The Country Club District is a group of neighborhoods forming a historic upscale residential district in Kansas City, developed by noted urban planner and real estate developer J. C. Nichols.
It was developed in stages, between 1906 and 1950, for a predominantly white, Anglo-Christian, upper-class and upper-middle-class regional monoculture that still exists in large part to this day, well over a century after the first home was erected. Called "a vast expanse of sylvan beauty," the District is home to approximately 60,000 and includes such well-known Kansas City neighborhoods as Sunset Hill and Brookside in Missouri, Mission Hills, Fairway, and the oldest parts of Prairie Village in Kansas. Ward Parkway, a wide, manicured boulevard, traverses the district running south from the Country Club Plaza, arguably the first multi-block, outdoor suburban shopping center in the United States. By the time developer Nichols died in 1950, the Country Club District covered more than 6,000 acres, making it the largest contiguous planned community built by a single developer in the United States.