![Coleman-Highlands-(28-of-32)](https://midtownkcpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Coleman-Highlands-28-of-32.jpg)
Among Midtown’s historic neighborhoods, Coleman Highlands may be the most unique because it lacks anything other than houses. Since it was platted in 1907, Coleman has been exclusively a neighborhood of homes, tucked away from residential businesses and heavy traffic—the kind of oasis its developers pictured.
![](https://midtownkcpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/coleman-map.jpg)
The 80-acre parcel that eventually became Coleman Highlands changed hands a few times before it became the Coleman farm in 1869. A map from 1887 shows one home in the northwest corner of the property. In 1905, the Parks Department acquired the curving Karnes Boulevard, grading and paving it and building stone retaining walls. That set the stage for the Coleman family heirs to subdivide it into 293 lots.
![](https://midtownkcpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Coleman-Highlands-3-of-32.jpg)
Developers immediately saw the attraction. Coleman Highlands had what potential homeowners of those days wanted: fresh air and cool breezes up on the bluff. It was located near streetcar lines. As they laid out the lots, developers followed the widespread practice of the day, using the natural topography to suggest the layout and promising in a 1910 advertisement in the Kansas City Star that “every street in Coleman Highlands will be finished like a boulevard.”
J.J. Swofford and Company advertised:
“A trip to this beautiful residential district is like a trip to a park. In fact, Penn Valley, Coleman Highlands and Roanoke Park form a chain of drives and parkways unexcelled in Kansas City. $100,000 has been spent in the improvement of Coleman Highlands; every natural beauty of the ground has been preserved, and the many artistic homes already built in the subdivision insure to the home buyer permanency of value and beauty of surroundings.
Coleman was built as a middle-class suburb. Its original deed restrictions limited the building of anything other than single-family homes, and the restriction has continued until the present time. It attracted business owners, doctors, salesmen, and teachers, with most of the homes built between 1908 and World War I and in a second wave between WW I and WW II. The neighborhood is recognized as a historic district for its architecture and as one of the middle-class suburbs built during the first decade of the 20th century.
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