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Hyde Park residents treasure memories, welcome resurgence, 1982 |
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Kansas City Star, September 16, 1982, elaine Johnson
It was 1936, the depth of the Depression, and Lois Brent and
her mother had just moved into a big house on Campbell Street in Hyde
Park, the reigning queen of Kansas City neighborhoods.
For a
down payment they used $1,000 of the insurance money Miss Brent and her
mother had received after Mr. Brent died. The monthly payments were
$39—“and that was hard to get.” Miss Brent said. “I didn’t make $100 a
month, but I made the payments on that house.”
Miss Brent, 71,
still lives in Hyde Park, an area bordered by 31st and 47th streets,
Gillham Road and Troost Avenue. Throughout the years, she has watched
her neighborhood weather changes wreaked by the Depression, the second
World War, the baby boom and the housing-industry slump of the 1970s.
The changes were not always welcome. For a while, it seemed as
if the queen of neighborhoods was aging badly, its glorious youth fading
into dowdy old age. However, like a loyal handmaiden, Miss Brent
remained true-blue.
The neighborhood, like Lois Brent, endured.
Hyde Park now is peopled by a new breed of entrepreneur, not unlike the
lumber barons and capitalists who helped start the neighborhood more
than 80 years ago. These new residents speculated in a declining
neighborhood and revitalized it. Hyde Park’s tenacity, and the hard work
and elbow grease of this new generation of homeowners, will be
celebrated Saturday and Sunday in the annual Hyde Park Festival,
featuring a street fair and open house at nine restored homes. (for
details, see the Tip sheet on Page 1B).
A Hyde Park address was
a mark of wealth and prestige in turn-of-the-century Kansas City. Rich
lumbermen, businessmen and lawyers flocked to what was then the edge of
town to build their sprawling brick and stone mansions.
Delbert
J. Haff, a lawyer who is credited with masterminding the city’s parks
and boulevards, was one of the first to move is family to Hyde Park. His
daughter, Madeline Haff Field, now 88, remembers moving into the stone
mansion at 416 E. 36th St. when she was 6. It would be her home for more
than 50 years. Her two children were born and reared there.
“I
loved that house so much,” she said. “It was the first house in that
square from 36th to Armour.”
The neighborhood was hillier
before modern engineers built up Gillham Road, she said. A main
thoroughfare crossed along 36th Street.
“The wagons would come
up that hill with their horses,” she said. “They got so winded they
would stop in front of our home. We had a lemonade stand.”
She
has many other cherished memories of her Hyde Park childhood. There was
the day in 1910 when former President Theodore Roosevelt visited a Hyde
Park neighbor, Missouri, Gov. Herbert Hadley. The neighborhood children
greeted him at 36th and Locust streets.
“’Hi, 36th and Locust,’
Mr. Roosevelt called out,” Mrs. Field said.
Miss Haff left home
to attend Vassar College, and, in 1921, on a snowy Mark day, she married
lawyer R. Harrison Field.
The 1920s were the days of large
household staffs and beautiful parties. The household employed a cook, a
maid, laundresses and—while the children were young—a French governess.
By the time Miss Brent and her mother moved to Hyde Park in the
1930s, the first changes were beginning to ripple through the proud
neighborhood. “Some families, in the Depression, had to leave, but it
was still real pretty.” Miss Brent said.
Miss Brent and her
mother were considered outsiders by original residents. “It was built by
wealthy people,” Miss Brent said. “I had the feeling they resented
outsiders.”
Neighbors also disapproved of Mrs. Brent taking in
boarders to make ends meet—an attitude that has resurfaced among the new
generation of homeowners.
However, the boarders ere a wave of
the future, especially during World War II and the subsequent baby boom,
when a housing shortage gripped the city. “People began turning homes
into apartments, but there were still several original owners,” Miss
Brent said.
In 1952, the Fields joined many of their friends in
the exodus south. “It got to the point where we had to move,” Mrs. Field
said.
The Hyde Park mansion was inconvenient: “It was a huge
house.”
A few years later, Miss Brent and her mother changed
addresses, too. They moved around the corner to a 16-room brick mansion
on Charlotte Street that Miss Brent had long admired.
By the
time her mother died in 1962, the changes were becoming obvious to her.
The grand facades of many neighborhood homes fronted honeycombs
of apartments. The Haff mansion at 36th and Locust streets was turned
into a nursing home.
However, the spiraling housing prices of
the last decade rekindled interest in Hyde Park. An estimated one-third
of the houses changed hands between 1975 and 1977. Young professionals,
unable or unwilling to afford the cookie-cutter housing of the suburbs,
turned their eyes to the solid, massive homes of Hyde Park. They were
willing and able to tackle the long-term renovation projects necessary
to restore the mansions to their original splendor.
“I was so
happy to see the block come back,” Miss Brent said sitting in the
high-ceilinged living room of her home.
“I know more of the
neighbors since the young people moved in,” she said. “The are more
friendly than the old ones . . . I feel more accepted now.”
Mrs. Field, too, welcomes the new Hyde Park residents. Five of them
restored the Haff mansion after the last nursing home occupant moved out
in 1979.
The neighborhood is alive again, a playground for
another generation of children. This fall, the children will stomp
through colored leaves falling on Hyde park, like Madeline Haff did 80
years ago.
“I remember playing and jumping around in the
leaves. I took my grandchildren there, so they’d have the experience,
too.”
A post card included with the article
featured the Hyde Park home of Mr. and Mrs. William Magraw Reid at 300
E. 36th St., at the intersection of Gillham Road, McGee and 36th
streets. Mr. Reid was a realtor and a director of the First National
Bank. The property now is occupied by the chancery offices of the Kansas
City-St. Joseph Catholic Diocese. A three-story addition has been built
on the west side of the residence.
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