Kansas City Public Library gives lowdown on ‘Great Places With Bad Reputations’
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It’s not just people who get bad reputations.
Places suffer from them, too — I can think of numerous examples in midtown alone — and sometimes they outlast the buildings.
That’s the idea behind a lecture titled “Great Places With Bad Reputations,” which local historian Joelouis Mattox delivers at 2 p.m. Sunday, October 11, at the Lucile H. Bluford Branch of the Kansas City Public Library (3050 Prospect).
Ahead of his talk, I asked Mattox to share his theories about just how certain places end up feared or loathed by citizens.
Sometimes, he tells me, it’s a “combination of location, lack of good management, the patrons, the people and — in some cases — music and liquor.”
Such an intersection of elements can be said to apply to, for instance, the Green Duck Tavern. It is still alive and well and operating at 2548 Prospect Avenue today, despite a haunted reputation. On July 15, 1970, local businessman and community activist Leon Jordan was gunned down while leaving the club, which he owned.
That crime occurred just after the era that dominates Mattox’s lecture — from 1954, when African-American residents of Kansas City began moving out of traditional black neighborhoods, to 1968, when race riots sent white middle-class families fleeing from East Side neighborhoods. But well before the 1960s, certain venues in Kansas City’s historic black neighborhoods had gotten bad reps for reasons not everyone remembers. Take the long-razed Castle Theater, a 782-seat moviehouse that stood for decades on 12th Street near the Paseo. It closed in 1952 but wasn’t razed until 1968.
“Middle-class African-Americans did not want their teenagers to see movies in that building,” Mattox says. “It had a terrible reputation, possibly because it was on 12th Street, which was pretty louche back in the day. There were loose women around and scandalous clubs. I’ve spoken to so many people who told me that their mothers forbade them to go in there.. It was not for respectable kids.”
Mattox adds that there were “management challenges” with the theater. Reports from 1968, when the theater was torn down, say that it was largely intact: The projectors were still in the projection booth, and seats remained bolted down in the auditorium.
Other subjects that Mattox plans to discuss are the Rhythm Lanes Skating Rink, Ray’s Golden Lounge, and Inferno Lounge on Troost. The latter is not the bar with a similar name that once operated at 11th and Independence Avenue, Dante’s Inferno, which later became one of Kansas City’s first drag bars. “The Inferno on Troost was completely different. It was a sophisticated nightclub club,” Mattox says.
Until the 1960s, the Inferno — famous for waitresses in devil costumes that had cigarette lighters sewn into the tail of the costumes — attracted national bands. “It was the hottest club in town in its day,” says restaurateur Steve Scudiero of the Villa Capri. “My Uncle ‘Scoots’ Scudiero ran it.”
“In those days,” says Chuck Haddix of KCUR’s Fish Fry program, “that stretch of Troost was considered a little risque and naughty.”
“That’s true,” Mattox says, “and then it got the reputation for being bad. Fights were breaking out in the clubs and in front of the clubs. People were afraid to go there anymore.”
Mattox says he expects that many people attending his lecture will share their own personal stories about famous places with bad reputations. “I know so many people who tell me, ‘Yes, I used to go there, but then I was baptized and I never went back.’ I think a lot of clubs lost patrons after they got saved.”
