This article from Future - a Kansas City good government, anti-corruption magazine provides this vivid description of the jazz club scene during the Great Depression and why Kansas City was considered a “wide-open” town.

The first edition of The Future, a weekly, was published in January 1935 and sold for 5 cents and offered readers this commentary on the purpose of the new publication.

“Future comes to you under no disguises; it is not a subtle crusading sheet for any political party. It will discuss the news, local, state, national, foreign, endeavoring to express the facts as it sees them. Nor is its function to moralize; it is not against this, that and the other individual vice or racket—it is for a system of government which cannot contain the greed and grail which is their breeding ground.

Future has no obligations, is not operated for profit, and is in competition with no one.”

Source: The Pendergast Years: Kansas City in the Jazz Age and the Great Depression. Kansas City Public Library

FUTURE: March 29, 1935

Last Sunday in Chicago, the Club Rendezvous burned to the ground. Death and horror ended the merry-making in that typical night club. 

The results of the tragedy will undoubtedly be an investigation of some sort or other of the smaller night clubs about Chicago. It might well be duplicated in Kansas City for there are more night clubs per capita in Kansas City than in any other city in the United States, and many of them are well designed fire traps. 

Three hundred or more clubs, saloons, hotels, joints and dives—a numerically impressive collection that give Kansas City its reputation as a “hot, wide open town.” The majority of these spots are small, obscure and ephermeral, stemming directly from speakeasies. 

They are so much alike in decor, entertainment, choice of beverages and patrons that only the name distinguishes one from the other. Take an old store room, several bolts of black, red or blue tarlatan, several cans of silver radiator paint, a secondhand bar and a ditto bartender and you have the makings of the average second class Kansas City night club. 

Your music will be supplied by a 3-piece orchestra who hammer out dance music for whatever coins fall into the yawning and ubiquitous kitty. The floor show, if any, can be made up of old burlesque acts, amateurs, or friends of the proprietor who are willing to oblige. 

The liquor is generally bootleg. Crawford County corn is the favored beverage. During prohibition a taste was developed for this brew made by the Sicilian miners in Kansas. The taste for it persists. It is economical to dispense, powerful in action and tastes enough like rye, bourbon and Scotch to pass for any of the three if doctored a little. 

We decided to make a calm, fairly sober analysis of this second rate phase of our city’s night life; of those small, prolific places that bloom and fade rapidly despite the protection afforded them by the police and the powers that be. We started our investigations at 10:30 on a Friday night and closed them with the dawn. We did not go in a spirit of muckraking. 

We went to see and hear, hoping to find out why so many intelligent citizens spend their money and time sitting in these little unlovely places, breathing smoke and dust, drinking inferior beer and terrible whisky or plain strong alcohol, listening to generally wretched music and watching floor shows that are either embarrassingly stupid or stupidly indecent. We never found the answer, but we submit a detailed report for your consideration. 

We went first to Dante’s Inferno, a small building with a smaller entrance. The interior is decorated with a lurid red substance which must be as inflammable as the flames of hell it symbolizes. We were there for the first show, an extremely unpleasant ordeal, for the female impersonators who gave it were an inept and pitiful lot. 

One of them came to our table, sat down in all his finery and ordered a sherry flip. Kansas City, he lisped, was the crudest place he had ever worked in. “The folks here are sure dumb. They don’t get nothing subtle.”

He went on to explain that he worked on a circuit which extended from New York to New Orleans; made pretty good money, but had to spend a lot of it on snappy costumes. He was wearing, at the time, a little tulle model decorated grotesquely with a bunch of bananas. 

One look at the croupiers behind the gambling table decided us against trying our luck there. We left just as the soft-spoken Mr. Lusco was arguing with two young men patrons in an attempt to prevent them from dancing together. 

From there we went to the Hey Hay Club. Our 10-cent beer was served in 26-ounce schooners and tasted of soap, ether, sour mash and, oddly enough, onions. There were several depressed and unescorted women perched about wistfully on other bales of hay. 

We then progressed to a spot which no longer operates, called, rather accurately, The Dump. The activities in The Dump consisted of a large gambling table and a colored hootch dancer. Again, we passed up the gambling and watched the dancer; we ordered and attempted to drink a Scotch highball (25 cents), recognizing it to be Crawford County corn served with lemon peel and sweet soda.