American Jazz Museum

In the 1930s and 1940s the blocks around 18th and Vine were the center of Black Kansas City, its businesses and churches and the clubs where a Kansas City sound was worked out by bandleaders such as Bennie Moten and later by Charlie Parker, who grew up in Kansas City. The American Jazz Museum opened on September 5, 1997, as the Kansas City Jazz Museum, with a three-day celebration on a red-carpeted 18th Street, in the building it shares with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.

The permanent galleries follow four musicians, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington, with artifacts, photographs and listening stations, and a studio where visitors try rhythm, harmony and improvisation by hand. The museum, a Smithsonian affiliate, holds the alto saxophone Parker played at the 1953 Massey Hall concert in Toronto with Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus and Max Roach. The visitor center's film, A People's Journey, narrated by Lucile Bluford, tells the district's history.

The Blue Room is named for the 1930s club in the Street Hotel and is both an exhibit and a club, with more than twenty shows a month. The Gem Theater across 18th Street opened in 1912 as the Star, a silent movie house for Black Kansas City, and took its present name in 1913. Parker's bronze statue stands behind the museum near Vine and 17th Terrace.