The Mainstreet Theater

On October thirtieth, nineteen twenty-one, the Mainstreet Theater opened its doors at Fourteenth and Main and instantly became the largest theater Kansas City had ever seen. Designed by the Chicago firm of Rapp and Rapp, the same architects who shaped movie palaces from Times Square to St. Louis, the Mainstreet held thirty-two hundred seats and spread across ninety thousand square feet of French Baroque splendor.

The interior dripped with ornamentation: painted ceilings, gilded plasterwork, columns that seemed imported from a Versailles wing. Outside, the facade blended neoclassical and French Second Empire elements. Kansas Citians who had never left the Midwest could walk through those doors and feel, briefly, that they were somewhere else entirely. The theater was so progressive it installed a nursery for children whose parents were watching the show, an almost unheard-of amenity in nineteen twenty-one.

But beneath the grandeur ran a shadowy convenience. A tunnel, so the story goes, connected the lower level to the President Hotel one block away at Fourteenth and Baltimore, and bootleggers are said to have used it during Prohibition to slip away from police raids. The Mainstreet became the largest theater in Kansas City and held that title until the Midland opened in nineteen twenty-seven.

Over the following decades the theater changed hands and names repeatedly, closing and reopening as tastes and ownership shifted. Today it survives as one of the few remaining grand movie palaces in the city, its bones intact beneath layers of renovation, a Beaux-Arts vault sitting in the heart of a power-and-light district that grew up around it.