ wood applique motifs of arrows and rectangles on spandrel panels (adjoining windows in the area between stories) (Figures 11 and 12). These motifs appear to alternate from building-to-building, just as front entryways might sport either triangular pediments or rounded tops (Figures 12 and 13), creating a sense of variety amidst near-identical repetition of most other features. It is also noteworthy that some of these buildings occur individually among clusters of other apartment designs—including not only similarly ornamented colonnades (Figure 14), but also a version of the aforementioned ‘boxy’ design with projected bays on either side of the front entrance (Figure 15) in a way that resembles the massing of a colonnaded building. By making an inventory of these three-story, walk-up buildings across the city and examining in closer detail their distinguishing ornamental features, we can identify distinct designs and patterns of repetition that bely a more comprehensive building scheme of which any individual building or cluster is only a small piece.

Figure 16: Three two-story flats comprised the“Green Gable Apartments,” a Nelle Peters-designed trio of buildings that adopted an essentially repeated design. Image courtesy of Eric Bowers Photography, www.ericbowersphoto.com.

The table of 52 buildings at the foot of this article provides as complete an inventory as could be assembled by the author, compiling photographs of extant buildings, records of known examples attested by 1940 tax assessment photographs, and supplementary data from architectural surveys and various district nominations for the National Register of Historic Places. The McCanles Realty Company is responsible for the great majority of those examples with easily accessible information pertaining to the original builders. If indeed the design’s proliferation is owed mostly to the McCanles Company, one wonders how the boxy, ornamented design discussed above gained favor to the point of outnumbering all the other repeated apartments designs utilized by the firm. The origins of the design remain mysterious, however; no architect is listed for any of the buildings, according to records reviewed prior to the writing of this article. At least one example, 3634-3636 Forest Ave. in the Squier Park neighborhood and National Register District, is attributable to Napoleon Dible of the Home Investment Company, the prolific developer of working-class, single-family housing city-wide mentioned above.

Figure 17: Demolition of Green Gables Apartments in 2015. Image courtesy of Eric Bowers Photography, www.ericbowersphoto.com.

Of the big-name developers in early 20th Century Kansas City, however, it was Guy McCanles and Charles Phillips who worked on a prolific scale developing much of what remains as the core of Kansas City’s multi-family building stock. Both built colonnades and fully-enclosed buildings, sometimes with different building types right next to one another, and both made iterative use of formulaic building designs. McCanles had begun his career as a developer of single-family residences and shifted toward multifamily construction in the 1910s, overseeing design and construction alongside successive associates specialized in leasing and sales. Phillips is best known today for his employment of Nelle Peters, whose acumen as the firm’s go-to architect spawned many local landmarks, including apartment-hotels and eclectic Tudor or Spanish Revival-Style buildings. One of their best known collaborations stands just west of the Country Club Plaza in the late 1920s: the ‘Poet’s Buildings’ lining the north side of 48th Street and two blocks wedged between it and Brush Creek.

Figure 18: An example of a Nelle Peters-designed building reminiscent of the Green Gables Apartments located in Kansas City’s East Side at 3507 Tracy Ave. Image courtesy of Ethan Starr.

This year, 2025, is the 10th anniversary of a demolition campaign that erased three of these buildings, the “Green Gable Apartments” (Figure 16), a group of two-story flats that adopted an essentially repeated design—differentiated mostly by contrasting parapet arrangements and paint colors). Besides depriving the Plaza of much-needed workforce housing, the absence of these economical units has diminished the overall integrity of the remaining historic buildings by replacing integral components of a 1920s development with grassy lots (see Figure 17 for demolition in action). Not all evidence is lost of this building design, however; imagine the surprise of the author to find, at 3507 Tracy Ave., (see Figure 18) an isolated instance of copy-and-paste on Kansas City’s East Side!

Figure 21: Front elevation of 506 E 44th St. in the Southmoreland neighborhood. Image courtesy of Ethan Starr.

As an illustration of the longstanding threat of demolition for these historically significant, if much-repeated, building types, let us turn back to the inventory of boxy, three-story, walk-up buildings exhibiting that design so favored by Guy McCanles. Of the 52 known examples to have existed—which could very well be an underestimate—12 have been demolished since 1940. Just adjacent to the five McCanles Company-developed six-plexes along Valentine Road are two 1923 12-unit buildings, the Manchester and Ipswich (Figures 19 and 20), for which the developer employed nearly identical designs. These are but two of five known iterations of this same building design by architect Frank Brockway, other examples of which appeared southeast of Linwood and Main in the Miller Plaza development and the Southmoreland neighborhood—with one 12-unit building, the “Dorchester” located at 506-508 E. 44th St. (Figure 21) and a truncated six-unit variant next door. All that remains of the Miller Plaza development built by the McCanles-Miller Company (following elevation of Guy McCanles’ top salesman to partner) are distant memories and a few photographs; they once sat on the grounds of today’s Home Depot parking lot. The Historic American Buildings Survey managed to capture a few final snapshots in 1986 just before their demolition (see Figures 22 and 23).

Figure 22: Three Kansas City buildings of identical designs within the McCanles-Miller Realty Company’s Miller Plaza development. Images of front elevations for 12-14, 23-25, and 31-33 Miller Plaza were captured by the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1983. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Image courtesy of Ethan Starr.

These examples attest to the fact that demolitions of these longtime venues of working-class housing, even when ‘incremental,’ deprive our community of much-needed multi-family housing stock when continued across the span of decades. At risk of losing the legibility of repetitious patterns of development—and the benefits the community accrues from their presence—it becomes a worthwhile goal to recognize these ‘common’ building types just as we might any other historically significant typology. Recognition on the National Register of Historic Places, where it can be achieved, provides opportunities for rehabilitation incentives that can extend the lifespan of these key resources. Thanks to the criteria established by two technical reports known as Multi-Property Documentation Forms—a 2007 report “Working-Class and Middle-Income Apartment Buildings in Kansas City, Missouri” and another on colonnaded apartment buildings, the ease of listing apartment buildings on the National Register of Historic Places is greatly improved.

Figure 23: Please see Figure 22 caption. Image courtesy of Ethan Starr.

The news of our present moment illustrates the critical role that copy-and-paste architecture continues to serve in the cityscape. Catty-corner to the former site of the Miller Plaza development, VanTrust Real Estate has proposed to build 10 adjacent six-unit buildings, each identical to the next, as part of an effort to repopulate this city-center location with a high density of residents (Figure 24). It just so happens that the massing of these buildings, if not the material, greatly resembles that of the McCanles Company’s second-favorite building design (where outer bays extend outward on either side of the entry). This new development also demonstrates a recognition of ongoing need for what some call “missing middle” housing—compact, multi-family residential settings of moderate scale. Meanwhile, Midtown’s Valentine neighborhood has sought to create a district for the local Kansas City register that would encompass two colonnaded buildings along Summit Street which face imminent threat of demolition. These identical buildings, built by the Phillips Company with designs by Nelle Peters (Figure 25), have prompted renewed conversation over the importance of ongoing, preventative maintenance of the city’s housing infrastructure.

Barring the occasional fire or small-scale disaster, demolitions of these historic apartment buildings tend to take place simply when owners neglect needed reinvestment, a community ceases to pay attention, or when the public does not deem it to hold any particular historic significance. This is, after all, why the National Park Service refers to the National Register of Historic Places simply as a “official list of the Nation's historic places worthy of preservation.” Only when our community recognizes the contributions of particular buildings or building types to Kansas City’s story do we begin to articulate the reasons for preservation. The mere fact of a building type having been copy-and-pasted ought not consign it to oblivion or obscurity, just as a building’s age need not condemn it to demolition. We ought to make room for recognition of these ‘common’ property types, whether on ‘honor rolls’ like the National Register or simply regarding them as equivalent in significance to many of the grand homes that stand alongside them. Most of all, the continued abundance of examples of copy-and-paste apartment buildings of the 1910s and 1920s should prompt reflection on the historical phenomena that enabled their surroundings to grow into the Kansas City we know and love today.

Copy-and-Paste Architecture: Recognizing Repeated Patterns in Kansas City's Built Landscape

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