Between 58th and 61st Street – Troost Avenue

According to the book Pendergast! by Lawrence H. Larsen and Nancy J. Hulston, Kansas City nearly doubled in size in the early 1900s thanks to many annexations that brought the city limits all the way to 79th St. This area just west of Troost shows the Crestwood housing developments – a development of JC Nichols after he constructed the Country Club Plaza. His contributions very much defined the plaza area, including the segregation between East KC and West KC.

This image here of many of the streets to the west of Troost reveals an interesting amount of regularity in housing as well as a nice break from the grid system, but right along Troost the buildings suddenly seem irregular and spaced out. Although this intrigued me, I can’t make any conclusions based only off of this information.

Nothing directly on Troost is of interest here with the same sparse buildings demonstrated earlier, but directly west of these blocks is a school that is still there today along with a golf club, which relocated in 1963. The nature of this area changes a bit in the 1950s, where all along Troost are auto shops, auto sales, and machining shops. That is presumably where the money was at that time. The increase in business interest also meant more buildings, which went stagnant throughout the late 1900s and into present day. Now, density is roughly equivalent to that of the 50s along these blocks of Troost with quite a few auto sales still around.

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