![]() ![]() There are no national chain stores around 18th and Vine. However, unlike Kansas City’s Power & Light District, where national developers have built a tax-subsidized entertainment complex, the revitalization effort in the Jazz District has been incremental, piecemeal and all local. In 1997, as mayor, Cleaver committed the city to fund streetscape and other improvements and create a quasi-public, quasi-private agency, the Jazz District Redevelopment Corporation ( JDRC), to plan and oversee redevelopment efforts in the district. ![]() Even before his election to the first of two terms as mayor in 1991, Cleaver, as a city council member whose district included 18th and Vine, advocated for the district’s redevelopment. Chief among them was Emanuel Cleaver II, a pastor who was the city’s first black mayor. Still, many in the city’s black community held out hope that the onetime hub could be restored to prominence. in 2006, a bill granting the foundation an exemption quickly passed in the state legislature.) (When police cited the popular club for serving alcohol after the city closing time of 3 a.m. But the nightlife had long since disappeared the one surviving link to the area’s jazz heyday was the Mutual Musicians Foundation ( MMF), which hosts all-night jazz jam sessions on weekends. The offices of The Call, the city’s black newspaper, remained there, and some of the historic buildings that housed community institutions still stood. But the East Side is still lacking concentrated investment and feels physically disconnected from other areas of the city that have grown more popular recently.įor decades, 18th and Vine was the core of the city’s black “downtown.” (For those who saw Robert Altman’s 1996 film Kansas City, the scenes involving jazz clubs were shot in the area.) The trouble was, by 1996, the area around 18th and Vine had largely emptied out. Local agencies have made progress in recent years on residential real estate, historic preservation and the attraction of some noteworthy cultural institutions. But the joint certainly isn’t jumpin’ the way it was in the early 20th century, or the way the city and the developers of the 18th and Vine Jazz District hoped it would when they undertook a major effort to revitalize the area in the late 1990s. “Dying” is actually too strong a word to describe the situation at 18th and Vine, the onetime heart of Kansas City’s black business district on the East Side. The Mutual Musicians Foundation was listed on the Kansas City Register of Historic Places on July 24, 1980.One of the problems facing just about anyone who seeks to reshape Kansas City, Missouri, is this: One side of the city is doing all right while the other appears to be dying on the vine. A living museum, the Foundation preserves and develops Kansas City's rich musical heritage.Įxplore the online exhibit at UMKC’s LaBudde Special Collections “ Musician’s Local 627.” supports the Mutual Musicians Foundation and its programs. ![]() The Foundation also serves as a rehearsal space for members, a classroom for visiting students and a place for private parties. ![]() A National Historic Landmark, the building is also entered in the National Register of Historic Places and the Kansas City Landmarks Commission Register.Īs they have since 1930, musicians gather at the Foundation Friday and Saturday nights after midnight to jam into the early morning hours. In 1979, the Foundation was prominently featured in Bruce Ricker's film, The Last of the Blue Devils. The Mutual Musicians Foundation, Inc., originally incorporated to manage the building and assets of Local 627, continued operating the building as a social club for musicians and fans after the merger with Local 34 in 1970. Today, the tradition jams on at the Mutual Musicians Foundation, located on the former site of Local 627 at 1823 Highland Ave., in the heart of the historic 18th and Vine District. ![]()
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