![]() 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. 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. ![]()
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