The Sophian through the Seasons- A Photo Journey

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Photography courtesy of David Vranicar.

Winter holiday glow.

Winter wonderland.

Sunny days, blue skies.

Sophians: Kyiv to New York — 1891

The Sophian family lived in Kyiv (Russia at the time, Ukraine today). Morris and Delia Sophian had five children, Meyer, Jennie, Rosie, Harry, and Abraham. They lived an imperiled life in Tsarist Russia. Kyiv (Kiev). Along with Warsaw and Odessa, Kyiv was ground zero for the Tsar’s pogroms against the Jews. As the New York Daily News reported that the great wave of Jewish immigration was “instigated by Russian massacres, ‘plagues of sword and torch,’ that have smitten their race in Russia. The violence continued for decades and prompted a continuous stream of Jews migrating to the US to escape the death march.”

1891

The Sophian family decided to make the brave move to America in the early 1890’s. There is much we do not know about their emigration. Digitized US Citizenship records and US Census records, tell us about their early life in the US. Harry and Abraham traveled on the same ship, the SS Edam, of the Holland America Line, out of Rotterdam to the Port of New York, arriving on the 25th of June 1891. The SS Edam was sailed under the Nederlandsche-Amerikaansche Stoomvaart Maatschappij, the English version was Holland Amerika Lign, today it’s known as Holland America Line. Holland Amerika Lign had its American terminus on the west side of the Hudson River, Hoboken.

Harry and Abraham were young. Harry was almost 9 years old and Abraham was 7. The rest of the family were likely on the same ship, but we have yet to locate the Edam manifest that would show all of them together. We know of Harry and Abraham’s voyage from their petitions for citizenship.

Harry and Abraham’s Declaration of Intent to become a US citizen (1908 and 1909), required each to attest: “It is my bona fide intention to renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, and particularly to Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, of which I am now a subject.” That declaration must have felt good.

Photos below: SS Edam, Holland America Line; Holland America dock in NYC (Hoboken); Steerage (emigrant) class accomodations (Library of Congress).

Holland America terminus New York (Hoboken)

Steerage (emigrant class) accomodations

SS Edam (Holland America line)

1900: Abject Squalor of their First NYC Home

Hester Street,

Lower East Side

Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, New York Public Library

The Sophians left the oppression of Russia and like the hordes of Jewish emigres of the time, the family found shelter in New York’s Lower East Side tenements.

1900

The 1900 Census documents that the Sophian family lived at 252 Henry Street. All of the family lived together at the time, Morris, Delia, Meyer, Jennie, Rosie, Harry, Abraham, and the smallest, their American-born sister, Gussie. New York City Municipal Birth Records note that Gussie was born on August 13, 1893, to Tillie Pergamentshich and Morris Sophion, both from Russia. From research to date, we believe that they lived in this neighborhood from arrival in 1891, and did not escape until sometime between 1900 and 1905.

[Side note: We all have heard tales of immigrants’ names being changed by immigration record keepers who did not understand their foreign names. Regarding our research, we found many of the records relating to the Sophian and Felix families have the same or similar spelling. It is clear, however, that Harry and Abraham’s mother’s name was nearly inscrutable to many English-speaking recorders—whether census takers, and the record-makers for birth, marriage, and death certificates. In the census records, her first name was variously recorded as Dora, Delia. But in birth, marriage, and death records that indicate maiden family names, she has been recorded as Tillie Bergamishczig, Tillie Pargomeschuk, Tillie Porganischik, and Matilda Peggermat.]

They found housing in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the Jewish ghetto. It and other immigrant neighborhoods of lower Manhattan were legendary for their sordid, over-crowded, and disease-filled conditions. These apartments were so appalling, they spawned a cottage industry of social reformers who championed minimally healthful living conditions. The activists and government health workers found hundreds and thousands of apartments with no sanitary plumbing, no running water, soot-spewing coal stoves for cooking and heat that compromised breathing and blackened everything from walls to belongings, very long narrow apartments with little light or air ventilation excepting for narrow windows in the front room, and crowding so severe that as many as 12 adults shared sleeping space just 13 feet across. The conditions fostered disease, and produced an infant mortality rate of one in ten. It’s remarkable that Gussie was born and survived!

Jacob Riis in his seminal work, How the Other Half Lives, detailed the blight in the immigrant neighborhoods of Manhattan. Lillian Wald famously founded what is considered the first social service organization, Henry Street Settlement. She built the settlement house just a couple blocks from where the Sophians lived.

Photos from the turn of the century—housed at the, New York Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library, and the Library of Congress—document the conditions of the Lower East Side streets. The website, allthingsinteresting.com, has pages devoted to New-York-Immigrant-photos and to Tenement-New York-photos-facts. They provide a quick snapshot of the base poverty, dangerous and unhealthful living conditions.

Chicken Market, 55 Hester Street, Manhattan, February 11, 1937, Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991), Brooklyn Museum; Two women & man in front of outhouses; one woman getting water, Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library; Man in kitchen—bedroom with dishes, clothes, irons (1904), Irma and Paul Milstein Division, New York Public Library; Life on the Lower East Side, corner Pitt and Rivington Streets, North, New York City, ca. 1915, Underwood & Underwood, Publishers, Library of Congress.

1900-1920: NYC Apartment House Living—From Squalor to Elegance

The design and construction of the Sophian Plaza is part of a larger story about the rise of the luxury apartment building at the beginning of the 20th century. The popularity of the new form of residence was developed in fever pitch in New York City, as Harry Sophian started his career. In the eight years, 1902-1910, some 4,000 apartment buildings were built.

At the end of the prior century, late 1800’s, the moneyed class considered apartment living to be the province of the poor, in the squalid tenements, derisively referred to by how many flights a resident had to climb, e.g., “fourth-floor walk-up.”

Yet, architects, engineers, and builders perfected designs, building materials, and elevators that could produce high rises, where residents floated up to their homes on upper floors. Tall buildings with elevators became a marketable feature, not an indicator of poverty. People enjoyed the relief from climbing stairs; they liked living suspended above the street chaos.

It was one thing to build a tall building, it required another impetus to make it a luxury building that would satisfy the status and amenity requirements of the wealthy. The developers adopted many features and services as enticements. First, architects adopted the Beaux Arts style (pronounced bowz-zar) that adapted the style of palazzos and grandiose public buildings of Europe. The style emerged from the premier French school of architecture, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and it draws on architectural forms of monumental Classicism, Italian Renaissance, and French Renaissance. Examples of the grand style were shown at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, to great fanfare. Beaux Arts (fine arts in English) synced with the City Beautiful Movement which inspired grand naturalistic, but composed parks.

Additionally, the new luxe apartment buildings offered the newest technologies and conveniences (electricity, central heat and cooling, telephones) far more affordably than retrofitting mansions of old. The stand-alone mansion had become an albatross, costly to operate, and downright primitive, compared with the modern paradise of new extravagant high rises.

Some commentators highlight that luxury buildings solved another upper-class problem: high turnover of servants. [Perhaps it’s no surprise that the moneyed class would consider their servants the problem, not their own behavior.] The apartment-building landlords provided door attendants, valets, elevator operators, grounds people, and the like.

Apartment “hotels” included the conveniences of restaurants that obviated preparing all meals, allowing families to have much smaller household staff. Individual apartment layouts provided service entrances for deliveries, tradespeople, and housekeepers, that were separate and distinct from the more gracious entrance for family and social guests. Many floor plans also included small bedroom(s) off the kitchen for live-in help. The new luxury apartment building allowed the affluent to live better than ever.

In NYC, apartment houses became the living style of choice

In New York City, the development of the luxury apartment hotel was energetic, creative, and experimental. By 1929 almost all upper- and middle-class residents in Manhattan were living in apartments, according to the historians describing works in the Irma and Paul Milstein Division of Local History at the New York Public Library,

“New York City’s housing law “not only legitimized the modern luxury apartment building, it bestowed a very specific blessing.””

— Elizabeth Hawes

The 1901 zoning law (called the Tenement House Law) authorized builders to erect fireproof buildings as tall as twice the width of the street. Effectively that meant 10-story tall buildings on the crosstown streets and 12-story buildings on the broad north-south avenues, with corresponding minimum building widths.

The greater building sizes allowed more creative apartment configurations. The impact of the new law has been chronicled by Elizabeth Hawes in New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed Life in the City (1869-1930).  According to Hawes, the new law “not only legitimized the modern luxury apartment building, it bestowed a very specific blessing.” Of the 4,000 apartment houses were erected in Manhattan in those early years of the 20th century, many hundreds of them were designed for upper and upper middle classes. Hawes described the impact on New York City, “Of all the buildings that were erected in the first two decades of the millennium, none transformed the city more dramatically and more definitively than the new luxury apartment houses. … [T]he luxury apartment house was one of the great products of the American Renaissance. The millionaire had propelled the Age of Elegance into flowering and it was this gilded taste that now shaped a new generation of apartment houses.””

Harry’s birds eye view of nyc apartment development

This is the apartment building fever that Harry Sophian brought to Kansas City.

In New York, like elsewhere, Jews were unwelcomed in the mansion-filled, blue-blood neighborhoods of Fifth Avenue and the Upper East Side, flanking Manhattan’s Central Park. Instead, Jews established their own enclave on the west side of the Park, the neighborhoods called the Upper West Side and Morningside Heights. That was Harry Sophian’s working territory.  The luxury apartment building blossomed in those neighborhoods. Immigrant architects (both Italian and Jewish) designed extravagant buildings that became home to the extraordinarily wealthy as well as the merely affluent.

There are a few architects and buildings that Harry might have found inspiration. Emery Roth, a Jewish architect of renown, designed many apartment buildings on the Upper West Side. His reputation bloomed after he designed the famous Chocolate Pavilion at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the showcase event for the Beaux Art movement. Notice the colonnade, Corinthian columns, balustrade, and free-standing statuary of the pavilion. Each are central features of Beaux Art design, and each was incorporated into the Sophian Plaza design.

1893 Columbian Exposition

Showcase for beaux arts architectural design

Chocolate Pavilion, architect Emery Roth

The Upper West Side apartment houses were grand, heavily ornamented, and designed in various architectural styles, most notably Beaux-Arts. These new buildings offered apartments of nine to twelve rooms. The chambers were large, with high ceilings and lavish interior details, including well-appointed bathrooms and kitchens, and ample closets.

A promotional book featuring select apartment buildings was produced annually, Apartment Houses of the Metropolis. They were created to entice potential middle- and upper-class tenants to New York City’s “principal high-class apartment houses.” It provides a glimpse into the exuberance of apartment house building on the Upper West Side. These 300-page volumes showed exterior shots of the featured buildings with description and often one or more floor plans. They were published annually from 1908 to 1913. The excerpts below are from the 1908 edition.

From these few examples, one can see parallels to the Sophian Plaza design. Limestone clad lower floors, topped with brick upper floors. Commonly, the building’s footprint was crafted to allow multiple facades for windows and air circulation.

Two of Harry’s siblings lived in buildings that were featured in these promotional books, Abraham and Rosie.

The Orienta

302 West 79th street

Abraham and Estelle Sophian’s residence, 1915 (per his passport application)

The st regis

830 East 163rd Street, Bronx

Rosie [Sophian] and Morris Rabinowitz residence, 1910 (per the Census)

Parallel Residential Forces in Kansas City  

Kansas City historians have traced the development of apartment buildings here, noting that a segment of the upper-middle class emerged as an important subpopulation of apartment dwellers in the late 1880s forward. As the old elite neighborhoods close to the business centers declined, “apartment hotels offered amenities typically provided by hotels located on major thoroughfares with streetcar lines near the City's business centers. These new residential buildings featured an array of facilities and services for those without the time or inclination to manage a large home - kitchen, laundry, and maid services; well-appointed public rooms; and private suites that included parlors, dining rooms. bedrooms, bathrooms, and maid quarters. Social registers from the first decades of the twentieth century reveal that these apartments appealed to the upper-middle classes, including professionals, businessmen, and entrepreneurs.” Working-Class and Middle-Income Apartment Buildings in Kansas City, Missouri, National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form (Sept. 20, 2007).

The Sophian Plaza was conceived and designed to fit this role.

1905 — Sophians move north to Harlem

By 1905, the Sophian family moved to Harlem, just north of Central Park. Jeffrey Gurock, The Jews of Harlem: The Rise, Decline and Revival of an Urban Jewish Community (2016), documented that Harlem had become the third largest Jewish settlement in the world, after the Lower East Side and Warsaw. At its peak in the 1920s, 175,000 Jews lived in Harlem.

The older Sophian children started to peel off to start their own paths. Harry and Gussie stayed with their parents and found a home at 26 East 109th Street. Meyer, started referring to himself as Michael, married Cecelia, had a son, Lawrence, and moved to 71 East 104th Street, about a six-minute walk from his parent’s place. Rosie married Morris Rabinowitz, and moved further north, to the Bronx. Jennie married Morris Berlin and moved to Brooklyn. Abraham started medical school.

It was in Harlem that Harry and Abraham likely met Jane and Estelle Felix, the women they eventually married. In another post, we describe the Felix family emigration, but they landed in Harlem in the same time period. The Sophian and Felix families moved regularly in the ensuing years, between Harlem and the Upper West Side. Over the years, the different siblings lived with the extended family, or as a boarder, or alone.

While conditions were better than the Lower East Side, quarters were still cramped.

Laundry lines, East 107th Street, circa 1900 (Library of Congress)

Two blocks from the Sophian’s apartment

Abraham became a physician, on the fast track:  Abraham Sophian won a scholarship (1902) to study and train at Cornell Medical College, directly, without an undergraduate degree. That was a lucky break for him, because by 1908, Cornell instituted a requirement of an undergraduate college degree or its equivalent to be considered for admission to medical school, just as Harvard and Johns Hopkins did. Abraham graduated in 1906. After graduation, he began a residency at Mount Sinai Hospital, founded by Jewish philanthropists when New York hospitals refused to grant privileges to Jewish physicians and kept Jewish patients out of their wards.

The hospital was first located on 28th Street. By 1904, it opened its third home on East 100th Street (where is stands today, albeit stretching many more blocks!). Its path matched the migration of the Jewish population from the Lower East Side to Harlem.

Mount Sinai Hospital

The Harlem heyday did not last long. The Jews that swelled Harlem, started to migrate to the up-and-coming neighborhood, of the Upper West Side. A new subway line was under development along the length of Manhattan on the west side. The Upper West Side saw the development of apartment building, sprouting one after the next at a startling rate. Harry and Abraham migrated to the Upper West Side as well and found a home together at 230 West 107th Street.

Harry’s early career in real estate

While Abraham was building a career as a physician, Harry started to build his career in real estate development. From that perch, Harry Sophian started his career in real estate on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Real estate transaction announcements in the New York Times, 1905 to 1912, included sales, mortgages, and rentals for multiple properties at West 107th Street to West 202nd Street. This is the time period where Harry’s sense of apartment living, posh and elegant, entirely different from the squalid tenements he once knew.

1917 — Georgian Court—Harry’s First Apartment House

The Story of the Sophian Plaza starts with . . . Harry’s first Kansas City Apartment House

Harry Sophian, a Russian emigré at age nine, lived and worked as a “real estate man” in New York City, during a time when development of tall apartment buildings (8-12 stories) was exploding, especially along Manhattan’s upper west side. As a transplant to Kansas City, he imported a well-developed vision of elegant apartment living. He arrived in Kansas City in 1916, and set to build his first apartment house, the Georgian Court apartment hotel.

Armour Boulevard and

main street

He selected a site at the auspicious corner of Armour Boulevard and Gillham Road, two blocks from the mansion of Kirkland Armour, meat packing magnate, and other Kansas City luminaries. The KC History site (Midtown KC Post) describes just how fashionable Armour Boulevard was in this time. According to Midtown KC Post, at the turn of the 20th century, Armour Boulevard was one of the most celebrated streets in town, proudly featured in numerous postcards of the day showing off Kansas City’s new boulevard system.

Harry purchased the corner lot in 1917 (Jan 2), with architectural plans already in hand. He attracted the financing might of bankers from New York and Chicago to underwrite the building, and broke ground (Jan 11) to build an eight-story apartment hotel. With speed that is remarkable in today’s terms, he declared the building would be ready for occupancy as early as October 1917. Although Harry was the man-on-the-ground, the bond financing notice shows that the new building was jointly owned by Harry and Jane, Abraham and Estelle Sophian. Shepard, Farrar & Wiser were the architects. The Kansas City Star article announcing the building’s debut, noted that its “appointments will be elaborate beyond anything yet attempted here.” (KC Star, 1-17-1917).

Georgian Court opened in 1917

The building offered 24 large apartments, most were 9-rooms, “exceptionally large and light,” including large foyers, sun parlors, breakfast rooms, and sleeping porches. A pergola and ballroom were planned for the top floor. The announcement included details about provisions for service staff, which included day and night elevator service, hall service, and footmen, all of whom would be attired in uniforms, and for whom onsite dormitory accommodations would be provided.

Architectural historians, Ellen Uguccioni and Sherry Piland noted that Georgian Court Apartment Hotel started the high-rise building boom here. The Georgian Court was deluxe and “set a standard for the others that were to follow. It had no rivals.” (Armour Boulevard, National Register of Historic Places).

Armour Boulevard (1918)

Glimpses In And Around Kansas City

(Fred Harvey)

The building filled its 24 apartments quickly. In a marketing coup, I suspect Harry Sophian nudged the folks at Kellogg-Baxter, the publishers of the Social Register, to include every family who became a tenant in the 1918-19 Kansas City Social Register. Twenty-four apartments, twenty-four families on the Social Register listed their address at Georgian Court, 400 East Armour Boulevard.

“The Georgian Court was deluxe and “set a standard for the others that were to follow. It had no rivals.””

— Ellen Uguccioni and Sherry Piland, architectural historians

1907 and 1911 - two Sophian brothers, two Felix sisters, two marriages

The Felixes emigrate and move to Harlem

Jane and Estelle Felix emigrated with their parents and six siblings from Łódź, Poland about 1890.

The family—Arthur and Emily, the parents, and children Sara, Pauline, Eva, Josef, Flora, Estelle, Louis, and Jane—found a home in Harlem by 1900. Sometime in the next few years, the Sophians and Felixes met and became close—especially Harry with Jane and Abraham and Estelle. The brothers eventually would marry the sisters.

Harry and Jane

Harry courted Jane, which appears to have included a vacation on the Jersey shore. Their arrival at one of the Asbury Park hotels, The Park View, in July 1905 was announced in the papers—“Misses Felix, Joe Felix, and Harry Sophian” arrive.  

Harry and Jane married in 1907. They welcomed their daughter Lucille into the world, 1909. And Harry applied for citizenship the same year. During this period, Harry, Jane, and Lucille lived the Felix family apartment. The 1910 census records show that nearly all the Felixes were engaged in work. Estelle was a school teacher; Pauline, a milliner; Louis, a lawyer; Josef, a salesman; Jane, a merchant; and Harry in real estate.

Abraham and Estelle

Abraham finished his medical degree in 1906, started his residency at Mount Sinai, courted and married Jane’s older sister, Estelle in 1911. Their children, Emily and Bud (Abraham Jr.) were born in 1913 and 1915.

This was an exciting time for the Abraham and Estelle. As they started their family, Abraham’s career started blooming as well. He became renowned for his work in infectious diseases and was in great demand to consult on outbreaks and epidemics. He was beckoned to Dallas in 1911 when that city suffered a particularly severe epidemic of 185 cases of meningitis. His success there was celebrated widely.

Ketubah-Jewish Marriage Contract

1919 — Siting The Sophian Plaza, Harry’s Next Apartment Hotel

Southmoreland, William Rockhill Nelson’s neighborhood

Developing the Georgian Court apartment hotel was a personal success for Harry Sophian. It was credited with transforming Armour Boulevard, and ushering in a new era of high-rise apartment living on the Boulevard, so much so that it is now its own historic district, Armour/Gillham Apartment Hotel Historic District (local district, designated May 27, 1982).

Harry was ready for the next project, The Sophian Plaza, on Warwick Boulevard, flanking Southmoreland Park. The site held an array of benefits.

First, it was very close to very wealthy people. William Rockhill Nelson’s baronial manse, Oak Hall, was on the opposing side of the park, and two blocks up Warwick Boulevard was August Meyer’s palatial home, Marburg. Nelson was the Kansas City Star publisher and a real estate developer. Meyer was a mining and smelting magnate. [Nearness to the wealthy families along Armour Boulevard had been critical to the Georgian Court’s fame.]

William Rockhill Nelson’s

Oak Hall

August Meyer’s

Marburg

Second, the site was reminiscent of the parks of New York City. Harry and his wife, Jane, brother Abe and his wife, Estelle, all spent their early adulthood years in New York, around Central Park, Morningside Heights Park, and Riverside Park—each was designed by venerated landscape architecture team of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. Olmsted and Vaux designed parks to heighten the enjoyment and aesthetics of the turf, water, and rock of the landscape and its natural contours, using gentle, sprawling lawns, winding pathways, natural woodlands, and rock outcroppings. Southmoreland had that look and feel.

Third, Meyer and Nelson were intent to craft the Rockhill and Southmoreland neighborhoods with very specific design elements in mind. They were natural admirers of Olmsted and Vaux’s work, and approached building their neighborhood to fit with that aesthetic. Their vision for the neighborhood was an extension of the City Beautiful Movement--naturalistic landscaping, open parkland, native stone for fences, and curved roadways lined with elm trees.

Southmoreland Park is a natural ravine, through which a small brook runs in the rainy times. The cliffside of the ravine is protected by a limestone retaining wall. [We have yet to learn when the park was designed and embankment built.] The plot of land was first platted by W.B. Clark as South Moreland Addition. It was eventually acquired by Nelson, and given to the City for street and park purposes.

The City Accepts

gift of

South Moreland park

Kansas City Journal, October 21, 1898

Nelson turned his attention to the roadways through the neighborhood. He orchestrated the renaming of Grand Avenue and McGee Streets, to more bucolic names, Warwick Boulevard and Oak Street to flank Southmoreland Park (September 1898). Per Harry Haskell, in Boss-Busters and Sin Hounds: Kansas City and Its Star (2007), Nelson doted over and groomed Warwick Boulevard. He badgered the city of Westport to pave the dirt roadway; ultimately paid the asphalt company owned by the Police Commissioner to pave it; and made sure to plant rows of elm trees along the sweep of its borders.

Indeed when there had been an attempt to change the character of the neighborhood by widening Walnut Street, everyone “knew” it would not be tolerated by Nelson and Meyer. The proposal prompted the mayor to make a personal inspection of the area. And he summarily vetoed the proposal, declaring that a street widening would do vandalism to the area. “The addition of South Morelands is one of the few in Kansas City where streets have been laid out to suit the contour of the ground, and where an attempt has been made to preserve the park-like character of the property and remove from it the ordinary characteristics of city lots.” (KC Journal 7-19-1899).

Rockhill Boulevard

Circa 1920’s

Nelson’s Oak Hall in the Background

Missouri Valley Special Collection, Kansas City Public Library

Nelson and Meyer’s design sensibilities drew admirers. Soon the neighborhood was dotted with mansions of some of the City’s most prosperous families. By 1919, when Harry purchased the lot for The Sophian Plaza, the immediate neighbors included Mrs. Simeon Armour, widow of the meatpacking tycoon; Stephen Veile, grandson of John Deere; Gardner Lathrop, one of the most widely known lawyers in Missouri; W. B. Thayer, owner of Emery, Bird & Thayer dry goods company, among other luminaries. [Link to section on the Homes of Note in the Southmoreland neighborhood, as of 1919]

In a neighborhood that evoked the venerated parks of New York City, and in the company of some of the wealthiest citizens of the City, Harry was ready to design and build the eponymous apartment house, Sophian Plaza. When he announced the building plans, specifically noted, “We will face Southmoreland Park and overlook Warwick Boulevard as it curves along the edge of that secluded park space. When I was fortunate enough to obtain this site a few years ago, I appreciated the suburban atmosphere.”

““We will face Southmoreland Park and overlook Warwick Boulevard as it curves along the edge of that secluded park space.” ”

— Harry Sophian

How we found all The Sophian residents

Our investigation and discovery methods: We were able to trace hundreds of residents of The Sophian through a few astonishingly fantastic resources.

First, the KC City Directories back in the 1920’s and 1930’s found on Ancestry.com through a free link provided by KC Public Library. They listed people’s phone number by name alphabetically and by address. So we were able to trace every person with a phone over many years.

Second, we relied heavily on the help of two genealogy sites. Familysearch.org and FindAGrave.com Both were fantastically helpful in triangulating stories to assure that we were not confusing individuals with similar names. Familysearch.org includes images of the actual ledger pages of the US decennial census, whose sole purpose is to list every person living in the US, by address. They also post images of immigration and citizenship documents, plus details from marriage certificates, draft registration, vital statistics records and and other marvelous primary sources. It is rich and free genealogy site maintained by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, an amazing service to the world. Find-a-Grave seeks to record every tombstone in the US and beyond, with incredibly valuable family information like parent, sibling, spouse, and children info.

FAmilysearch.org

Offered by Church of Jesus Christ of Latter DAy Saints

1930 Census records for The Sophian

Third, it turns out that it was a common practice for newspapers, at least in the 1920s and 1930s, to identify the home address of people mentioned in a news report. We used the Kansas City Star archives and Newspapers.com, which includes newspapers nationwide, including the Kansas City Times. It was especially surprising to see how much the newspapers-of-old operated much like Facebook and other social media today, at least for high society types. The papers reported events like who was having whom for dinner, travel plans across the country or abroad, and social activities (as small as hosting a reading group to large fundraising galas). It was an unexpected bonanza to have access to papers across the country, allowing us to piece together the lives of our Sophian neighbors over time.

Lastly, through some archives held by the State Historic Preservation Office, we happened upon a substantial set of files of Harry Sophian’s attempt to sell in the building in 1943. As part of the negotiation process, he provided the rent roll for each apartment and tenant. Through these sources we built a database for residents in the building.  

As we tried to discover the stories of the early tenants, w  

A word on newspaper practices and social norms: Many, many, many women went by their married name exclusively --- Mrs. [husband’s first and last name] only, e.g., Mrs. Jack Rieger—whether or not the story had to do with the activities of the woman only, or the two of them as a couple. By the newspaper reports, it was clear that these women were engaged and doing noteworthy work.

The Challenges Facing a Jewish Developer

As “perfect” as the site was for Harry’s vision for his next building project, he also faced headwinds in building a new apartment hotel. Nelson’s Rockhill development to the east of Oak Hall and JC Nichol’s Country Club developments south of Brush Creek were known for their exclusionary sales and rentals practices against Black and Jewish people.

JC Nichols was well known for developing deed restrictions that were ironclad and stood the test of time. Many of the restrictions pertained to issues like allowable materials to be used in the home construction, setbacks, and the like. The ones that were most venal were the restrictions of who could purchase or rent in these neighborhoods. A typical restriction read: “No lot shall be conveyed to, used, owned, nor occupied by negroes as owners or tenants.” Jews were not expressly included within restrictions, but they were patently included by practice.

“restricted”

“protected”

JC Nichols was a member of a national league of developers (called the “High Class Developers Conference”) which kept detailed records of their meetings. William S. Worley in his highly regarded book, JC Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City (1990), recounts that the members worried about selling to “Jews and Orientals.” In their 1917 meeting, Nichols explained that his policy was not to sell to Jews, but acknowledged that four or five Jewish families have houses on his properties through other sellers. He noted that he was getting pressure from Jewish leaders to open sales to Jewish families. Other developers urged him to resist, noted that his resistance would be good for sales, and offered stories of their “fortitude” to cancel contracts summarily when they learned the purchasers were Jewish.

This was the world that Harry Sophian faced as a Jewish developer and that Jewish families faced when looking for hospitable places to live. When Harry Sophian finally purchased this plot of land between Rockhill and Country Club districts, he made an announcement referring to his unwelcoming neighbors and proudly claiming that his building would be enviable.

He specifically noted the “restricted home areas” that surround his Warwick Boulevard site, and extolled the amenities, aesthetics, and virtues of the planned new building. With real estate bravado, he noted that he directed his architects to design “a structure that will measure up to its environment out there on the edge of the Rockhill district. … I told my architects to instill into towering brick and stone the fine residential character of the neighborhood.” The architects were told “there would be no skimping in carrying out a pure Italian design.”

“Harry Sophian’s answer to the racist anti-semitic developers:
My architects will design “a structure that will measure up to its environment out there on the edge of the Rockhill district, and .... instill into towering brick and stone the fine residential character of the neighborhood.””

— Harry Sophian