Kansas City Museum

About this museum

Kansas City is a city of grand gestures, from its celebrated barbecue to its fountains to the jazz tradition that emerged from its clubs in the 1930s - and the Kansas City Museum, occupying a seventy - room Beaux - Arts mansion on Gladstone Boulevard, matches that civic ambition in stone and plaster and permanent exhibitions. The Corinthian Hall mansion was built in 1910 for Robert Alexander Long, a lumber baron whose fortune was measured in tens of millions of dollars, and the scale of the building reflects that wealth without apology: grand staircases, formal reception rooms, coffered ceilings, and grounds that once made this one of the showplaces of the Missouri side of the metropolitan area. Today the mansion and its surrounding outbuildings house the collections of the Kansas City Museum, with exhibitions that trace local and regional history from Indigenous settlement through the cattle drives and railroads that made Kansas City a continental hub, through the jazz age and the decades of urban transformation that followed. The result is one of the most architecturally spectacular settings for a local history museum anywhere in the Midwest. With a rating of 4.7 stars from nearly 700 visitor reviews, the Kansas City Museum has built a devoted audience that returns for new exhibitions and community programming. Admission is free. The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 AM to 5 PM, with extended Thursday hours until 8 PM, and Sunday from noon to 5 PM; Monday is closed. The Kansas City Museum is located at 3218 Gladstone Boulevard. This is one of the Midwest's most rewarding free cultural experiences.