City workhouse castle

The castle was designed by prominent Kansas City architects, A. Wallace Love and James Oliver Hogg, and built in 1897 with the title "workhouse castle". The structure's unusual four-story Romanesque Revival style in yellow limestone was in vogue at the time.[3]

Built as a city jail for petty offenders such as vagrants and debtors, it was constructed at a low cost to the city by using labor of the prisoners who quarried the limestone onsite. As a part of their sentences, the women sewed prison uniforms and the men labored for the city's public works department. Life was hard in the workhouse, reportedly including an "overcrowded, vermin-ridden dungeon". Some prisoners had social connections for procuring drugs, women, and the jail keys.[4]

In 1909, Mayor Thomas T. Crittenden, Jr. responded to the state of workhouse corruption by assigning the newly formed Board of Pardons and Paroles a broad authority of investigation and of conducting individualized paroles. In 1911, the board shut down the workhouse in favor of a work farm in the Leeds area.[4]

In 1924, the jail was closed. Across five decades, the workhouse castle and surrounding field would be periodically repurposed more than one dozen times including as a city storage facility, a Marine training camp, and a dog euthanasia center.[3]

The site was totally abandoned in 1972 and the castle became ruinous. Vacant for five more decades,[2] its roof collapsed and the interior floors followed. This let it fill with weeds, trees, and garbage, while vandals covered it in spraypainted graffiti.[3][5]

The castle entered the Kansas City Register of Historic Places on November 29, 2007.[6]

In 2015, the property was bought by the Kansas City Business Center for Entrepreneurial Development, which is a 501(c)(3) non-profit[7][8] business incubator for minorities and owned by Kansas City real estate investor Vewiser Dixon.[9] In 2016, community developers Dan and Ebony Edwards chose the abandoned castle in their mission to host their wedding in the process of scouting for a needy site to rehabilitate into a modern non-profit community event center. The intensive project was powered by hundreds of volunteer laborers and funded by $12,500 from a Community Capital Fund grant plus crowdfunding. The optimistic effort successfully removed all 62 total tons of trash, hosted the wedding, and left the property and stone structure again empty due to unspecified conflict.[2][10]

As of January 2020, the city has conditionally approved $1.2 million in tax money toward Dixon's proposal for the castle's restoration and the land's repurposing into a $20 million housing development.[2] The city then discovered that Dixon had been simultaneously under FBI investigation as of 2019 for allegedly committing financial fraud and death threats in the course of an unrelated housing development for the Black Economic Union. This controversy also prompted the proposal of an upgrade to the city's Ethics Code to introduce background checks of applicants, and the resignation of a tax board member under concern of potential conflict of interest due to his employment by Dixon's major investor.[11][2]