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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Repeated Building Designs: Colonnaded Apartments

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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

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Volker Developer Fred Bonfils Lived a Colorful Life

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This photo shows 4118 Mercier in 1940. When the developer of Bonfils Place in the Volker neighborhood died, the Kansas City Journal called him “one of the most colorful survivors of the Old West.” Fred Bonfils, who gave the subdivision his name, started a lottery in Kansas to buy property in Kansas City and helped

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Front elevation of the Cottesbrook, located at 708 W 48th St, Kansas City, MO

Name Restored to West Plaza, Nelle Peters-Designed Building

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A new placard has been installed on a 48th St. building located just west of the Country Club Plaza. How might a new sign, simply denoting “708 W 48th St / COTTESBROOK APARTMENTS,” amount to a newsworthy story?  The sign, situated on a (comparatively) sleepy cut-through between the commercial district and Roanoke Parkway, is significant

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The Emil Rohrer Home: A Landmark of Concrete Construction

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4425 Terrace today, viewed from the west. Captured March 2025. Like most American cities, Kansas City suffered a lull of private home-building throughout the decade of the 1930s. Outside of the impressive public construction projects associated with the Ten-Year Plan, a scant few neighborhoods saw extensive development during this period, and many commercial and industrial

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