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.
If you have something around the metro you’d like KCtoday to explore, send us an email with the button below.