18th and Vine is east of
Downtown Kansas City and is the
metropolitan area's historic center of
African American culture. In 1991, the national
historic district encompassing 35 contributing buildings was listed on the
National Register of Historic Places. In the 1990s, parts of the film
Kansas City were filmed there, and façades left from the movie remained on most of the dilapidated buildings until the end of the decade. The 18th and Vine neighborhood includes the
Mutual Musicians Foundation, the
Gem Theater, the long-time offices of
African-American newspaper The Call, the Blue Room jazz club, the
American Jazz Museum, the
Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, Smaxx Restaurant, a restaurant inside the Juke House and Blues Club, and several apartments and condos. The Historic Lincoln Building serves as a hub of professional and business activity in the Black community, restored in the early 1980s by the
Black Economic Union of Kansas City. Six blocks to the north, the former intersection of 12th Street and Vine is the subject of
Leiber & Stoller's song "
Kansas City" in 1952, adapted by
Little Willie Littlefield as "Kansas City Lovin" and adapted by
Little Richard,
Wilbert Harrison, and
the Beatles. Vine Street no longer intersects with 12th Street, where a housing project was built over it. The city has since erected a street sign in a park near the housing project to mark the former 12th and Vine. The neighborhood has long suffered epidemic blight, with huge portions being juggled for decades between unproductive owners and their countless colossal visions and broken promises of rehabilitation. It has been the focus of more than $30 million of civic investment since the late 1980s, but redevelopment has struggled. In 2001, the Kansas City area manager of
Bank of America proposed a $46 million redevelopment of 96 acres of blight across the District but canceled in 2005 ahead of the global crash of 2008, selling much of it to KC native millionaire Ephren W. Taylor II who likened his invisible investments to the comic book antihero
The Phantom. Actually a
con artist, Taylor promised in 2006 to develop his large Jazz District property into 42 homes plus a community center or museum within the nearby historic
city workhouse castle, but was instead convicted of a
Ponzi scheme defrauding Black churchgoers of millions of dollars and then federally imprisoned. From 2016 to 2020, pending a federal investigation into corruption. ==References==