20 W. 9th St., Kansas City, Missouri. County/parish: Jackson.
Added to the National Register of Historic Places July 08, 1970. NRIS 70000336.
1 contributing building.Also known as:
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 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 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 New York Life Building was abandoned for much of the 1990s following a failed attempt to convert it into apartments. Local utility form 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 200,000 square feet (19,000 m2), 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 New York Life Building's design has been praised.
(read more...)National Park Service documentation: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/63819305