Fake apartments. Drive down Main Street in Midtown, and you’ll find a storage warehouse across from Burger King at the corner of Armour Boulevard. Take Armour, turn onto Baltimore Avenue, and you might not think twice about the brick colonnade-style apartments on the corner that are common to the area. However, the apartments are actually fake.
Drone photography by KCtoday shows the facade ends at the roofline — it quickly turns into a half-city block of commercial space.
This 23-year-old compromise collided with modern social media in a TikTok video, where @laurenlosingit pointed out several key giveaway features. Those include:
- Several buildings are literally connected
- You can’t see in any of the windows
- There aren’t any gates in the fences
According to the Kansas City Star, the storage warehouse was built in 1998. However, residents on Baltimore didn’t want a big store disrupting their community. In order to appease the neighborhood + City Council, Storage Trust Properties agreed to spend $3 million to blend in with the surrounding homes.
Urban camouflage is actually a design practice used around the world. 23 + 24 Leinster Gardens in London takes a similar approach to KC. When the Metropolitan Line of their underground rail system cut through a wealthy neighborhood, engineers built fake facades to conceal a tunnel vent. It’s the same story at 58 Joralemon St. in Brooklyn, NY.
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