Looking back at 20 years of neglected promise at 18th and Vine — and forward to 2020

On September 5, 1997, 1,500 people packed 18th Street between the Paseo and Highland. In the Gem theater, Harry Belafonte and Billy Dee Williams hosted a black-tie gala. The stars performing included Tony Bennett, Al Jarreau, George Duke, Diane Reeves, David Sanborn, Pat Metheny and Jay McShann. They had come to celebrate the opening of a jazz museum, one meant to herald the rebirth of Kansas City’s historic 18th and Vine district.

A block-long red carpet lined 18th Street. False fronts hid grassy lots and decorated the Boone Theater just beyond the Gem, and historic buildings along Vine Street. The fronts mostly remained from Robert Altman’s movie Kansas City, some of which the director had filmed in the district a couple of years before. They primed the illusion of a streetscape ready for its closeup.

Twenty years later, the false fronts are gone.

Today, entering the district from the west, on 18th Street at the Paseo, visitors are greeted by a pair of signs. One sits atop a building on the northeast corner, illuminated at night by giant red, green and blue letters, facing Interstate 70 and announcing: “18th & Vine District.” It would better fit Disneyland. On the southeast corner, in a grassy lot, a signboard propped with sandbags proclaims: “Celebrating the Progress and Improvements Made in the 18th & Vine District.”

Just to the south, at 1815 Paseo, the Holy Ghost New Testament Church sits empty, pocked by gaping holes burned through its roof and windows and littered by yellow caution tape that stretches across its front door. A cornerstone dates to 1926. A faded sign on the front admonishes, “Don’t Give Up!”

Along the south side of 18th Street, between the Paseo and Vine, one original building still stands, walled off by fences and plywood. Its roof and back wall have burned away. A banner hanging from one fence reads, “Welcome to 18th & Vine.” One of the plywood panels bears an image of Count Basie in a hard hat, and the words “Let’s get these museums built!” This building once was the office of the Kansas City Monarchs, the city’s Negro Leagues baseball club.

In the 1930s, along the north side of this stretch of 18th Street, stood the Street Hotel, with the original Blue Room nightclub; the Subway Club, where legendary musicians like Mary Lou Williams, Lester Young and Ben Webster jammed. There also was the Shannon Building, with a third-floor boxing club where Joe Louis sparred. Those structures have been gone for decades. Today, buildings erected during the district’s restoration line the street with a mix of anonymous offices and empty storefronts.

Turn south onto Vine, between 18th and 19th streets, and the first remaining building on the right is another burned shell. Next to it is an empty lot, where once stood the Kentucky Tavern. The next door down was the Cherry Blossom, the nightclub where Bill Basie was first billed as Count, and where, in December 1933, Kansas City musicians brought down a visiting Coleman Hawkins, then recognized as “the king of tenor sax,” in a legendary jam session that alerted the music world that something amazing was happening here. The building burned in 1984; only a braced façade remains. Across the street stood the Booker T. Washington Hotel, where musicians like Hawkins stayed. At the end of the block, on the northwest corner, the Roberts Building, boarded but standing, was the first African-American-owned auto dealership in America.

This is one of the most significant blocks of 20th century American history in Kansas City. An infusion of city funds is bracing and saving its historic remains. A popular barber shop and a new restaurant fill a couple of storefronts on the east side of the road. There are signs of hope. But mostly, this street is a mess.

The next block east is different. Midway between 18th and 19th streets, on Highland, you’ll find a remarkable transformation. The last five single-family homes in the district and the former Rochester Hotel have been renovated into senior housing. The block dead-ends with apartments on one side, and a multifamily-home development across 19th Street. All of this surrounds Kansas City’s jazz jewel, the Mutual Musicians Foundation. The Foundation, a National Historic Landmark, was the black musicians’ union hall until this city’s segregated unions merged, in 1970. For more than 80 years, the building has jumped with overnight jam sessions, which continue to this day on Friday and Saturday nights from 1 to 5 a.m. This half-block is the best place to experience what the jazz district must have felt like at its height.

More than the jazz and Negro Leagues museums, these blocks define the dichotomy of the district two decades after its rebirth was declared. Colorful signs welcome visitors but sit amid burned shells. One street sparkles with fresh renovations and life; another sits full of history but mired in disgraceful disrepair.

Eighteenth and Vine is facing two important centennials in 2020, certain to draw attention. On February 20, 1920, the charter creating the Negro Baseball Leagues was signed at the Paseo YMCA, which still stands at 1824 Paseo. The Negro Leagues were home to some of baseball’s greatest players and ultimately fed the integration of Major League Baseball. On August 29, 1920, saxophonist Charlie Parker was born. Parker, whose innovations have influenced a staggering amount of the music that followed him, grew up here. He was mentored in a club that stood next to the Kansas City Call building on 18th Street. Today, that space is a lot filled with weeds.

The focus at 18th and Vine is on jazz, but jazz never thrived here on its own. In the 1930s, it was part of a culture of gangsters, Prohibition-era booze, gambling, prostitution and segregation. Journalist Edward R. Murrow wrote that Kansas City then was home to “the greatest sin industry in the world.” Jazz was the score to all that sin. Kill that culture, and jazz needs new partners. Alone it cannot spark a district. It never did.

Baseball may provide the answer.

Behind the museums, Parade Park is giving way to four baseball diamonds with lights and bleachers and a half-mile walking trail. This is the first phase of the Major League Baseball Urban Youth Academy. A brochure touting the city’s latest improvement plan for the district explains that the goal of the academy “is to serve approximately 800 to 1,000 youth per year, ages 6 to 18, providing free, year-round baseball and softball instruction and play, including hosting tournaments, coaching clinics and skills camps. The Academy’s aim also is to provide youth with access to tutoring programs, college prep classes, college and career fairs, financial literacy and internship programs, courses teaching math through the use of baseball statistics and MLB industry alternative career workshops.”

The academy will bring a new constituency to the neighborhood, ready to form fresh opinions. The hope is that more visitors and a new $7 million investment by the city will attract businesses to fill the empty storefronts. Yet, with false fronts long gone, the historic heart of 18th and Vine today looks worse than it did at its grand opening celebration.

Twenty years on from what was supposed to be a new glory, the district has yet to find itself. Now, it has a little less than two and a half years before its 2020 closeup. History is owed a better effort than what has been paid so far.