Municipal Auditorium, the massive Art Deco complex in front of you, was completed in 1934 and has hosted some of the most significant events in Kansas City's cultural and political history. The complex contains three distinct performance spaces — the Music Hall, the arena, and the Little Theater — all housed within a single unified limestone building that takes up an entire city block. In the decades after its opening, Municipal Auditorium was the premier venue in Kansas City for conventions, concerts, sporting events, and political gatherings.
The 1928 Democratic National Convention that nominated Al Smith was held here; so were countless boxing matches, basketball games, and touring musical productions. The Music Hall was the home of the Kansas City Philharmonic for decades. In the 1940s, the same arena that hosted political conventions and symphony concerts also hosted some of the most celebrated jazz performances in Kansas City history, when touring orchestras from New York and Chicago played for packed, integrated audiences in defiance of the segregation that governed most public spaces in the city.
Municipal Auditorium represents the civic ambition of Depression-era Kansas City — the conviction that a great city required great public spaces, regardless of what the economic calendar said about timing.