The Hotel Rochester

Just one block off of 18th street, in the heart of Kansas City's 18th and Vine jazz district, sits the dilapidated Hotel Rochester. It's boarded up now, the windows covered with plywood, reminding me of the See No Evil monkey with its hands over its eyes. Someone has busted the sign out, almost like they wanted to erase the memory of this place. I imagine it wont be long until it's torn down , its sordid past erased. Across from the Rochester sit 3 or 4 row houses, overgrown with weeds. Just to the south are bland condos or apartments, they lack character, just bland brown cubes , no history , no story to tell. Frankly, I'd prefer to see them fall under the wrecking ball, while the Rochester and the row houses remain.

I understand why people wanted to save the 3 or 4 blocks of what was Kansas City's claim to fame. I don't mean to knock them, I think the area needed saving, but in the attempt to save only the bright and shiny side, the grit and grime, the character of the place has been all but lost. Sadly the 18th and Vine area has become little more than a G rated version of its former true self. Sure its pretty to look at, but its just a facade of what that area was really like, it isn't revitalized, its reinvented. Among all of the scrubbed clean newness the Rochester sits silent, just waiting for someone to bitch and moan long enough until the city tears it down.

You will be hard pressed to find much , really any, information on the Hotel Rochester. I can tell you that it was built in the 1920's or 1930's. I have no doubt that the musicians and women of the night once inhabited the place. It isn't a big stretch to say, more than a few of these Jazz greats probably spent time nodding under the spell of the dragon in those very rooms. More than a few women sold their bodies and dignity in the Rochester. While I cant speak with absolute specifics of what and who , that doesn't make it any less true. When the night clubs closed, they had to take their vices somewhere, and the Rochester was just around the corner.

I do know that the Rochester was basically a whore house from the 1970's up until they closed it down at the turn of this century. When I was in my teens, my friends and I would drive by the place, hookers stood outside the building, their pimps within eyesight, leaning against gaudy Caddy's and Lincolns. In the 1980's I knew a few women who fell under the spell of cocaine or heroin. They would start out as strippers, graduating to call girls when dollar tips could no longer feed the monkey on their backs. With more money came more drugs, and in short time the visible toll it took would make their stock plunge. They would move to the street and the Rochester was a cheap place to take a trick or a glass pipe. It's sad, tragic, disturbing, all of that, but its an undeniable part of history, and it's all but swept under the rug.

It must seem odd to most people that I would feel sentimental about a flop house like the Rochester. After all it is just an abandoned old flop house with an ugly past. I don't have any close ties to the place, never spent any time there. I only set foot in the place once, to help a friend drag his sister out of one off the filthy rooms and in to a rehab facility. The rehab didn't take, and Gina, her name was Gina, was later found along a river bank with her head caved in by her pimp. But that's the thing, you cant have a true vision of a place, the history of it, unless you embrace the totality of it. The good and the evil. As pretty as the 18th and Vine area looks today, it is just an airbrushed version of its true self. So before it is eventually erased from the record, someone needed to give an honest account of what it once was.