On a Crossroads block once known as Film Row, bronze stars embedded in the sidewalk celebrate Kansas Citians who went on to become Hollywood legends

If you’ve ever walked the stretch of 18th Street between Wyandotte and Baltimore in the Crossroads on a bustling First Friday, you’ve likely noticed dozens of open-door art galleries, street musicians and sidewalk sales. But you might have missed what’s lying just underfoot.

Embedded in the sidewalk along this block—cast in bronze and set into concrete designed to look like a strip of film—are the names of some of the most celebrated figures in Hollywood history. And they’re not just any names; they’re people who called Kansas City home long before they became legends. They’re part of what eventually became known as KC’s Film Row district. This district was a regional distribution center for major motion pictures at the time and one of roughly 35 similar districts dotting the country. It’s where physical reels of film were received, catalogued and circulated to theaters across multi-state territories before same-day shipping and streaming was a thing.

Filmmaker Butch Rigby, the founder of both Screenland Armour Theatre and KC’s own “walk of fame,” bought his first building on the row, the old Commonwealth Theaters headquarters (215 W. 18th St., KCMO), back in the ’90s. “I was out here buying my first building in 1994, before there was a Crossroads,” he says. “I was one of the original guys in the Crossroads.”

Kansas City’s movie district covered Missouri, Kansas and parts of Oklahoma and Nebraska. Studios including MGM, Columbia, Paramount, Universal, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox and United Artists all had a presence here. “Film rows were unique because they often had Art Deco-influenced architecture that was so prevalent with the studio system back in the 1930s,” Rigby says. “They were also fireproof because, until the early ’50s, film was made on nitrate, which was highly flammable. So the buildings were concentrated in one area, designed so that if there was a fire, it would be contained within a largely fireproof district.”

Kansas City’s Film Row is considered one of the last in the country to have kept its buildings largely intact, and most of their exteriors look just as they did 60 or 70 years ago, even though the spaces inside now house offices, apartments and other businesses.

In 1999, Rigby and collaborator John Schiff applied for a KC150 celebration grant, and the stars were born. “We came up with this idea that we would have a Walk of Stars in Kansas City featuring Kansas Citians who went on to Hollywood,” Rigby says. They commissioned bronze stars from Leawood-based Livers Bronze and set them into a sidewalk panel designed to look like a filmstrip. The inaugural honorees were all Kansas Citians: Walt Disney, Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford, William Powell and Robert Altman.

Rigby would like to see the Walk of Stars grow, with more stars and clearer way-finding signage. For him, the bronze names embedded in the sidewalk are reminders that Kansas City once played a vital role in how movies reached the rest of the country. “Nobody goes to Rome to see the strip malls outside of town,” he says. “The thing that makes our city unique is its history, the stories that can be told by the people who worked in these districts.” 

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