August 2025

Morley Family, Midtown Builders and Architects: Tales of Passion and Tragedy (Part 1)

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(Part 1) People searching for the history of their homes hope to find a good story, and here’s a great, if rather tragic, one for the folks in Midtown.  It’s the story of  Washington Irving Morley, an architect who designed a number of homes in Midtown in the early 1900s. In the Valentine neighborhood, for example, Morley’s […]

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Morley Family, Midtown Builders and Architects: Tales of Passion and Tragedy (Part 2)

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In Part 1 of this post, we met the athletic and successful Morley family. Father P.J. Morley built a number of houses in Midtown. His son, Washington Irving Morley, became a popular architect, designing 15 homes in the Valentine neighborhood.  But things would turn bad for Irv Morley. What went wrong, according to Morley’s own

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Repeated Building Designs: The Tudor 12-plex

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Do you ever get that deja vu feeling while traveling around Kansas City? If you’ve ever stopped for a double-take after after thinking, “I’ve seen this before,” you might recognize one distinctive building type either tucked away along quiet, park-side boulevards. Those who remember the now lost neighborhoods of Midtown might also recall the Tudor 12-plex building

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Repeated Building Designs: The Prolific Six-Plex

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Do you ever get that deja vu feeling while traveling around Kansas City? If a familiar-looking apartment building prompts you to stop and do a double-take, there’s a decent chance it’s an example of what we call the “prolific six-plex.” Even as constituent neighborhoods of the urban core are defined by their diversity, similarities abound among much

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