Nelle E. Peters, Prolific Apartment Building Designer

Architect Nelle Elizabeth Peters (1884 – 1974; née Nichols) was well-known in the 1920s for her efficient, economical, practical, and pleasing designs of numerous low- and mid-rise apartment and hotel buildings in Kansas City, Missouri and beyond.

Missouri Valley Special Collections, Kansas City Public Library, Kansas City, Missouri.

In 1927, Building Age called Peters’ Ambassador Hotel “one of the best recent examples of a combined apartment and commercial hotel.” Without mentioning the architect by name, the publication lauded the flexibility of the single room units, calling Peters’ design a “delight” and “a revelation to designers of this type of building.” Peters’ room plans included a closet designed to receive a “disappearing bed”—a bed that could rotate to vertical and roll out of sight—thereby transforming the single-room units from a bedroom into a parlor.

The Ambassador, from Building Age, November 1927.

Peters was born on a farm in North Dakota in 1884 and later moved with her family to southern Minnesota and then to Storm City, Iowa. After Peters finished college there in 1903, a sister suggested she practice architecture owing to her skill in both drawing and math. Peters described her childhood drawings as being like mechanical drawings which she attributed to her “millwright ancestors.”

Peters moved to Sioux City, Iowa, to look for work in an architect’s office. After being refused a position by all the local firms, she asked them each again. As the result of a bet between the partners at one firm, Peters was hired as a “draftslady.” The firm leaders learned she could in fact draw. In addition to working in an office, Peters also took correspondence courses to augment her architectural training. This was a common path into the profession at the time. Missouri did not adopt licensure requirements for architects until 1941.

After five years with the firm that first hired her, in 1907 Peters and another employee were sent to Kansas City to open another office. In 1909, Peters left to start her own practice. Over the next decade, Peters would design several low-rise apartment buildings built to help accommodate Kansas City’s growing population.

One of these three-story buildings was described in National Builder as “exceptionally well worked out to utilize the shallow lot.” Practical features noted by the builder’s magazine included “the back-to-back positions of the kitchens and inner bathrooms” to eliminate separate plumbing stacks, a “simple and effective” use of materials to add interest, and locating the kitchen to help contain cooking odors.

Peters married in 1911 and divorced in 1923. In 1913, she began working with the builder Charles E. Phillips of Phillips Building Company. She worked with Phillips until his death in 1955. While Phillips was a major client, Peters worked for other developers as well. At the end of her career, she said she had designed more than a thousand units of housing in the Midwest.

Peters was most prolific in the 1920s. After World War I ended, she began designing larger 18 to 24 unit projects, sometimes grouped in multiple-building complexes around a courtyard. In 1930, Architectural Record published photos and a drawing of one of Peters’ six-story buildings in Kansas City and a ten-story building in Tulsa, Oklahoma. While apartment buildings dominated her portfolio, Peters also designed a number of single-family and commercial buildings.

In 2009, a street in Kansas City was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the “Nelle E. Peters Troost Avenue Historic District.” It includes six buildings designed by Peters: Gerre Apartments and the five-building Spanish Court Apartments. Two other buildings of Peters’ design on the block had been demolished.

From 1929 to 1940, there was very little architectural work for anyone owing to the Great Depression. Peters closed her office in 1933 and supported herself as a seamstress and by writing and selling crossword puzzles until the economy recovered. Although she received little public notice after 1930, Peters practiced architecture even after her retirement in 1967 at age 83. Then she limited herself to small projects that did not require her to leave her home. Peters died in 1974.

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Sources:

E. S. Hanson, “When is a Bedroom?” Building Age (Vol. 49, No. 11, November 1928): 94 -97.

George Ehrlich and Sherry Piland, “The Architectural Career of Nelle Peters.” Missouri Historical Review (Vol. 83, No. 2, January 1989): 161-176.

“Apartment House for a Shallow Lot.” National Builder (June 1924): 48.

Sherry Piland, “Nelle Elizabeth Peters.” Pioneering Women of American Architecture.

Henry Wright, “The Place of the Apartment in the Modern Community, Architectural Record, Vol. 67, No. 3, March 1930: 245-246, 296.

National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form, “Peters, Nelle E., Troost Avenue Historic District,” 2009.