Isis Theatre

The Isis Theatre was a single-screen neighborhood movie house at 3100 Troost Avenue, the southwest corner of East 31st Street and Troost, inside the Wirthman Building. It opened 21 August 1918 and was called the finest suburban theater in Kansas City.¹²³ Its organist in the early 1920s was Carl Stalling, later the composer of the Warner Bros. cartoons; it was at the Isis that Stalling met Walt Disney, then running Laugh-O-gram Films a block east on 31st Street, and several pieces of Disney’s Kansas City output are recorded as having screened here.²³⁴ The theater survived three fires, ran first-run pictures until 1968, switched to adult films, and closed in 1970 after a violent clash between youths and police outside its doors.¹²³ The theater stood vacant while other tenants held on; the whole Wirthman Building was demolished in 1997, and the corner is today a surface lot and bus stop.⁵²⁶ The Isis sits on the Troost Avenue line — Kansas City’s racial dividing wall — and carries an entry on the African American Heritage Trail of Kansas City.³

On the spelling. The theater’s own printed program reads “The Isis Theatre.”⁷ Missouri Valley Special Collections photograph captions and Clio also use Theatre;⁸² the African American Heritage Trail, Cinema Treasures and the Midtown KC Post use Theater.³¹⁶ This page takes the house’s own spelling and carries the other as an alias.

Site: Millionaire’s Row and the Wirthman Building

The three blocks of Troost from 31st to 34th were known at the turn of the century as “Millionaire’s Row.” Clio dates the pattern to 1883, when Webster Withers moved his family from 9th and Cherry out to a mansion at 31st and Troost, followed by others including L. V. Harness.⁹ The Panic of 1893 and the westward drift of wealth broke the pattern up; grander houses were subdivided or torn down, and with streetcars reaching the corner in the early 1900s the mansions gave way to commerce.⁹

Joseph C. Wirthman — a druggist and real-estate operator, the son of German immigrants who came to Kansas City in 1885 and farmed near 27th and the Paseo — built the block that would hold the theater. He ran a drug store at 16th and Troost, served on the city council, and was the first president of the South Central Business Association.⁶ How he came by the corner is told two ways: the Midtown KC Post says he bought the tract and built himself a home there in 1907, later tearing it down; Clio says he acquired the Withers mansion and demolished that.⁶⁹ Both accounts agree on the outcome — the house came down and the Wirthman Building went up in 1917.⁶⁹⁵

The building was designed for six stories but built at two in 1917; three more floors were added in 1922, producing the five-story block Kansas Citians remembered.⁶⁹ Storefronts ran along both Troost and 31st; the upper floors held offices, mostly doctors and dentists.⁹⁶ Tenants recorded by 1920 include the Louise W. Winter Millinery Shop, Mary Lane Dry Goods, the Humfeld-Orear Floral Company, Dinty Moore’s Restaurant, the Baldwin Piano Store, the Monkey Steam Dye Works, and — in the basement — the Isis Cafeteria.⁹⁶ A Sanborn fire-insurance map of the period shows the theater nestled behind the rows of shops facing both streets, which is why the Isis read from the sidewalk as a lobby rather than a facade.⁶

No architect has been identified for either the Wirthman Building or the theater inside it.

Opening, 21 August 1918

The Isis opened on Wednesday, 21 August 1918.¹²³ Cinema Treasures records a grand-opening advertisement of that date;¹ the African American Heritage Trail and Clio give the same day.³²

A surviving program from the theater’s first weeks is the most direct evidence of how the house ran at opening. Its masthead reads “The Isis Theatre / Troost Avenue and Thirty-first Street / Blackstone Amusement Company, Proprietors,” with telephones “Home, South 1068; Bell, South 1068,” and “THREE SHOWS DAILY.”⁷ The schedule:

• Matinee — box office open 2:00 p.m.; short subject (comedy, news or travel picture) “promptly at 2:30”; organ concert 2:45 to 3:00; feature production 3:00 to 4:30.⁷
• Night shows — box office 6:45 to 9:30 p.m.; shows at 7:15 and 9:15.⁷
• Admissions — adults 15c plus 2c war tax, total 17c; children 10c plus 1c war tax, total 11c.⁷
• No seats reserved; matinee sections could be reserved for parties by arrangement with the manager. “Comfortable Lounging Chairs are provided in the Main Foyer.”⁷
• A “Special Saturday Matinee for Mothers and Children” ran alongside the regular bill.⁷

The pictures listed are “Sandy” with Jack Pickford and Louise Huff (Saturday, August 24), “The Claws of the Hun” with Charles Ray (Tuesday and Wednesday, August 27-28), and “The Lie” with Elsie Ferguson (Thursday, August 29).⁷ The program itself is undated, but all three are 1918 releases and the weekday-to-date pattern (24 August a Saturday, 29 August a Thursday) fits 1918 — so this is almost certainly the theater’s first full week. That inference is this page’s, not the source’s.

The Blackstone Amusement Company proprietorship on that program is worth noting against the later record. Clio states the theater “was owned and operated by the Midwest regional chain of Fox Studios,” and Cinema Treasures lists Fox Midwest Amusement Corp. as a previous operator.²¹ Fox Midwest was not the opening operator; no source located dates the handover from Blackstone to Fox.

The house

Contemporaries called the Isis the finest suburban theater in the city — “suburban” meaning simply outside downtown, which in 1918 the 3100 block of Troost was.¹³ Newspapers in the 1920s advertised it as “irresistible,” and Clio reports the media nickname “The Irresistible.”³²

What the sources establish about the room:

• Style. Described as Egyptian: the African American Heritage Trail says the theater “was designed in the Egyptian style”; Clio calls it “extravagant Egyptian style” and elsewhere says the Wirthman Building itself was “constructed using Egyptian style architectural elements.”³²⁹ No period architectural description, drawing or architect’s name has been located to test this against.
• Entrance. “One of the most spacious in Kansas City,” fitted out to match the building outside and the auditorium inside; the Isis “welcomed movie goers through its long and elegant lobby.”¹⁶ Readers writing to the Midtown KC Post decades later still singled out the lobby: “that lobby at the ISIS made you feel really top drawer.”⁶
• Seating. 1,417 per Cinema Treasures; 1,400 per Clio. One screen.¹²
• Organ. Clio describes a $22,000 “Hope Jones Organ” on which Stalling scored the silent bills.² No organ-builder opus record for a Kansas City Isis was located; a search of theatre-organ listings surfaced only the unrelated Isis in Denver.
• Screen. A patron who attended as a boy recalled “the extremely large movie screen — it was considered the largest in KC,” with “half moon blue lighting on the sides of the walls.” Reader recollection, not documentation.¹

Carl Stalling at the console

Carl Stalling (1891-1972), a Missouri native who became one of the two or three most consequential composers in American animation, was the Isis organist in its early years.²⁴ Wikipedia’s account: “By his early 20s, he was conducting his own orchestra and improvising on the organ at the Isis Movie Theatre in Kansas City.”⁴ He improvised scores to silent pictures on the house organ, and — as the African American Heritage Trail entry puts it — it was at the Isis that Stalling met Walt Disney.³⁴

What followed is why the corner matters to film history rather than only to Kansas City. Stalling loaned the new Disney studio money in its first California months, became Disney’s first musical director, wrote 19 of the first 20 Disney sound cartoons, composed “Minnie’s Yoo Hoo!” and the score for “Plane Crazy,” and in 1936 moved to Warner Bros., where he scored close to 1,000 cartoons across a twenty-two-year career.²³ The African American Heritage Trail entry, drawing on Burnes, Viets and Butler’s Walt Disney’s Missouri, states the meeting flatly: “The Isis Theater is best known as the theater where Carl Stalling met Walt Disney.”³

Walt Disney and the Isis — and the Newman Theater question

This page does not choose between the Isis and the Newman. The vault’s walt-disney and laugh-o-gram-studio pages follow The Pendergast Years in stating that the “Newman Laugh-O-Grams” — modernized fairy tales and filmed editorial cartoons — screened at Kansas City’s Newman Theater.¹⁰ Several sources place Disney’s work at the Isis instead. Read carefully, the two sets of claims are about different films at different moments, and both stand.

What each source actually asserts:

Source	Claim
The Pendergast Years (KCPL), via walt-disney	The “Newman Laugh-O-Grams” screened at the Newman Theater.10
Ron Green, JCHS Journal	The Newman Laugh-O-Grams were filmed editorial cartoons Disney made in the garage at 3028 Bellefontaine in 1920-21, poking fun at police practices and bumpy roads — before Laugh-O-Gram Films existed. Does not mention the Isis at all.11
Clio	Stalling “played the organ for silent films in the theater’s early years, including some of Walt Disney’s animated shorts that were produced by Laugh-O-gram Films in the early 1920s.”2
Clio	In mid-August 1922 Laugh-O-gram Films rode in the South Central Business Association parade — Disney, sales manager Leslie Mace and animator Rudy Ising — with a branded movie camera in the back seat under a sign reading “These pictures will be shown at the Isis Theatre Tomorrow Night.” Clio notes the parade footage’s actual placement in the Isis bill is “not verified.”2
Clio	Stalling suggested Disney make a sing-along reel of “Martha: Just a Plain Old Fashioned Name,” written by Joe L. Sanders of the Coon-Sanders orchestra. Disney shot live actors and illustrated the lyrics a word at a time and called it a “Song-O-Reel”; “Martha” debuted at the Isis Theatre, had a short run, and disappeared.2
African American Heritage Trail; Cinema Treasures	The Isis employed Stalling as organist and Disney as an illustrator of commercial slides for the theater.31
Midtown KC Post	”Walt Disney had his first office in the Wirthman Building and worked with Carl Stalling at the Isis before the two left for Hollywood.”6

The reconciliation this page prints: the Newman Laugh-O-Grams are a specific, named 1920-21 series sold to Frank Newman’s downtown house; the Isis material is later and separate — commercial slide work, the August 1922 parade reel, the “Martha” Song-O-Reel, and Stalling’s accompaniment of Laugh-O-gram shorts. No source located claims the Newman Laugh-O-Grams themselves played the Isis, and no source claims Disney’s Isis material played the Newman. Nothing on the walt-disney page needs retracting; it needs the Isis half added.

The Midtown KC Post’s “first office in the Wirthman Building” is the one claim here that does not survive. Disney’s first jobs were at Pesmen-Rubin and the Kansas City Film Ad Company; his first venture of his own, the KayCee Studio, worked from a room above the streetcar barn at 30th and Holmes and then above the Standard Phonograph Company at 3239 Troost; Laugh-O-Gram Films incorporated into the McConahay Building at 1127 East 31st.¹¹¹⁰ The Wirthman Building came at the end, not the beginning.

Laugh-O-Gram’s last address

Where Disney’s studio spent its final Kansas City weeks in 1923 is genuinely contested:

• Clio and the Kansas City Landmarks Commission put it in the Wirthman Building. Clio: creditors came for backdated rent in June 1923, Disney moved the studio out of the McConahay Building and into the Wirthman Building, “where he spent one month before leaving for California,” filing bankruptcy in July.² The Landmarks Commission’s own catalog description of the building is unambiguous: “Constructed in 1917, the building was briefly home to Walt Disney’s Laugh-O-Gram Studios, and was demolished in 1997.”⁵ Clio’s Millionaire’s Row entry says the same: “In June 1923, Walt Disney moved his struggling Laugh-O-gram Films studio here.”⁹
• Ron Green, writing in the Jackson County Historical Society Journal, puts it somewhere else: “By May, he moved the studio back to 3241 Troost above Peiser’s Restaurant where he had worked in his KayCee Studio.”¹¹

3241 Troost is roughly a block and a half south of the Wirthman Building. The two accounts may be sequential rather than contradictory — 3241 Troost in May, the Wirthman Building in June — but no source states that, and this page does not assert it. The page prefers the Wirthman placement on the strength of the Landmarks Commission record plus two independent Clio entries, and records Green’s account as unreconciled.

The Isis Cafeteria and the Coon-Sanders orchestra

The Isis Cafeteria operated in the basement of the Wirthman Building in the 1920s.⁹⁶ A surviving Isis Theatre program held by the Kansas City Museum carries, on its back pages, an advertisement for Earll & Gehring’s Original Doughnut Shops and one for the Isis Cafeteria featuring the Carleton-Coons-Sanders Novelty Orchestra.⁸ That is the band of drummer Carleton Coon and pianist Joe Sanders, formed in Kansas City in 1918 and later nationally famous as the radio-borne Coon-Sanders Nighthawks; the same Joe Sanders wrote the song Disney turned into the “Martha” Song-O-Reel for the Isis screen upstairs.²¹² The Kansas City Public Library’s own history of the band tracks its early residencies at the Café Trianon and the Plantation Grille in the Hotel Muehlebach and does not mention the Isis Cafeteria; the program advertisement is the evidence for that engagement, and it is undated.¹²⁸

Three fires

The Isis burned three times in five decades.¹³

• 1928 — the stage caught fire; the African American Heritage Trail dates the fire to January 1928.²³
• March 1939 — the worst of the three. Clio dates it 9 March 1939 and says the theater did not reopen until 6 October 1939, nearly seven months later. For the reopening the 3100 block of Troost was closed to traffic and an estimated 25,000 people turned out.²³
• April 1954 — “considerable damage.”³¹

The 25,000-person reopening in October 1939 is the single best measure of what this house meant to its neighborhood, and it happened in the middle of the Depression.

Fox Midwest and the neighborhood-theater era

Through the 1940s and 1950s the Isis ran first-run pictures as part of the Fox Midwest circuit — one of a chain of Kansas City houses that also included the Uptown and the nearby Apollo at about 33rd and Troost.¹²⁶ Cinema Treasures frames the Isis as “representative of a unique component of Kansas City’s past: the neighborhood theater.”¹

The audience for that era is best documented in reader recollection rather than record. Midtown KC Post readers describe walking down from 39th and Forest, from 3229 Wayne, from East 31st Street Terrace; a dentist’s office in the building above (Dr. Woodburn, Dr. Honda), a drugstore next door with “fantastic sodas and malts,” queues for Rodan and Godzilla stretching to the TG&Y, A Summer Place, Blood Alley, John Wayne and horror bills in the early 1960s.⁶¹ Those are memories posted to a blog comment thread, and they are cited here as such.

An Isis Pool Hall operated in the basement of the Wirthman Building and, per one commenter, moved in the late 1950s to the old Eagles club half a block south on the east side of Troost. Uncorroborated.

Troost, the dividing line, and the last decade

The Isis stood on the west side of Troost Avenue, which through the twentieth century functioned as Kansas City’s racial and economic boundary — produced by restrictive covenants, federal redlining, lending practice, and, after Brown v. Board of Education, school-district lines deliberately drawn along the avenue.⁹¹³ Clio’s account of this stretch: by the late 1920s Troost had become “the center of minority-owned commerce and social activity,” an area “highly desired by African American families and some recent immigrants,” with new schools, churches, banks, retail, theaters and the last streetcar stop.⁹ Then: “Due to restrictive covenants and poor lending practices to people of color, Troost became a racial and economic dividing line, and white-owned businesses and families abandoned the area.”⁹ The Kansas City Star, revisiting the corner in 2023, put it plainly — Troost “has become known as Kansas City’s dividing line, and its roots run deep in the city’s history of racial segregation and slavery.”¹⁴

What the record does not show. No source located states the Isis Theatre’s own admission policy toward Black patrons at any date — whether it segregated seating, excluded Black moviegoers, or when that changed. The African American Heritage Trail of Kansas City entry itself does not address it: the trail entry, written by Hunter Albright, a UMKC student in Dr. Sandra Enriquez’s urban history class, is almost entirely about Stalling, Disney, the fires and the closure, and ends “Although no longer standing, the Isis Theater continues to exist in community memory.”³ The theater is on the trail because of where it stood and what the neighborhood around it became, not because a documented episode of Black patronage or exclusion has been published. That gap is the most important open question on this page.

The end came in stages:

• 1968 — the Isis stopped running first-run pictures and switched to adult films.¹²³ The switch is universally reported and the date is consistent across sources, but it sits awkwardly against the programming actually documented for late 1969 — see below.
• 30 November 1969 — the theater was held up at about 6:30 p.m. on a Sunday as it began an evening triple feature of The Valley of Gwangi, True Grit and The Devil’s Bride. The account comes from a Cinema Treasures commenter citing “Isis Theater is Robbed / Two Cashiers at Troost Movie Say Youth Armed,” Kansas City Times, Monday, 1 December 1969, p. 4A. The newspaper citation is specific but has not been checked against the paper itself; note that this is a mainstream bill, not an adult one, fifteen months after the reported switch.¹
• 15 March 1970 — a violent clash outside the theater. Cinema Treasures: “disgruntled youths rioted, breaking theater and store windows and engaging police in violent attacks.” Clio: “a violent clash between local youths and the police resulted in extensive damage to the theatre.”¹²
• 2 May 1970 — the Isis closed permanently, per the African American Heritage Trail. Cinema Treasures says the closing was announced “less than two months” after the March disturbance; Clio says “later that spring.” The three are consistent.³¹²

Robberies had become frequent by then, and the Midtown KC Post notes that by the end of the 1960s “newspaper headlines about the corner of 31st and Troost often focused on crime and even rioting.”⁶¹ Clio attributes the decline to “years of disinvestment and neglect from city leaders.”²

Vacancy, demolition, and what survived

The theater sat vacant from 1970, while shops, offices and dentists carried on in the rest of the Wirthman Building into the 1990s.¹² Then the whole structure came down.

The demolition date is contested only in one place, and that place corrects itself. The claim that the Isis was “demolished 1977” appears on Cinema Treasures’ page for the Screenland Theatre at the Crossroads, which describes its own marquee as “rescued from the historic Isis Theatre (closed 1970/demolished 1977).”¹⁵ A comment on that same page from user claydoh77, dated 15 January 2005, corrects it: “Correction to above — Isis was closed in 1970, demolished in June 1997.”¹⁵ Every other source says 1997:

Source	Claim
Kansas City Landmarks Commission (Missouri Valley Special Collections)	Wirthman Building “constructed in 1917… demolished in 1997.”5
Cinema Treasures, Isis page	”The structure was finally razed in early-1997.”1
African American Heritage Trail	”in 1997 the Wirthman Building, which housed the defunct theater, was demolished.”3
Midtown KC Post	The corner was the Wirthman Building’s “from 1917 to 1997”; “The Wirthman Building was razed in 1997.”6
Clio	”the entire structure was razed in 1997.”2
Cinema Treasures, Screenland page	”demolished 1977” — corrected in its own comments to June 1997.15

Resolution: 1997, and the claim is about the whole building. The theater was a component of the Wirthman Building, not a freestanding structure; it was demolished when the building was. The “1977” is a stray digit on a page about a different theater, corrected there twenty-one years ago. Cinema Treasures’ “early-1997” and the commenter’s “June 1997” differ by a season and are not reconciled here. The vault’s own mid-central-exchange page currently repeats the 1977 figure from that Screenland record and should be corrected.

Two things outlived the building:

• The marquee. When the 150-seat Screenland Theatre at the Crossroads opened in 2004 in a renovated 1913 cold-storage warehouse at 1656 Washington Street — the building now known as the Mid-Central Exchange — its marquee was “rescued from the historic Isis Theatre.”¹⁵ How the marquee survived the seven years between the 1997 demolition and the 2004 installation, and where it went after Screenland left Washington Street in 2013, is not recorded in any source located.
• The mural. In 2006, local artist Alexander Austin painted a 100-foot mural on the flank of the building next door to the south, designed by the Troost Folks organization, commissioned by the sponsors of the Troost Avenue Festivals and unveiled on Labor Day 2006. It includes tributes to the Osage — the original landowners here, whose trail became the first phase of the Santa Fe Trail in 1825 — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Walt Disney, and the Isis Theatre itself.¹³

The corner today is a vacant lot and a busy bus stop.⁶²

Timeline

Date	Event
1883	Webster Withers builds a mansion at 31st and Troost; the block becomes part of “Millionaire’s Row.”9
1907	Joseph C. Wirthman builds a house on the tract (per Midtown KC Post) / acquires the Withers mansion (per Clio).69
1917	The house comes down; the Wirthman Building goes up — designed for six stories, built at two.695
21 Aug 1918	The Isis Theatre opens, southwest corner of 31st and Troost. Blackstone Amusement Company, proprietors; three shows daily; adult admission 17c with war tax.1237
by 1920	Wirthman Building tenants include the Isis Cafeteria (basement), Louise W. Winter Millinery, Mary Lane Dry Goods, Humfeld-Orear Floral, Dinty Moore’s Restaurant, Baldwin Piano and Monkey Steam Dye Works.96
early 1920s	Carl Stalling is house organist; he meets Walt Disney, who illustrates commercial slides for the theater.314
Aug 1922	Laugh-O-gram Films rides the South Central Business Association parade behind a sign: “These pictures will be shown at the Isis Theatre Tomorrow Night.”2
1922	Three floors added to the Wirthman Building.96
1923	Disney’s “Martha” Song-O-Reel, scored by Stalling, debuts at the Isis and quickly disappears.2
Jun 1923	Laugh-O-gram Films moves into the Wirthman Building after defaulting on McConahay Building rent (Clio, Landmarks Commission); Ron Green instead places the studio at 3241 Troost from May.2511
Jul 1923	Laugh-O-gram files for bankruptcy; Disney leaves for California.2
Jan 1928	First fire — the stage burns.32
9 Mar 1939	Second fire devastates the theater.23
6 Oct 1939	Reopening: the 3100 block of Troost is closed and an estimated 25,000 attend.2
Apr 1954	Third fire, considerable damage.31
1968	First-run programming ends; the Isis switches to adult films.123
30 Nov 1969	Armed robbery during an evening triple feature (per a Cinema Treasures commenter citing the Kansas City Times, 1 Dec 1969).1
15 Mar 1970	Violent clash between youths and police outside the theater; extensive damage.12
2 May 1970	The Isis closes permanently.3
1970-1997	Theater vacant; other Wirthman Building tenants continue.12
1997	The Wirthman Building is demolished (June 1997 per a Cinema Treasures correction; “early 1997” per Cinema Treasures’ Isis page).5151
2004	Screenland Theatre at the Crossroads opens at 1656 Washington using the salvaged Isis marquee.15
Sep 2006	Alexander Austin’s 100-foot mural, including the Isis, is unveiled at 31st and Troost on Labor Day.13

Significance

The Isis is the rare Kansas City building whose loss can be measured three ways at once.

As a film-history site, it is where Carl Stalling met Walt Disney — a meeting at a neighborhood organ console that produced the first musical director of the Disney studio, the man who wrote 19 of the first 20 Disney sound cartoons, and then the composer who defined the sound of Warner Bros. animation for two decades. Kansas City’s Disney story is usually told through the McConahay Building; the Isis is the other half of it, and it is gone.

As a neighborhood institution, its arc is the arc of the American neighborhood theater in one address: a 1918 suburban palace with a spacious lobby and a house organ; a Depression-era fire whose reopening closed a city block and drew 25,000 people; a first-run Fox house through the postwar decades; then adult films, robberies, and closure in 1970 — with the building itself outliving the theater by twenty-seven years before coming down in 1997.

As a Troost Avenue site, it is at the intersection the whole corridor turns on. The Isis opened when 31st and Troost was the retail heart of a booming streetcar suburb; it closed after that corridor had been redlined, covenant-bound, school-boundaried and disinvested into a dividing line. It appears on the African American Heritage Trail of Kansas City — and the fact that the trail entry can say so much about Disney and so little about the theater’s Black audience is itself a finding about how thinly this stretch of the city’s social history has been documented.

Sources

Footnotes

1. Paul Salley, “Isis Theater,” Cinema Treasures, theater record 1430, with reader comments — asserts: address 3102 Troost Avenue, Kansas City, MO 64109; closed and demolished; 1 screen, 1,417 seats; previously operated by Fox Midwest Amusement Corp.; opened 21 August 1918 at the southwest corner of E. 31st and Troost; “considered to be the finest suburban theater in the city”; entrance “one of the most spacious in Kansas City”; the owners employed Carl Stalling as organist and Walt Disney as an illustrator of commercial slides, and the two later collaborated in Hollywood before Stalling went to Warner Bros.; three fires in 1928, 1939 and 1954; first-run films until 1968, then adult films through 1970; frequent robberies; 15 March 1970 youths rioted, breaking theater and store windows and attacking police; closing announced less than two months later; other Wirthman Building businesses continued while the theater stayed vacant; “the structure was finally razed in early-1997.” Reader comments cited in the body: rivest266 (31 July 2015) on the 21 August 1918 grand-opening ad; OKCdoorman (12 January 2017) citing “Isis Theater is Robbed / Two Cashiers at Troost Movie Say Youth Armed,” Kansas City Times, 1 December 1969, p. 4A; Mike Gallagher (4 August 2014) on the screen size, wall lighting and the drugstore next door. A user-contributed cinema database; comments are reader recollection and are marked as such in the body. Retrieved via Firecrawl scrape, 2026-09-08. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸ ↩¹⁹ ↩²⁰ ↩²¹ ↩²² ↩²³ ↩²⁴ ↩²⁵ ↩²⁶ ↩²⁷ ↩²⁸ ↩²⁹ ↩³⁰ ↩³¹

2. Nichole Stahly and Clio Admin, “Isis Theatre (1918-1970),” Clio: Your Guide to History, entry 148154, published 25 July 2024 — asserts: opened 21 August 1918 in the Wirthman Building at the southwest corner of 31st and Troost; Egyptian style, nicknamed “The Irresistible” by the media; “the finest theater outside of downtown”; 1,400 seats; owned and operated by “the Midwest regional chain of Fox Studios”; premier films until 1968; first fire 1928 (stage), second 9 March 1939 with reopening 6 October 1939, the 3100 block closed and an estimated 25,000 attending, third fire 1954; white flight and disinvestment; adult films from 1968; 15 March 1970 violent clash between local youths and police, closure later that spring; structure razed 1997; now a surface parking lot and bus stop. On Stalling and Disney: Stalling played a $22,000 Hope Jones Organ; met Disney in the early 1920s and gave him and his friends free passes; suggested the “Martha: Just a Plain Old Fashioned Name” sing-along, written by Joe L. Sanders, which Disney made as a “Song-O-Reel” and which debuted at the Isis; the mid-August 1922 South Central Business Association parade with Disney, Leslie Mace and Rudy Ising and the sign “These pictures will be shown at the Isis Theatre Tomorrow Night” (Clio notes the footage’s placement in the Isis bill is not verified); June 1923 move of Laugh-O-gram Films from the McConahay Building into the Wirthman Building, bankruptcy in July, departure for California; Stalling later Disney’s first musical director, author of 19 of the first 20 Disney sound cartoons, “Minnie’s Yoo Hoo!” and Plane Crazy, then Warner Bros. from 1936 and nearly 1,000 cartoons; the Alexander Austin mural on the building to the south. Cites Burnes/Viets, Walt Disney’s Missouri (Kansas City Star Books, 2002); Cinema Treasures; the African American Heritage Trail; and KCHistory.org images. Retrieved via Firecrawl scrape, 2026-09-08 (the site 403s a plain fetch). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸ ↩¹⁹ ↩²⁰ ↩²¹ ↩²² ↩²³ ↩²⁴ ↩²⁵ ↩²⁶ ↩²⁷ ↩²⁸ ↩²⁹ ↩³⁰ ↩³¹ ↩³² ↩³³ ↩³⁴ ↩³⁵ ↩³⁶ ↩³⁷ ↩³⁸ ↩³⁹ ↩⁴⁰

3. Hunter Albright, “Isis Theater,” African American Heritage Trail of Kansas City, produced as coursework in Dr. Sandra Enriquez’s urban history class at the University of Missouri-Kansas City — asserts: address 3100 Troost Avenue (demolished); “best known as the theater where Carl Stalling met Walt Disney,” Stalling playing organ to silent films while Disney illustrated commercial slides for the theater; Disney later recruited Stalling as his first musical director, for whom Stalling composed 19 of the first 20 Disney cartoons before going to Warner Bros.; opened 21 August 1918 at the southwest corner of E. 31st and Troost, “considered in the ‘suburbs’”; first-run films, advertised in 1920s newspapers as “irresistible”; designed in the Egyptian style, in the Wirthman Building with a drug store, shops and other businesses; three major fires in January 1928, March 1939 and April 1954; first-run movies until 1968, then adult movies; rising neighborhood crime and repeated robberies; closed permanently 2 May 1970; the Wirthman Building demolished in 1997; “Although no longer standing, the Isis Theater continues to exist in community memory.” Cites Burnes, Viets and Butler, Walt Disney’s Missouri: The Roots of a Creative Genius, p. 10, and Mary Jo Draper, Kansas City’s Historic Midtown Neighborhoods, pp. 104-105. Retrieved via Firecrawl scrape, 2026-09-08. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸ ↩¹⁹ ↩²⁰ ↩²¹ ↩²² ↩²³ ↩²⁴ ↩²⁵ ↩²⁶ ↩²⁷ ↩²⁸ ↩²⁹

4. “Carl Stalling,” Wikipedia — asserts: “By his early 20s, he was conducting his own orchestra and improvising on the organ at the Isis Movie Theatre in Kansas City”; during that time “he met and befriended a young Walt Disney, who was producing animated comedy shorts in Kansas City,” Disney visiting the Isis and being impressed by Stalling’s approach, which led to their professional relationship. The article names no other Kansas City theater and gives no dates beyond “the early 1920s.” A tertiary encyclopedia, used here only to show that the Isis attribution is not confined to local sources. Retrieved 2026-09-08. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

5. Kansas City Landmarks Commission, “Wirthman Building,” Kansas City Landmarks Slides (P34-6, Box 1, Folder 2), held by the Missouri Valley Special Collections, Kansas City Public Library, published through Missouri Digital Heritage — asserts: photograph of the upper levels of the Wirthman Building at the corner of 31st Street and Troost Avenue in the early 1980s, with an upper window reading “A. L. Kushner Dentist”; “Constructed in 1917, the building was briefly home to Walt Disney’s Laugh-O-Gram Studios, and was demolished in 1997”; address recorded as 3100 Troost Avenue, Kansas City, Missouri; neighborhood recorded as Hyde Park; coordinates +39.07041, -94.57136 (the lat/lng carried in this page’s frontmatter); cross-referenced to the 1940 Tax Assessment Photos, district 11, block folder 170. Metadata created 2018-07-17 by Katie Sowder. Item record retrieved through the CONTENTdm item API, 2026-09-08. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

6. “Troost Corner Served the Neighborhood” (also published as “Do you remember the Wirthman Building and the Isis Theater?”), Midtown KC Post, 26 October 2015 — asserts: an imposing five-story building stood at the southwest corner of Troost and 31st from 1917 to 1997, housing a drug store, street-level shops, doctors, dentists and the Isis Theater; the corner is now “a vacant lot and a busy bus stop”; Joseph C. Wirthman, druggist and real estate operator, son of German immigrants who came to Kansas City in 1885 and farmed near 27th and the Paseo, ran a drug store at 16th and Troost, served on the city council, and was first president of the South Central Business Association; Wirthman bought the tract and built himself a home in 1907, later demolishing it for the commercial building; the building was designed for six stories but only two were built in 1917, with floors added in 1922; the Isis opened “a year later,” “considered the finest theater outside of downtown,” entered through “its long and elegant lobby”; a 1909-1950 Sanborn map shows the theater “nestled behind rows of shops facing both Troost Avenue and 31st Street”; “Walt Disney had his first office in the Wirthman Building and worked with Carl Stalling at the Isis before the two left for Hollywood”; 1920s tenants included the Isis Cafeteria in the basement, Louise W. Winter Millinery, Mary Lane Dry Goods, Humfeld-Orear Floral, Dinty Moore’s Restaurant, Baldwin Piano and Monkey Steam Dye Works; first-run movies until 1968; by the late 1960s headlines about the corner “often focused on crime and even rioting”; the theater closed in 1970 and the Wirthman Building was razed in 1997. Photographs credited to the Kansas City Public Library-Missouri Valley Special Collections. Reader comments on the same page, cited in the body as recollection only, supply the lobby memories, the dentists, the drugstore, the Rodan and Godzilla queues, and the Isis Pool Hall. Retrieved via Firecrawl scrape, 2026-09-08. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸ ↩¹⁹ ↩²⁰ ↩²¹ ↩²²

7. “The Isis Theatre” program, reproduced from an original at VintageKansasCity.com — asserts: masthead “The Isis Theatre / Troost Avenue and Thirty-first Street / Telephones: Home, South 1068; Bell, South 1068 / Kansas City, Missouri / Blackstone Amusement Company, Proprietors / THREE SHOWS DAILY”; matinee box office 2:00 p.m., short subject 2:30, organ concert 2:45-3:00, feature 3:00-4:30; night box office 6:45-9:30, shows 7:15 and 9:15; admissions adults 15c plus 2c war tax (17c), children 10c plus 1c war tax (11c); “Comfortable Lounging Chairs are provided in the Main Foyer”; no seats reserved, matinee sections reservable for parties by arrangement with the manager; bill of “Sandy” with Jack Pickford and Louise Huff (Saturday, August 24), “The Claws of the Hun” with Charles Ray (Tuesday and Wednesday, August 27-28), “The Lie” with Elsie Ferguson (Thursday, August 29); a “Special Saturday Matinee for Mothers and Children.” The reproduction carries no year; the 1918 dating in the body is this page’s inference from the three 1918 film releases and the weekday-date alignment, not the source’s statement. Retrieved via Firecrawl scrape, 2026-09-08. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

8. “Isis Theater,” local-subject page, The Pendergast Years (Kansas City Public Library) — asserts: seven catalogued items, whose captions establish that the Wirthman Building with the Isis Theatre stood at the southwest corner of 31st and Troost; a Kansas City Museum item (KCMA-C163-0002), “Isis Theatre program excerpts,” is described as “the cover, back, and excerpts of a program for the Isis Theatre at 31st Street and Troost Avenue,” whose back “includes an advertisement for Earll & Gehring’s Original Doughnut Shops” and “an advertisement for the Isis Cafeteria featuring the Carleton-Coons-Sanders Novelty Orchestra”; other captions record Troost Avenue Christmas decorations with the Wirthman Building in view, the installation of parking meters on Troost photographed with South Central Business Association men including Joseph Wirthman and Jack Rieger, and city officials posed with a sightseeing bus in front of the Isis after a luncheon celebrating the widening of Linwood Boulevard. Retrieved via Firecrawl scrape, 2026-09-08. ↩ ↩² ↩³

9. Nichole Stahly, “Kansas City’s Midtown Millionaire’s Row,” Clio, entry 148159, created 6 April 2022, last updated 25 July 2024 — asserts: Troost from 31st to 34th was “Millionaire’s Row”; Webster Withers built at 31st and Troost in 1883 after moving from 9th and Cherry; L. V. Harness among the neighbors; the Panic of 1893 broke the pattern; Joseph C. Wirthman, drug store owner and city councilman, acquired the Withers mansion and demolished it to build the Wirthman Building in 1917, originally designed for six stories and built at two “using Egyptian style architectural elements”; the Isis Theater opened 21 August 1918; by 1920 the building held the Louise W. Winter Millinery Shop, Mary Lane Dry Goods, Humfeld-Orear Floral Company, Dinty Moore’s Restaurant, the Baldwin Piano Store, the Isis Cafeteria (basement) and Monkey Steam Dye Works; three floors added 1922, the expansion offering offices “generally for doctors and dentists”; June 1923 Walt Disney moved Laugh-O-gram Films here, filed bankruptcy in July and left Kansas City; by the late 1920s Troost was “the center of minority-owned commerce and social activity,” “highly desired by African American families and some recent immigrants”; decline in the Great Depression; restrictive covenants and poor lending made Troost “a racial and economic dividing line”; post-Brown school boundaries drawn along Troost; the Isis became an adult film theater in 1968 and closed in 1970; “the entire structure was razed in 1997”; the site is now a busy public bus stop with a mural next door. Retrieved by direct HTTP fetch, 2026-09-08. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸

10. “Walt Disney,” The Pendergast Years (Kansas City Public Library) — asserts: Laugh-O-Gram Films opened 23 May 1922 at 1127 East 31st Street, second floor of the McConahy Building, with Disney and four regularly paid staff; its cartoons, the “Newman Laugh-O-Grams,” modernized fairy tales, screened at Kansas City’s Newman Theater; the $11,100 Pictorial Clubs contract and the client’s default; bankruptcy in July 1923; Alice’s Wonderland carried to Los Angeles. This is the source behind the vault’s walt-disney and laugh-o-gram-studio pages, and the Newman half of the conflict discussed above. ↩ ↩² ↩³

11. Ron Green, “The Roots of Animation in Kansas City,” Jackson County Historical Society Journal, Summer 2014, pp. 15-19 — asserts: Disney developed local notoriety making the Newman Laugh-O-Grams in the family garage at 3028 Bellefontaine Avenue — filmed editorial cartoons poking fun at police practices and bumpy roads, among the few examples of animation done exclusively by Disney; in the autumn of 1921 he and Kansas City Film Ad colleague Fred Harman started the KayCee Studio, which moved “from a room above the Kansas City streetcar barn at 30th & Holmes to a second-floor location above the Standard Phonograph Company at 3239 Troost Ave.”; Disney hired Rudy Ising and apprenticed Hugh Harman there; Laugh-O-Gram Films, Inc. was incorporated 18 May 1922 with $15,000 raised locally, taking the second floor of the new McConahay Building at 1127 East 31st Street; as the company failed the McConahy landlord sued for unpaid rent, staff quit, Disney slept in the studio, ran a tab at the Forest Inn Café and bathed weekly at Union Station for a dime; and “By May, he moved the studio back to 3241 Troost above Peiser’s Restaurant where he had worked in his KayCee Studio,” before leaving for California in July. The article does not mention the Isis Theatre or Carl Stalling anywhere. PDF downloaded and text-extracted, 2026-09-08. Note that Clio’s incorporation date of 23 May 1922 (also carried on laugh-o-gram-studio from The Pendergast Years) differs from Green’s 18 May 1922; that discrepancy belongs to the Laugh-O-Gram page, not this one. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

12. Chuck Haddix, “Radio Pioneers: The Coon-Sanders Nighthawks,” The Pendergast Years (Kansas City Public Library) — asserts: the Coon-Sanders Novelty Orchestra of drummer Carleton Coon and pianist Joe Sanders played country clubs, social events, dance halls, Electric Park and private parties; from early October 1919 it held a residency at the Café Trianon in the Hotel Muehlebach, switching in September 1920 to the Plantation Grille in the hotel’s lower level; Sanders composed “Kick In” for a 1918 war bond rally and “Nighthawk Blues” after the band’s December 1922 radio debut. The article does not mention the Isis Theatre, the Isis Cafeteria or 31st and Troost — the Isis Cafeteria engagement rests on the program advertisement catalogued at ⁸. ↩ ↩²

13. “31st & Troost Avenue Mural,” Clio, entry 141092 — asserts: the 100-foot mural at 31st and Troost was designed by The Troost Folks Organization, painted by local artist Alexander Austin, commissioned by the sponsors of the Troost Avenue Festivals and unveiled on Labor Day 2006; it includes tributes to the Osage Tribe, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Walt Disney and “the iconic Isis Theatre which once operated at this corner”; Troost was part of the Osage Trail, which became the first phase of the Santa Fe Trail in 1825; by 1865 the Osage population had fallen by 95 percent; the 1880s “Millionaire’s Row”; by the 1960s Troost was a racial dividing line, with post-Brown district boundaries drawn to keep African American families in majority-Black schools; restrictive covenants and lending practice raised Black families’ mortgages and rents. Retrieved by direct HTTP fetch, 2026-09-08. ↩ ↩² ↩³

14. Monty Davis, “Walt Disney used to frequent a theater on this midtown KC corner. See how it’s changed,” The Kansas City Star PAST|PRESENT series, 14 June 2023, read through Yahoo News syndication — asserts: the Wirthman Building on Troost’s west side “contained shops and offices, and most notably, the Isis Theater,” part of midtown’s 1920s retail growth on the stretch of Troost from Linwood north to 31st; Disney frequently attended the Isis, met organist Carl Stalling there, and “established a working relationship that the two later resumed in Hollywood”; Troost “has become known as Kansas City’s dividing line, and its roots run deep in the city’s history of racial segregation and slavery.” Read through a syndicated copy rather than the Star’s own paywalled page. ↩

15. Clay Jarratt, “Screenland Theatre at the Crossroads,” Cinema Treasures, theater record 10062, with comments and cinematreasures.org — asserts: the original location was 1656 Washington Street on the edge of the Crossroads and Film Row; the 150-seat Screenland opened in 2004 in a renovated 1913 cold-storage facility with a 26-foot screen; “The marquee was rescued from the historic Isis Theatre (closed 1970/demolished 1977) where the young Walt Disney showed some of his earliest, locally made cartoons”; in early 2015 the theater relocated to 1701 McGee Street with 95 seats. The 1977 date is corrected on the same page’s comment thread by user claydoh77, 15 January 2005: “Correction to above — Isis was closed in 1970, demolished in June 1997.” A second comment from Butchrigby, 22 March 2015, records the McGee Street move. This is the source of the “demolished 1977” claim, and of its own retraction. Retrieved by direct HTTP fetch, 2026-09-08. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶