The first stadium ever built for a women's professional team stands on the Kansas City riverfront, and it has not had an empty seat since. CPKC Stadium at 1460 East Front Street on the Berkley Riverfront opened on 16 March 2024 with the Kansas City Current beating the Portland Thorns 5-4 before a sellout - Vanessa DiBernardo scoring the building's first goal. Current co-owners Angie Long, Chris Long and Brittany Mahomes had announced the privately funded project in October 2021, barely ten month.....

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.....

An entire downtown city block, roofed in translucent plastic pillows and wired for sound, functions as Kansas City's open-air living room. KC Live! - the heart of the Power and Light District at 13th and Grand Boulevard, directly across from the T-Mobile Center arena - opened in 2008 and hosts concerts, festivals and watch parties beneath its ETFE canopy for crowds in the thousands. The block was the centrepiece of downtown Kansas City's great revival bet: developer Cordish built the multi-bloc.....

A body-shop owner threw street parties with free beer to lure customers to the wrong side of the tracks - and accidentally built one of America's great roots-music venues. Knuckleheads, at 2715 Rochester Street in Kansas City's industrial East Bottoms, is a four-stage honky-tonk complex where Merle Haggard, Lucinda Williams, Jason Isbell and Sturgill Simpson have all played beside an active rail line. Frank and Mary Hicks ran Mid-City Collision Repair here and opened the F.O.G. Cycles Harley-Da.....

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.....