New York Life Building

Kansas City, United States

Exterior only

Visible from the street; the inside is private.

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The New York Life Building stands at 20 West Ninth Street in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, occupying the northeast corner of Ninth and Baltimore Avenue. Designed by Frederick Elmer Hill of the prominent New York firm McKim, Mead & White in Italian Renaissance style, the building was completed in August 1889 as a commercial structure for the New York Life Insurance Company. Upon completion, it was Kansas City's tallest building and the first in the city equipped with elevators. The structure features an "H"-shaped plan with two pairs of ten-story wings connected by a central twelve-story tower, with brick and brownstone facades on Ninth Street and Baltimore Avenue elaborately decorated with multiple tiers of arched windows. The building originally included light courts flanking the wings and initially housed banks and law firms. After various ownership changes and uses throughout the twentieth century, including a significant renovation by UtiliCorp in 1996, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-Saint Joseph purchased it in 2010 for administrative offices. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.