Robert Ostertag House

Pioneering Kansas City architect Mary Rockwell Hook designed this home for Robert A. Ostertag, President of the Janssen-Ostertag Manufacturing Company, in 1922. Hook designed many of the prominent homes in Kansas City in that era, and the Ostertag House demonstrates that even some of Hook's less grandiose designs still attract attention in Kansas City's mansion-filled Ward Parkway. Despite facing many obstacles as a female architect, Hook gained a reputation as one of Kansas City's most innovative. Most of her designs were built in Kansas City early in Hook's career, from roughly 1908 to 1927, but she also managed a rebuilding project in Paris after World War I. Hook completed projects in other parts of the U.S. in her later years and she spent the last fifteen years of her career (into her 70s) designing resorts and hotels in Florida. The longevity of her career matched her life as Hook lived past the age of 100. 

Mary Rockwell Hook's father, Bertrand, left the Union Army after the Civil War in 1865 and settled near Fort Riley in Junction City, Kansas. He founded both a mercantile business and a grain company and later became a bank president. Mary Rockwell (born 1877) was the middle child of five daughters. Bertrand's wealth allowed him to send his daughters to what he considered superior schools in the Northeast U.S. Mary Hook studied at Dana Hall, a girls' preparatory school in Wellesley, Massachusetts, which led her to enroll at Wellesley College, which she attended from 1896 to 1900. 

The Rockwell family traveled to several locations worldwide, including Asia, the Pacific Islands, Canada, and the U.S., which allowed Mary to witness an array of architecture that inspired her to pursue a postgraduate architectural degree. In 1903, at the age of twenty-six, she spent the year studying in the architecture department of the Art Institute of Chicago. After a term teaching English in Puerto Rico and trips to Venezuela and Sicily, Mary Rockwell Hook's second period of architectural instruction came in Paris in 1905 in an atelier préparatoire directed by a recent graduate of the lauded Ecole des Beaux-Arts. 

She studied in Paris as the only female student, alongside seven other American men who did not think too kindly of her. Indeed, finding acceptance among her male peers proved exceptionally difficult. Nevertheless, she faced the gender bias head-on and returned from Paris with a mission to succeed as an architect. The first office to which Hook applied refused her because of her sex, but the second, a prominent firm — Howe, Hoit & Cutler — welcomed her. 

Two years later, in 1908, Hook began to design homes, mainly for Kansas City's wealthiest residents. The Ostertag arose in 1922 when Hook's architectural work began to slow down. At the tail end of World War I, from 1917-1918, Hook lived in New York, specifically Greenwich Village, and worked for a Post Office translating "Spanish trade mail." In the spring of 1920, Hook joined the American Committee for Devastated France, organized by the philanthropic daughter of J. P. Morgan, and traveled to an area of Paris destroyed during the war. Morgan selected Hook to supervise rebuilding hospitals and schools and organizing technical assistance programs for the district's farmers. 

In 1921, the year before building the Ostertag House, Hook (still Mary Rockwell at the time) returned from France and married Inghram D. Hook. In the early 1920s, the Rockwell and Hook families bought three adjacent home sites at the crest of a hillside serviced by a cul-de-sac drive. Hook started with arguably the most famous of the three, the "Pink House," where the Hooks lived from 1924-1931. And, close to those three lots, Hook also built the house for Janssen-Ostertag Manufacturing Company president Robert A. Ostertag in the same year. 

As a wealthy business owner in a large house, Ostertag's presence speaks to the abundance of luxurious residential estates along Kansas City's Ward Parkway, a development conceived and organized by famed urban planner J.C. Nichols as part of his plan for the Country Club District, where Hook also built a mansion for her parents. The parkway plan consisted of large lots, extensive green space, ornate parks, and several statues purchased in Europe. Many of the communities along Ward Parkway included racial covenants and rules that prevented or outright forbade Jewish families and people of color from owning property. The iconic Kansas City boulevard connected exclusive communities that were explicitly restricted to white residents in the first half of the 20th century.

The house sitting just east of the actual Parkway speaks to its less-extravagant nature than the grand estates lining the main Parkway, but the timeless design still attracts attention, as does the home's connection to one of the city's most prominent female architects. From 1924-1929, Hook maintained an architectural partnership with Eric Douglas MacWilliam Remington, who also studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Still, Hook began to split her time between being a wealthy suburban wife and mom (of two adopted sons) and a professional architect. In 1927, she completed her last Kansas City home when she designed the grand Four Gates Farm for her longtime friend Marvin Gates and his family, affluent Kansas City residents.

In 1935, at age 58, Hook purchased fifty-five acres of shore property on Siesta Key, south of Sarasota, Florida. She spent the next fifteen years (roughly) designing an informal resort hotel, two vacation homes, and a guest house. Finally, at around age 73, she decided to end her career. But Mary Rockwell Hook lived beyond the age of 100, dying in 1978 at age 101.

Coleman, Daniel. "Mary Rockwell Hook: Architect, 1877 – 1978." Kansas City Public Library. Accessed June 16, 2024. https://kchistory.org/document/biography-mary-rockwell-hook-1877-1978-architect.

Dent, Mark. "The Man Who Made the Suburbs White." Slate.com. August 16, 2023. https://slate.com/business/2023/08/jc-nichols-covenants-segregation-development-zoning.html.

Ford, Susan Jezak. J. C. Nichols: Developer: 1880-1950. Kansas City Public Library. Accessed June 17, 2024. https://kchistory.org/document/biography-j-c-nichols-1880-1950-developer. 

"Mary Rockwell Hook: Ahead of Her Time." Architectural Observer. July 16, 2018. https://architecturalobserver.com/mary-rockwell-hook-ahead-of-her-time/. 

Piland, Sherry and Elaine Ryder. "Nomination Form: Residential Structures by Mary Hook." National Register of Historic Places. nps.gov. 1983. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/51eda1d5-081f-475f-8749-a775f2158c53. 

Powers, Mathew and Clio Admin. "Bertrand Rockwell House." Clio: Your Guide to History. June 13, 2024. https://theclio.com/entry/182735. 

--- --- ---. "Four Gates Farm." Clio: Your Guide to History. January 29, 2022. https://theclio.com/entry/145381.

--- --- --- "Mary Rockwell Hook's Pink House." Clio: Your Guide to History. June 14, 2024. https://theclio.com/entry/182782.