By Dan Verbeck
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kcur/local-kcur-989942.mp3
Kansas City, MO. – Kansas City's Municipal Auditorium turned 75 today as a party celebrated renovation of the building once termed "the best architecture in America." To the masses it was much, much more.
Municipal Auditorium has seen more events than you can count. There have been basketball tourneys, circuses, wrestling matches, and performances by musicians from Louis Armstrong to Elvis Presley.
There was a visit by John F. Kennedy before he won the 1960 Presidential Race. Attorney Mike Burke remembered seeing JFK wading out among people on 13th street shaking hands.
The building went up in midst of the 1930's depression and Mayor Pro Tem Cindy Circo said it brought two thousand needed construction jobs.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt attended the dedication in 1936.
Linsday Sanders looked over old photos taken during 1934 construction--"the city looks completely different. It's really interesting as a young person to see what it looked like then and even what it looked like ten years ago and what it looks like now."
Kansas City decided to take some of the exterior age off the old building and started renovation in 2010.
The design team cleaned the outside limestone, metals and granite. New lighting highlights the north and south sides of the building. Patty Weaver of the Lawrence firm Treanor Architects quotes a 1930's brochure that says the friezes and carved bas-relief medallions were supposed to portray "the intellectual and social purposes for which the building will be used."
Wrestling and Elvis were booked years later.
The goal of the renovation, inside and out, was to guarantee there will be a Municipal Auditorium 75 years into the future.