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Crossroads Art District

Crossroad Art District


The Crossroads (officially the Crossroads Arts District) is a historic neighborhood near Downtown Kansas City, Missouri. It is centered at approximately 19th Street and Baltimore Avenue, directly south of the downtown loop and north of Crown Center. It is the city’s main art gallery district and center for the visual arts. Dozens of galleries are located in its renovated warehouses and industrial buildings. It is also home to numerous restaurants (including one operated by Lidia Bastianich), housewares shops, architects, designers, an advertising agency, and other visual artists. The district also has several live music venues. Numerous buildings in the neighborhood are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, including the TWA Corporate Headquarters Building, Western Auto Building, and Firestone Building. There are two historic groups of buildings also on the RegisterWorking Class Hotels at 19th & Main Streets (Midwest Hotel, Monroe Hotel, and Rieger Hotel) and Crossroads Historic Freight District (industrial buildings clustered along the tracks north of Union Station).

The Crossroads District is also home to one of the county’s largest remaining examples of a Film Row District, a.k.a. a Film Exchange district. There were once 32 major cities in the U.S. that had thriving Film Rows as early as the 1910s to the 1970s. Kansas City’s Film Row consists of 17 buildings (On 4-22-13 a 1946 building at the N.E. corner of 17th & Wyandotte, referred to as the Orion Pictures Building, was demolished to build a three-story parking garage.) Following the demolition, the entire Film Row District won a nomination for Missouri Preservation’s 2013 Most Endangered “Watch List”. For more information on Film Row, Friends of Film Row.org is organized to help educate and enhance Film Row’s future value and preservation. The Kansas City Star’s offices and printing facility are in Crossroads, as are The Pitch ‘s.