![]() If the true glory days of east 12th Street were the years before and directly after World War II, it was still one of Kansas City’s liveliest thoroughfares in 1952, when Leiber and Stoller wrote their famous tune. KCUR 89.3 The informational kiosk at 12th and Vine is so faded it's illegible. She didn’t think the musicians who played there were very hot.” And Etta James, who was one tough cookie. I saw Dinah Washington perform there and Billie Holiday. “I had to bring my aunt as a chaperone,” Bey recalls. In the late 1940s, an ambitious teenage singer from Kansas City, Kansas, named Queen Bey wangled a regular Monday night gig at the Orchid Room, one of the busiest nightspots at 12th and Vine. This is the nightclub where, in 1935, Count Basie formed his first orchestra, where Charlie Parker allegedly earned his “Yardbird” nickname, and where black and white patrons could mingle “Skirting the black-and-tan fringe area of 12th Street,” according to one report. Operated by “Papa” Sol Stibil, it reportedly stayed open 24 hours a day. The “queen of Kansas City jazz clubs” was the legendary Reno Club, several blocks west of The Paseo at 602 East 12th. It had jazz clubs, cafes, taverns, honky tonks, and barbecue joints.” “The biggest movie theater in the neighborhood was the Castle, which seated over 1,500 people. “It was much more of a jumping entertainment corridor than 18th Street was,” Haddix says. ![]() Kansas City Public Library The south side of 12th Street east of Vine, photographed as part of the Jackson County Tax Assessment project of 1940. The true heyday of the stretch of 12th Street between Paseo and Woodland was the 1920s, says Chuck Haddix, director of the Marr Sound Archives and longtime host of KCUR’s Fish Fry program. Back in the 1850s, the place was a heavily wooded forest where the “largest black bear was ever killed in the state of Missouri,” according to a 1928 newspaper article.įorty years later, small clapboard cottages lined the street, “starter homes” for young working class couples like Molly Cronin and her Irish-born streetcar driver husband Cornelius, who later became a Kansas City police captain and even later, as a pal of Tom Pendergast’s, a millionaire. The lyric has long outlasted the street.īut 12th Street is still very much alive in fabulous memories. ![]() The song, first recorded in 1952, has achieved an almost iconic status over the last half-century (it was officially adopted as Kansas City’s theme song in 2005), although there hasn’t actually been a corner at 12th Street and Vine since the 1960s, when an urban renewal project led to much of 12th Street east of The Paseo, being razed. Why did the songwriters of “Kansas City” – Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller two 19-year-old students in Los Angeles who had never been to Kansas City – write lyrics about 12th Street?
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