A City of Fountains

A little over a year ago I had major foot surgery, and as a result, I spent most of last summer migrating back and forth between our guest room and the couch. Thank the Lord and his prophetess Megan Rapinoe that the Women’s World Cup was entertaining, because outside of that, my June ’19 was quite a bummer. As I named constellations in the ceiling tile and counted the hours to my next vicodin, I got through it all in part by imagining all the fun stuff I was going to do when Summer 2020 rolled around.

Sigh.

To be clear, I’m not complaining or woe-is-me-ing to any great degree. Given the state I was in a year ago, I’m one of the few people on earth for whom May 2020 was less challenging than May 2019, even if my dreams of busting out of the house for concert-going and sports-shouting haven’t panned out. There’s nowhere to go, but at least I can walk there.

One thing I have done to pass the time this summer is sit next to fountains. Oft can I be found next to fountains old and new, functional and not, public and private, urban and Kansan, cloistered and vista’d. Perhaps I do some reading; perhaps I plan a class; perhaps I just watch the water circulate. It’s a nice enough diversion, and I live in the right place for it, because Kansas City is bananas for fountains.

Plenty of articles recirculate the claim that the KC area has “more than 200 fountains,” though the original source of this statistic is not clear. Still, the number passes the sniff test, and if anyone did a census that included things like fountains in people’s yards or the little waterfalls framing the signage of office parks, the number would undoubtedly be far higher. A visitor to KC who did only the most basic tourist stuff—shop the Plaza, stroll the galleries at the Nelson, take in a Royals game—might notice that they’ve rarely been more than a couple blocks from a fountain during their trip. And the thing is, while the Plaza is almost comically dense with fountains, the rest of the metro area, even down to residential neighborhoods, has an uncommonly high number as well.

The map of KC fountains maintained by the City of Fountains Foundation is impressive. It chronicles fountains as far-flung as the “Kids at Heart” Fountain in Lee’s Summit and, 43 miles north, the abstract unfinished-billboard-esque monstrosity that welcomes travelers to KCI. But if you know KC in any detail, you realize pretty quickly that when you look at the map of fountains, what you are really looking at is a map of money. There are more fountains west of Troost than east; more in Johnson County than Wyandotte; more in northeast Johnson County than Olathe. Even where fountains exist on the East side of KCMO, many of them (especially along the Paseo) were built roughly a century ago when the neighborhoods that hold them were wealthy and white. So the map of KC fountains is not only a map of money, but also a map of the history of money.

The architect of KC’s fountain disparities—as he was of so many of KC’s disparities—was the early-twentieth-century real estate developer JC Nichols. Residential neighborhoods throughout the KC metro have fountains, but the neighborhoods that Nichols developed in the 1910’s and 1920’s are absolutely teeming with them.[1] For instance, a walk down a one-mile entirely-residential stretch of 69th Street from Ward Parkway to Rockhill takes one past four fountains. And that’s just on the Missouri side—Mission Hills is even more saturated with fountains.[2] As the architectural historian Sara Stevens writes, fountains were an essential part of Nichols’ development strategy:

Nichols’s landscape architects also used another kind of design—statuary fountains—to sell buyers a vision of high-end suburban living. The neighborhood’s traffic-directing street layouts created small, postage-stamp sized parks, islands surrounded by roads. These Nichols turned into selling points by filling them with fountains and sculptures. He collected the art on trips to Europe, adding to the general cachet of the endeavor, and held receptions to unveil new acquisitions. More than mere ornaments in the landscape, Nichols believed these objets d’art established an aesthetic tone that reflected the street design, and helped build a long-term vision for the quality and financial stability of the area.

Fountains were not, however, the most important driver of Nichols’ economic success. That, without question, was the use of racially restrictive deeds to create exclusively white neighborhoods. Advertising signs for Nichols’ neighborhoods referred to them as “Protected Residence Property.” It doesn’t take much intuition to guess from whom the developer promised to protect the buyer. That coded language, which was printed on billboards in a larger typeface even than the phrase “Attractive Prices,” makes clear that the exclusion of African-Americans was a core selling point—perhaps the core selling point—of southwestern Kansas City during the city’s interwar boom. Nichols laid out the racial and economic divides that still shape Kansas City a century later, and tragically, his influence extended far wider. As Stevens points out, he was the founding president of the National Association of Home Builders, and his restrictive deeds the model that the Federal Housing Administration recommended to developers in the 1940’s.

Photo credit: State Historical Society of Missouri

I live in one of the neighborhoods that Nichols developed, and in spite of the fact that the restrictive deeds he used were finally made fully illegal 52 years ago, it is uncommon for me to see any African-Americans when I walk around my neighborhood. My neighborhood has a variety of public spaces scattered among its private residences, and more than anywhere else I have ever lived, people actually use those public spaces. But when Nichols designed those public spaces, he did so in a way that aggressively policed who gets to count as part of “the public,” and that legacy is still visible today. And yes, one could state truthfully that anyone is allowed to walk down the street and sit on a bench in my neighborhood. But the blunt fact is that only someone who looks more or less like me is likely to feel fully comfortable doing so. The restrictions Nichols designed, and which generations of white Kansas Citians bought up with enthusiasm, still define the daily lived experience of this city.

The most famous and photographed fountain in Kansas City was named to honor JC Nichols. It sits off of Main Street at the entry to the Plaza, and features statues of four horses which are meant to symbolize “the four mighty rivers of the world,” all of which are located in Europe or North America. The Nichols Memorial Fountain is featured in countless Kansas City postcards, it is virtually guaranteed to make an appearance when any Chiefs game comes back from commercial, and I suspect that most Kansas Citians have a picture of themselves standing near or in front of it. I didn’t even realize that I had one until I went scrolling through my facebook photos, but there I am, eleven years ago. 

Photo Credit: Anne Twitty

Unlike the smaller fountains in residential neighborhoods, the Nichols Fountain is a public space used by all sorts of people, and it has long been a key location for political protests, including the recent Black Lives Matter protests. More than anyplace else in the city, the Nichols Fountain is Kansas City’s town square.

The news came out today that the Parks Board is going to remove Nichols’ name from the fountain. Good. And I’m sure that someone will argue that this constitutes “erasing history,” but that’s ridiculous. Nichols’ influence is so wide-ranging and profound that to erase his history, you would have to erase Kansas City itself. We live our lives along geographical lines he quite literally drew, and it will take a lot more than altering the name of an equine fountain to erase that. But Kansas City cannot continue to honor him. Taking his name off a fountain is of course entirely symbolic, but it is a symbolic action this city has to take if we want our next 100 years to be defined by something other than the sins of the past 100 years.   

Further reading: If you're interested in knowing more about the history of Nichols' role in Kansas City, the article I cite by Sara Stevens is well worth your time. Whitney Terrell's novel The King of King's County deals with a fictionalized version of the Nichols family, and Evan Connell's Mrs. Bridge, probably the most important novel ever written about Kansas City, depicts life in Nichols' Country Club District in the 1930's.

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[1] I was going to say “overflowing,” but I have too much respect for you, dear reader.

[2] Sorry—couldn’t help that one.