The Country Club Plaza is the oldest planned shopping district in America and the only one that anyone would actually call beautiful. J.C. Nichols had it built starting in 1922, modeled on Seville — terra-cotta roofs, tile work, a continuous Spanish arcade along the storefronts, and over the years the fountains accumulated. There are now forty-seven of them in fifteen blocks, and they are not decorative in the way that fountains usually are. They run because the moving water cools the air. The Plaza reads, by our model, about six degrees below the surrounding streets at 3 PM in July.
The picks below all stay under the arcades for as much of the walk as possible. The arcade on Nichols Road is the most continuous; the one on 47th Street has a few breaks where the newer buildings did not match the line. The Mill Creek Park stretch at the western end is the shadiest piece of the system, where the planted sycamores join with the arcade cover. The eastern end past Wornall opens up — the original plan stopped there.