Always Be Closing

Why does the intersection of 23rd and Massachusetts have two hulking stone monuments, each topped with a heavy metal doublecross light fixture?

The Breezedale monuments are the only evidence left of an aggressive period of suburban development between 1900 and 1910 for a town that wouldn’t exist for decades.

Lawrence in the early part of the 20th century was not a growing community. Census figures show  a modest increase in population from 1900 (10,682) to 1910 (12,374) that stopped dead in its tracks by 1920 (12,456). At the same time, developers of the era expected big growth in the community, judging by the number of subdivisions and additions that were registered in Lawrence between 1901 and 1919. 29 were recorded in that time frame. The next twenty years would only see seven added to the books.

Most of what seemed to be occurring was speculation. The papers of that era are filled with advertisements extolling the up-to-date attributes of the latest developments (“Granitoid sidewalks! Paved roads! City water and sewage!) along with what must have been the sure fire sales tactic of the era: boasting about how many lots you’ve sold and warning about how quickly the remaining will go.

Charles E. Sutton, with stints as a businessman back east and a farmer in western Kansas already under his belt, moved to Lawrence in 1906 to farm and raise livestock to sell. By 1909 he had gotten into the real estate game, purchasing land south of the city limits, platting an addition he would call Breezedale and registering it with the county on May 12, 1909.

Prior to 1900, the city of Lawrence all but ended at what is now 13th Street to the south, Louisiana Street to the west and Delaware Street to the east. Any home within those boundaries was within a few minutes walk of the central business district along Massachusetts Street, or KU. Additions had been platted and a few roads graded in areas outside those boundaries, but very few homes were built as the distance to the city’s core services was just too great. Industrial jobs of the time were at the river’s edge, commercial ones along three or so blocks of Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire stretching south from the river, and this was still a time of daily trips to the grocer and the butcher. Anything past the informal boundaries of the city meant a walk of more than 15 minutes, and at the mercy of the weather.

The Breezedale addition was more than double that distance. At two miles south of the Kansas River bridge on Massachusetts Street, residents would need a half an hour to walk from their homes to the heart of downtown. So what made it - and the other real estate developments of the time well south of the tradition city edges - suddenly so attractive to developers?

That one thing that every modern, up-to-date 20th century town simply had to have: An electric streetcar line. With an electric streetcar, a trip from the farthest southern reaches of Massachusetts street to the Bowersock Opera house was a mere ten minutes - and covered to boot! That kind of public transit meant that the boundaries of town could expand beyond the distance you could comfortably walk.

Lawrence had a horse drawn streetcar line as late as 1899, but it was shut down as part of the first of the city’s decade of failed dalliances with electric streetcar promoters. Over the years at least three official franchises were awarded and revoked, while several other promoters would proffer schemes to civic leaders but never gained official acceptance.

By 1908, it seemed that a suitably financed operation was finally going to make good on the promise. Local developers, led by the Hosford Investment company, had been buying up land or otherwise representing landowners to create new subdivisions south of 13th Street as early as 1907, but the pace quickly picked up in 1908, with larger ads (and the accompanying “news” articles that were strangely identical in tone and enthusiasm describing the business acumen of the developers and the inevitable, can’t-miss increases in the value of the property.)

By the time Charles Sutton brought Breezedale to market in 1909, the streetcar line was set to run all the way to 23rd Street, the electric streetcars were being shipped to Lawrence and a full on gold rush was happening. New real estate companies were appearing, and all of them were taking out huge ads in the local papers. According to a page one article in the Lawrence Daily Journal on August 9, 1909, 521 new lots south of the city limits (19th Street at the time) were platted and put up for sale. More were just inside the city line, or to the west and south of the KU campus. Yet the population of Lawrence had barely increased.

Sutton had enormous faith in his development though, and took the unusual step of building five houses on the grounds before he had any buyers (one of them he would give to his daughters as a residence.) The usual method was simply to sell the lots and leave the owners to build as they pleased. But by the end of the summer, Sutton seemed to have gotten frustrated by the pace of sales and he dumped his original brokers, the Hosford Investment company, and switched to McQuarry-McNeill, a company that had only set up shop that summer.

McQuarry-McNeill then poured on the marketing. Huge ads extolling the thoroughly modern conditions and the soon-to-arrive streetcar lines, along with automobile rides to see the property; planted stories in the papers; and a final ace, something no other development would have: a gateway.

All of the other developments underway were essentially plugged into the existing grid of the city, meaning there really was no way to define them. But Breezedale had only one way in or out. Which meant it could have a ceremonial gateway, a fad that had been popping up in other cities around the country at that time.

The original plans called for much more than what currently exists. Blueprints were officially displayed at the McQuarry-McNeill offices in Merchant’s Bank: “It will have two handsome columns on each side of the roadway with a stone slab running across the arch with the word ‘Breezedale’ on it. The ornamental archway will cost $1500,” according to an article in the Lawrence Daily World on August 19, 1909.

The streetcar finally began running in September of 1909, and a front page article from the Lawrence Daily Journal on September 22nd was sure that the best was yet to come: “It will be but a matter of a few years until all the south side land is covered with residences. The natural growth rate of the city at the same rate of the last two years will mean that every lot in the south side additions will be needed in three years and with street cars and business, Lawrence is sure to grow faster than it has the past few years.” The very last line of the article admonished readers, “You must buy now.”

So what happened? How did we end up with the low benches and lights instead? The development boom appears to have fizzled shortly after the hype of the electric streetcars passed. By 1910, the real estate ads were back to a few columns by a few inches, down from regularly taking up an entire page of the paper in the summer of 1909, and by 1911 the ads were even less prominent, taking up only a few inches in a typeset column. People had been encouraged to buy the home lots as an investment, assured that they would quickly double in value or more. Yet there was never anyone to actually build homes on them. By my own rough estimate, it would have taken an influx of 3,000 people in 1909 to build homes on all of the empty lots that became available in that year alone.

Mentions of the Breezedale arch in the Lawrence papers stop after the initial articles and ads in August and September of 1909. I suspect that once the selling cooled down towards the end of that year, the developers saw no need to spend any more money on the arch, and modified it to the structures we see today. A 1912 publication from the Lawrence Journal celebrating Lawrence’s progress in the 50 years since Quantrill’s raid featured an advertorial for Charles Sutton, and showed his five model homes sitting by themselves, no other homes built three years after the opening of the development - the timeframe that the Daily Journal assured its readers would see that all the lots would have homes. In the end, it would be decades before Breezedale would be fully built out.

In 2008, the Breezedale addition and the five original houses would be added to the National Register of Historic Places, and in 2015, after years of neglect, the monuments themselves would be restored - to their 1912 version that is. Perhaps someday some old blueprints will come down from a dusty storage trunk in an attic, and reveal what could’ve been on the south side of 23rd and Massachusetts.

East side monument in 2013, with the bench removed, a passageway cut through, the large column leaning and all five light fixtures broken.

TRIVIA BONUSES

Basic Trivia: The electric streetcar line, so important to the development of south Lawrence 100 years ago, built a storage barn for its cars near 18th and Massachusetts. That barn still exists today as the On the Rocks liquor store. The garage openings for the cars are still visible in the side of the building.

Bar Trivia: The “granitoid sidewalks” so prominently advertised as a feature of the Breezedale development are a kind of concrete with large pebbles of granitic rock mixed in. At the time, it was considered a more attractive, more upscale type of cement. There are no extant granitoid sidewalks in Breezedale, and it is likely they were just another unfulfilled sales promise.

Showing Off Trivia: The original cost estimate for building the full archway in 1909 was $1,500. The cost to restore the much smaller monuments in 2013 was $55,000.

LFK Trivia: The lots platted and sold during the development frenzy of the early part of the century were still mostly empty even a decade later. According to the 1922 School Survey of Lawrence, Kansas, “It is an interesting fact that Lawrence is only about 50% occupied. Not more than one-half of all the lots in the city are occupied.”

A note on sources: Although I don’t treat this blog like an official research paper, I do try to find documentation for my work. I also want it to be readable and more informal, so while I will attribute direct quotes from sources, I don’t footnote every individual fact. Three key sources of information are: the Breezedale National Historic Register Registration Form, The Breezedale Monuments Restoration TEP Application Form, and the City of Lawrence’s Horizon 2020 Historic Preservation Plan Element.

But most of the information came from digging through Lawrence newspapers of the era. By going to the Kansas Historical Society’s Kansas Digital Newspapers site, anyone with a valid Kansas driver’s license can access hundreds of pre-1923 newspapers from across the state, and search by keywords.  

Lastly, I’ve called the east-west streets by their current numerical designations rather than the names they were at the time in order to avoid confusion about the locations.