Midland renovation leaves the best intact

Hitting a home run in regard to downtown redevelopment in Kansas City requires fusing the old with the new.

While Kansas Citians longed for the day the blight that covered downtown would be reduced, we also wanted the jewels to remain. One of those valued relics was the Midland Theatre. Kansas Citians have so many fond memories there. It’s part of the enter­tainment fabric of Kansas City.

The Midland, which is undergoing renovation, isn’t due to open to the public until Sept. 9. However, I recently toured it and came away impressed. The Midland was just one of the stops on a tour of the Power & Light District led by officials with the Cordish Co., which developed and manages the area.

Some people may have feared that the Midland Theatre, constructed in 1927 in just one year, might never look the same once developers got their hands on it. However, nothing could be further from the truth.

At the corner of 13th Street and Walnut Avenue, Jon Stephens, director of marketing and public relations for Cordish, led us inside the Midland.

It looked like the Midland, where I saw stars like George Benson and the Jazz Crusaders do their thing many years ago.

The back of the venue features a new wooden bar fabricated in <st1:country-region>Ireland</st1:country-region>. The old seats on the first floor, brought in during a 1970 renovation, have been permanently removed. The upper level and mezzanine seats are a different story. Since they were the original seats, they were removed during renovation and sent to Minneapolis to be refurbished.

While the first floor seating area looks new, it actually is a floor poured over the original. “So nothing historic was removed,” Stephens said. “It’s just a reconfiguration of the main floor.”

In the place of those musty old seats on the first floor is new flexi­ble seating, which can be snapped in and out of place depending on the size of an event.

The original elaborate terra cotta ceilings and the ornate detail on the walls of the Midland haven’t been disturbed. In fact, they’ve been restored to their original look. The plaster-repair specialist who worked on Union Station flew in from <st1:country-region>England</st1:country-region> to work on the Midland.

Zed Smith, senior vice president of operations for Cordish, explained that the Midland, which has five floors, wasn’t viewed as a profitable operation by city officials.

“One of the problems the city had with the Midland is it wasn’t productive,” Smith said. “We’ll be utilizing all five levels for various events of different sizes. The changes that we’ve made, we’ve made simply to make it more productive. We’ve restored and retained what we could.”