Jack Johnson slept in the manager's apartment because no Kansas City hotel would rent the heavyweight champion a room; Gypsy Rose Lee made her unplanned first burlesque appearance on the same stage in 1929. The Folly Theater at 300 West 12th Street opened on 23 September 1900 as the Standard Theatre - a Louis Curtiss design whose exposed lightbulbs showed off a technology barely a generation old - and it is now Kansas City's oldest theatre. Its century ran through every name and vice the entert.....

A sculptor opened a pizza joint to feed his art district - and ended up building one of Kansas City's favourite outdoor concert venues in the lot next door. Grinders, at 417 East 18th Street in the Crossroads Arts District, pairs a famously irreverent pizza-and-wings restaurant with Grinders KC Live, an open-air stage whose lawn holds around 3,000. Artist Stretch - the metal sculptor whose work marks buildings across the city - opened the restaurant in 2004 as the anchor of his block of studios.....

Forty percent of the audience sits beside or behind the orchestra - by design. Helzberg Hall, the concert hall of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts at 1601 Broadway in downtown Kansas City, opened on 16 September 2011 as the performance home of the Kansas City Symphony, a 1,600-seat vineyard-style room ranked among the finest concert halls built in America this century. The credentials are blue-chip: architect Moshe Safdie designed the Kauffman Center's swooping steel shells - the bui.....

Housed within the Crown Center complex in the heart of Kansas City, the LEGOLAND Discovery Center is an indoor attraction devoted entirely to the beloved plastic bricks. One of a worldwide family of such centres, it caters above all to young children and their families, gathering interactive play areas, gentle rides and brick-built displays under one roof for a self-contained few hours of imaginative fun. A standout feature is the elaborate miniature world, where master builders have recreated .....

The stage is built on a vintage flatbed truck, and the venue exists because 2020 handed Kansas City lemons. Lemonade Park, at 1628 Wyoming Street in the West Bottoms stockyards district, is the outdoor music garden that restaurateurs Wes Gartner and Jill Myers of Voltaire and recordBar co-owner Steve Tulipana improvised in a parking lot during the pandemic - and never stopped running. The origin is in the name: with restaurants shuttered and stages silent in the summer of 2020, Gartner looked a.....

The house organist went on to score Looney Tunes - Carl Stalling played the Madrid's Wurlitzer before Walt Disney and Warner Brothers called. The Madrid Theatre, at 3810 Main Street in midtown Kansas City, opened on 29 May 1926 as a Spanish Revival movie palace and now works as one of the city's most atmospheric concert and event venues. The 1926 opening was silent-era showmanship: the 400,000-dollar, 1,500-seat house opened with the film Steppin' Out, a live stage show, Hollywood star Reginald.....

Thousands of visitors cycle through on First Fridays, when the gallery throws its doors open with local art on the walls and regional bands and DJs on the stage. MOD Gallery and Space, at 1809 McGee Street in the heart of Kansas City's Crossroads Arts District, opened on 2 October 2009. The self-definition is on the door: MOD - bold and free in style - operates as an art gallery and event space with a hip downtown vibe, hanging new cutting-edge exhibits every month and selling work by the city'.....

Placido Domingo sang the opening gala on 16 September 2011, inaugurating a hall whose stainless-steel north facade rises from the ground like a wave. The Muriel Kauffman Theatre is the larger of two venues inside the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts at 1601 Broadway Boulevard in downtown Kansas City. The architect was Moshe Safdie: his 285,000-square-foot double-shell design places the 1,800-seat theatre and the 1,600-seat Helzberg Hall as distinct structures under one glass roof, the Br.....

The Art Deco lighting fixtures in this hall were so admired that they inspired the Sky Stations sculptures atop Bartle Hall's pylons decades later. The Music Hall, inside Kansas City's Municipal Auditorium at 301 West 13th Street, opened on 14 June 1936 and remains one of the country's finest streamline moderne theatres. The building was a Depression-era statement: the limestone, concrete and steel Municipal Auditorium cost 6.5 million dollars - over a million of it a federal Public Works Admin.....

A cornerstone of the live-music scene in Kansas City, recordBar is a much-loved venue and bar in the lively Crossroads Arts District. After years in an earlier location, the venue relocated to its home on Grand Boulevard, bringing its blend of quality live music, food and drink to one of the city's most creative neighbourhoods and cementing its reputation as a favoured room for touring and local acts alike. The venue is an intimate space holding a few hundred people, combining a stage and music.....