On December 25, 1925, a string of Christmas lights hung over the doorway of the Mill Creek Building at the Country Club Plaza for the first time, beginning a tradition that today is one of the most extravagant Christmas light displays in the nation.

The Plaza shopping center had been conceived by Jesse Clyde "J. C." Nichols in 1912, when Brush Creek Valley was just an uninhabitable marsh with a nearby hog farm. J. C. Nichols, already a prominent real estate developer in areas south of Kansas City, believed that automobiles (as opposed to electric streetcars) would form the basis of future transportation. Therefore, the architects he hired, Edward Buehler Delk and George E. Kessler, planned the shopping center to have wide streets and considerable space devoted to convenient parking.

The location, five miles south of downtown Kansas City, seemed to pose a challenge. In an era in which virtually all upscale shopping occurred in the heart of cities connected to residential areas by electric streetcars, would shoppers drive their vehicles to a shopping center that was not downtown? When Nichols announced his plans in 1922, skeptics derided it as "Nichols’ folly."

Read the rest of the story at KC History.