25 years of First Fridays in the Crossroads
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People out and about on First Fridays. Photo: Courtesy of The Crossroads Association
First Fridays, which began 25 years ago as a small art event in a half-empty warehouse district, returns Friday night as the anchor of the Crossroads economy.
Why it matters: The free gallery walk turns the Crossroads into Kansas City's biggest monthly gathering, built from a handful of galleries on Baltimore Avenue.
Flashback: Sculptor Jim Leedy, priced out of his Westport studio in the 1980s, bought rundown buildings along Baltimore and Wyandotte and co-founded the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center at 2012 Baltimore in 1985. Other artists followed him into the empty freight district, and the blocks became known as Leedyville.
- "The neighborhood had been kind of lost," gallery owner John O'Brien recalled. He discovered the district's real name, the Crossroads, in old meeting minutes at a businessmen's luncheon at Hereford House in the early 1990s.
Catch up quick: Through the 1990s, the galleries between 19th and 20th on Baltimore threw art shows on their own irregular schedules, often on the first Friday of a month.
- People kept calling O'Brien to ask if he was having an opening. It took the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and his fear of losing his business to turn the scattered openings into one regular event.
- First Fridays got its start in 2001 on that block and grew to crowds of 20,000 to 30,000 people in the 2010s.
- Suzie Aron, whose Society of Contemporary Photography gallery helped found First Friday, tells Axios that the original galleries remain part of the event today.
A fatal shooting changed everything in August 2019, when Erin Langhofer of Overland Park was killed by a stray bullet while waiting in a food truck line.
- Food trucks moved to the outskirts, galleries closed earlier, and far fewer people came. Then the pandemic emptied the streets entirely.
The crowds found their way back. When the event returned in full in 2022, Crossroads businesses were counting on it. "We solely depend on the First Friday," Cafe Ollama owner Lesley Reyes said.
By the numbers: Sensor estimates the association shared with Axios put last June's peak night at 17,301 people, with 2025 events averaging about 9,900.
What they're saying: "We've been having record-setting attendance at First Fridays this year," Angie Hoffman of the Crossroads Community Association tells Axios.
Stop by: Galleries, studios, restaurants and shops across the district open their doors Friday night, alongside more than 100 artists and makers in the Art Alleys along 18th and 19th streets between Baltimore and Wyandotte and the Food Truck Plaza at 1907 Grand Blvd, 5-9pm.
The bottom line: Twenty-five years in, the event that pulled Kansas City into a forgotten neighborhood is still doing it, one Friday a month.