The New York Life Building (also the 20 West Ninth Building) is a commercial structure at 20 West Ninth Street in the Library District of downtown Kansas City in Missouri, United States. Designed in Italian Renaissance style by Frederick Elmer Hill of McKim, Mead & White, it occupies the northeast corner of Ninth Street and Baltimore Avenue. The New York Life Building was Kansas City's tallest building and the city's first building with elevators when it was completed in August 1889. The structure was built for New York Life Insurance Company and is similar in design to the Omaha National Bank Building in Omaha, which the same architects designed for New York Life. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
New York Life officials bought the site in 1886, and work began in early 1887. When the building opened, it hosted numerous banks and law firms. In 1895, New York Life completed an annex, which burned down in 1913. Three New York businessmen bought the building in 1924, but New York Life took back ownership in 1931 and renovated the structure. The Granthurst Realty Company bought the building in 1944, and Transcontinental & Western Air and Waddell & Reed occupied large amounts of space in the mid-20th century. Stanley J. Bushman bought the New York Life Building in 1981, with plans to renovate it. The building was abandoned for much of the 1990s following a failed attempt to convert it into apartments. Local utility firm UtiliCorp (later Aquila) moved its downtown headquarters into the building in 1996 after renovating the structure. Aquila moved out of the building in 2007, and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-Saint Joseph purchased it in 2010, using the structure as administrative offices.
The building has an "H"-shaped plan, with two pairs of 10-story wings connected by a central 12-story tower. The wings originally flanked light courts to the north and south, though the northern light court was replaced with additional office space during the 1990s renovation. The Ninth Street and Baltimore Avenue facades are clad in brick and brownstone and are elaborately decorated, with multiple tiers of arched windows. The main entrance on Ninth Street is topped by a bronze sculpture of an eagle sculpted by Louis Saint-Gaudens. Its superstructure consists of cast iron columns and exterior load-bearing walls. The interior spans , with wood decorations, a marble lobby with a barrel vaulted ceiling, mosaic-tiled corridors, and 400 rooms on the upper stories. Over the years, the building has been praised for its architecture.
Site The New York Life Building is located at 20 West Ninth Street in the Library District of downtown Kansas City, Missouri, United States. It sits at the northeast corner with Baltimore Avenue. Due to the layout of the street grid, Baltimore Avenue is interrupted at Ninth Avenue. The section of Baltimore Avenue south of Ninth Street ends right in front of the building, while the section north of Ninth Street begins immediately west of the building. The main entrance on the building's south facade is aligned with the eastern sidewalk of Baltimore Avenue's southern section.
Located in the Library District and West Ninth Street Historic District, the building is surrounded by other structures such as the Kansas City Club and the Central Library. To the north is a parking garage clad in aluminum siding, which is decorated to blend in with the New York Life Building's brick facade. When the building was constructed in the 1880s, the surrounding area was filled with high cliffs; the surrounding land was not leveled out until later. In addition, the section of Baltimore Avenue south of the building was not developed until just before the building was completed. Prior to the construction of the building, the site had been sold at a foreclosure auction in 1873 for $6,000.
History In the 1880s, William Rutherford Mead and Joseph M. Wells of the firm McKim, Mead & White became acquainted with officials of the New York Life Insurance Company. At that time, Downtown Kansas City was experiencing increases in development. The development of Kansas City's New York Life Building in the late 1880s coincided with the development of other New York Life regional offices, including a building in Omaha, Nebraska; another in Saint Paul, Minnesota; and a third office in Montreal, Quebec.
Development
Design and site acquisition W. T. Booth bought nearly the entire city block between Wall (now Baltimore), Ninth, Delaware (now Main), and Eighth streets in December 1886, paying $373,000. This site was near the city's business hub, known as the Junction. The company simultaneously acquired sites for the Omaha, Saint Paul, and Montreal offices, the combined cost of which was less than what Booth had paid for the Kansas City site. New York Life was unable to acquire a plot at the corner of Ninth and Delaware streets, owned by one Harriett March. The company's inability to acquire March's site nearly prompted New York Life officials to abandon it in favor of a plot at Walnut and Ninth streets, which was located on higher ground. Officials eventually agreed to the original site after conversing with workers at New York Life's head office, who refused to let them buy the Walnut Street site. To compensate for the failure to buy March's lot, New York Life added two stories to their new structure; there were concerns that the company would not be able to find tenants for the upper floors, as high-rises were still rare at the time.
New York Life invited four firms, including McKim, Mead & White, to compete in an architectural design competition to design two Midwestern regional offices. Besides the Kansas City office, New York Life was seeking plans for the Omaha office. McKim, Mead & White won the competition in March 1887 and were hired to design the Kansas City and Omaha offices. To save money, the buildings were to be built using the same general plans. Both New York Life buildings would be the tallest structures in their respective cities, and vacant space in both structures would be rented out to other tenants.
The building was designed by Frederick Elmer Hill of McKim, Mead & White. As originally designed, there would be a main entrance on Ninth Street to the south and a secondary entrance on Wall Street to the west. The upper stories would have been "H"-shaped, with light courts facing north and south; there would be glass-roofed atria at the first story within the light courts, as well as elevators in the center of the "H". The plans called for the center of the "H" to be topped by a cupola and a dome. At the time, the structure was planned to cost $800,000 or $1 million.
Construction Shortly after receiving the commission, Mead traveled to Kansas City to examine the site, which was cleared in mid-March 1887. New York Life received an excavation permit on March 21, and David Pullman was hired to excavate the foundation. The site was difficult to excavate and repeatedly flooded, as there had been a spring directly underneath, which drained into a nearby swamp. Water from the spring was eventually used to feed the building's hydraulic elevators and its toilets. The foundation had been excavated to a depth of by May 1887. The next month, Norcross Brothers was hired as the general contractor. Due to the lack of heavy machinery or even paved roads, a team of four mules was employed to haul stone for the foundation from a nearby quarry, and a brick factory was built near the site. In October 1887, the city government approved a construction permit for the building. At the time, the foundation had not been completed, and work had not progressed above the ground story.
After the foundation was completed, White made a trip to Kansas City to examine it. One worker recalled in a memoir that it took four weeks just to build one story. When the building's stonecutters went on strike in early 1888, the Norcross Brothers agreed to increase their salaries. By April 1888, the stonework had been completed to the third story, and workers were about to lay the bricks for the upper stories. The next month, a contractor was selected to construct a sewer leading to the building; though there was an existing sewer on Delaware Street, water from the New York Life Building was physically unable to drain into it. During construction, in June 1888, several men died when a scaffold collapsed; this was the only major incident on the construction site. Following the incident, a grand jury charged Norcross Brothers with negligence, and multiple workers alleged that there had been several safety hazards at the construction site.
The process of fitting out the interiors was laborious; for example, it took each worker one day to lay a stretch of mosaic-tile floor. The interior decoration was also costly, with the marble-work alone ranging from $60,000 to $70,000. The building's plumbing system had to be partly rebuilt after city inspectors visited the building in early 1889, finding evidence of poor workmanship. By May, Norcross Brothers had completed an iron grille for the building's entrance. New York Life had announced plans earlier that year to create a law library with 20,000 books, and it began moving these books onto the building's 10th floor in June. The building opened in August, and a group of New York Life officials traveled from New York City that November to inspect their new building. Upon the New York Life Building's completion, it was the tallest building in Kansas City and, as such, was sometimes used as a fire lookout tower. The structure cost $1.7 million and may have been the first building in Kansas City to be built by union laborers.
Early years
The building's completion prompted multiple companies to relocate there from farther north. Originally, New York Life occupied part of the first floor. Other notable tenants included the Kansas City School of Law, the National Bank of Commerce in New York, the Merchants' National Bank of New York, and the United States Trust Company. The banking spaces in the ground level's southwest and southeast corners were used by at least eight banks in the building's first four decades. The building also housed many law firms because of the 10th-floor law library and the site's proximity to Kansas City's financial district. Shortly after the building opened, a fire occurred in one of the offices and was extinguished without spreading to other rooms. Numerous tenants, convinced that the building was fireproof, moved there as a result.
A sculpture of an eagle, depicting the company insignia, was commissioned for the main entrance but was delayed by several years. The sculpture was ultimately hoisted on February 25, 1891, and became a frequent nesting place for pigeons. By the next year, the site was worth , twice the rate that New York Life had paid for it, and the building was 40% occupied. New York Life continued trying to acquire the March property at the intersection of Ninth and Delaware streets, as it wanted to build a similar structure on that site, but the company was unsuccessful in doing so. Instead, the company annexed the neighboring Emmons Building on Delaware Street, converting it into the New York Life Building's eastern wing. This annex was finished by 1895.
1900s to 1930s