Boys and girls in the 64130 are still waiting for their new club

The ballroom of the Hyatt Regency Crown Center sparkles with Kansas City's philanthropic elite. A quick scan of the room picks up familiar faces from the business pages, such as Embarq CEO Tom Gerke with his wife, Rhonda. The open bar is rocking the way an open bar should be when guests pay $300 a ticket.

They're here for "Kids Night Out," the fundraiser for the nonprofit Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Kansas City. The group spends approximately $2,397 annually for each member — the cost of services and maintaining a safe place to hang out after school. But it charges only $15 a year per child, and, with many parents facing financial hardship, the fee often goes uncollected. No kids are turned away.

Outside the ballroom doors, more guests sip drinks and examine the tables of silent-auction items lining the hall. Among other treasures, the millionth Harley-Davidson built at the factory in Kansas City leans on its kickstand, awaiting bids. Several of tonight's guests, asked about the charity by a reporter, confuse it with the unrelated Big Brothers, Big Sisters. Unlike that group, though, the Boys & Girls Clubs' mission depends on location. The five centers across Kansas City — one in Wyandotte County, two in Independence and two on the city's East Side — are in parts of the metro rarely traveled by the well-heeled.

On the mezzanine, one floor beneath the ballroom, a dozen kids from each of the metro's five Boys & Girls Clubs devour pizza while the adults upstairs dine. The entertainment for the evening is an Inside the Actors Studio-style interview with Julie Andrews. The adults know her as Mary Poppins and Maria von Trapp; the kids are more likely to recognize hers as the voice of the queen in Shrek 2 and Shrek the Third.

When the night is over, a Boys & Girls Clubs spokesman will call the 2009 event a success and say it raised more than $600,000 for the charity.

It's a healthy sum, especially during a recession. But it's not enough for what the Boys & Girls Clubs want to do.

If a donor to the Boys & Girls Clubs is curious about where the money goes, he or she needs only to step inside the 47,000-square-foot Thornberry Unit, at 43rd Street and Cleveland. The core of the building went up in 1935, but an $8.9 million renovation that began in 2002 has transformed it into "the Cadillac of clubs," as chapter President David Smith calls it.

Inside, the place looks like a college student union — office space, Wi-Fi accessibility in the lobby, computer labs and a TV lounge for the older teens. Next door to the lounge is a well-equipped weight room overseen by Program Director Anna Martin, a weightlifting coach who was an alternate in the 2004 Olympic trials. The shiny blond floor of the new gym runs the length of two full basketball courts. The old gym, still in very good shape, remains in an older part of the building, along with an Olympic-sized pool.

At the club, as the older teens call it, programming includes visits by tutors to help with schoolwork, and visits by health professionals, who talk about things like sex (that is, not having it).

A carrot-and-stick approach is at work here: homework periods and tutoring sessions in exchange for coveted gym access.

A set of concrete stairs leads to the second floor, where a cafeteria serves breakfast, lunch and snacks. A small eating area overlooks the gym through Plexiglas windows.

Across the street is Cleveland Park, where a $2 million baseball diamond was recently installed for the club's RBI program — Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities.

The Thornberry Unit is the area's largest club site, serving as many as 450 kids a day with a membership of 2,800. The $8,966,550 price tag on the renovation was raised ahead of schedule, thanks to contributions from philanthropies such as the Hall Family Foundation ($2 million) and the Mabee Foundation ($1.8 million).

But the opposite is true at the Boys & Girls Clubs' East Side Unit, where administrators have promised a renovation for five years. If the Thornberry Unit is the Cadillac of clubs, the East Side Unit is a rickshaw.

The East Side Unit stands in the middle of the most dangerous neighborhood in Missouri. According to a Kansas City Star series this past winter titled "Murder Factory," more of Missouri's inmates serving sentences for murder or voluntary manslaughter come from the 64130 zip code than from any other in the state.

Because the neighborhood is also one of Kansas City's hardest-hit by the foreclosure crisis, it's hard to find one block without several boarded-up homes. Many front lawns are littered with abandoned furniture. There's no real grocery store for miles.

It wasn't always this desperate. Longtime residents remember Minute Circle, the community center on the corner of Elmwood and 24th Street, where kids played basketball and learned boxing, elderly folks gathered to catch a bus ride to the store, and anyone could drop in for a free meal. Financial problems forced its closing in August 2004, turning away more than 1,000 regular visitors.

Before disbanding, the Minute Circle board agreed to sell its building to the Guadalupe Center, an organization in the Latino community that offers similar services. At the same time, the Heart of America United Way, which once funded Minute Circle, looked for another organization to support in the neighborhood and chose the Boys & Girls Clubs. Without United Way funds, the Guadalupe Center's hold on the former Minute Circle building was short-lived. In June 2005, a fire gutted the building. The Guadalupe Center sold the remains to the Boys & Girls Clubs in September 2005.