This is the seventh in a seven part series about the Great Mall of the Great Plains. Click here to read parts one, two, three, four, five, and six.
Dippin’ Dots, inside the Great Mall, 2015. (Photo by Mike Keller)
In January of 2009, the international economy was in sad shape and the long-struggling Great Mall of the Great Plains was down to 70% occupied. It was under this cloud that the new owners were announced. A group of local investors called Great Olathe Center LLC had purchased the Great Mall – which had been built in 1997 for between $110 and $120 million – for a mere $20.5 million. Talk about your discount centers!
Of the six investors, only David Block wished to be known publicly at the time. Block told the KC Star that the group hoped to rename and revitalize the mall. He felt that because Glimcher wasn’t located in the Kansas City area, and hadn’t owned any other properties in the region, they had been at a disadvantage in leasing and promoting the mall. He hoped local ownership would be able to get the mall going again.
Early plans called for additional signs to make the mall more visible from the highway, a new look inside the mall, entertainment venues, and opening up walkways that would cut through the center of the mall and make it easier for people to get from place to place. In an interview with the Kansas City Business Journal, he said that since the group had obtained the mall for such a low price, they hoped to rent to local and regional retailers for 30% less than competing centers in the area. Given the state of the economy, they didn’t expect national tenants to be opening new stores inside the mall for another couple of years.
In The Olathe News, Block told Jack Weinstein that outdoor access to stores would be a priority going forward, and he also hoped to make the mall a resource of sorts for Olathe – a place where charity and community events could be hosted. “We just have to figure out what to do about that carpet,” he joked.
According to the Kansas City Business Journal, Glimcher used the proceeds from the sale to pay most of a $30 million mortgage on the property. The recession was hitting real estate investment trusts hard, and it made sense for them to unload the property, even if it hurt. One bit from an article that stung me a little was this: “After the recession, rent rates should climb, and the mall’s value should soar. […] Unless the recession drags on for years and many more tenants leave the mall, it’s hard to imagine a downside to this deal.” How little we knew.
Even under the new ownership, 2009 brought many closures. Dress Barn Outlet, Lids for Less, Limited Too, Nautica, and Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory closed. Noah’s Ark relocated to a different spot in Olathe. Most painfully, VF Factory Outlet (an anchor) closed and moved to the Legends in Kansas City, Kansas. Still, the lower rents encouraged some locals to give the mall a shot. Shop Baby Kisses (clothing, accessories, and tutus for infants) and Sazzy’s lingerie boutique opened up in the mall with a handful of other stores. Late in the summer, the Kansas City Business Journal profiled a handful of people who had been laid off from their jobs elsewhere and set up shop in the mall, including Tony Sun, who started the Osaka Teriyaki spot in the food court.
Storefront of what was once Dillard’s, then VF Factory Outlet, then Treasure Hunt. (Photo by Mike Kalasnik of Dead and Dying Retail)
In July, the mall hosted the Fourth again, and a couple of weeks later they threw a carnival in the northeast parking lot to bring people out who hadn’t visited the mall in a while.
In late December of 2009, The Kansas City Garden Railway Society set up a huge model railroad in a former store inside the mall. This was always one of my favorite things to see when I visited the mall in its later years. It was an enormous, very detailed model train set, and I remember it running a lot on the weekends. The article I found about the society moving into the mall described the non-store’s location as “in the fashion district of the Olathe mall,” which made me chuckle a little.
The Fashion Entrance, 2012. (Photo by Mike Kalasnik of Dead and Dying Retail)
2010 didn’t bring much news. A June article about malls in the difficult economy observed that with conspicuous consumption at a low point and department stores no longer a draw, many area malls were trying to draw in shoppers with “experiences.” Among the Great Mall’s attractions were several children’s play centers, a photo booth, the aforementioned model train, a mini golf course, and a 1955 fire engine.
Step right up, and I will tell you what the future holds. (Photo by Bryan Cisler)
That July some cash-strapped cities cancelled their fireworks shows, but Olathe’s went on as usual at the Great Mall.
In the fall, the new owners of the mall requested and received a Community Improvement District (CID) for the Great Mall. This added a 1.5% sales tax to items purchased at the mall that would raise money to first fund a study that would advise the owners on how to revitalize the mall, and later contribute about a quarter of the funds that would go to the potential $210 million redevelopment of the Great Mall.
The redevelopment plan pitched in 2010. (Source: PlanOlathe)
The CID excluded the seven restaurants around the mall, six of which were owned by a fellow in San Francisco who did not feel it was fair to burden his restaurants with additional sales tax if it wasn’t absolutely certain that this project would benefit them. The restaurants would have generated 15% to 20% of the tax had they been included, so their exclusion extended the timetable for the whole project.
Over the course of 2010 it was reported that Safari Park Amusements opened inside the mall, and Shop Baby Kisses doubled its space. Famous Labels and Scrappers Paradise, on the other hand, closed.
In June of 2011, the DMV moved from 151st and Ridgeview to a location inside the Great Mall. The new location gave them a lot more space.
That same month, the Kansas City Garden Railway Society attempted to make the Guinness Book of World Records for “longest model train.” The record was 894 feet, but they were only able to get 705 feet to run on their 3000-foot track.
A picture from 2012’s Great Midwest Balloon Festival at the Great Mall (Photo by Tabitha V on Foursquare)
July saw more fireworks and added the Great Midwest Balloon Festival a little later in the month. The previous year’s festival had been held in a field in Overland Park, but it was held at the Great Mall in 2011, 2012, and 2013, before moving to the Kansas Speedway in 2014. Over the years the festival featured musical acts (such as Shealeigh, Clay Walker, The Elders, and The Scott Perry Band), skydivers, carnival rides, fireworks, kite performances, inflatables, and a whole bunch of hot air balloons. Some years it attracted as many as 50,000 people.
A picture from 2013’s Great Midwest Balloon Festival at the Great Mall (Photo by Michael L on Foursquare)
In a strange twist, Glimcher Realty Trust acquired Leawood’s Town Center Plaza for $139 million in September of 2011. According to the Kansas City Business Journal, it was less an actual purchase and more of an asset swap, where Glimcher traded their Polaris Towne Center in Columbus, Ohio for Leawood’s outdoor mall.
The most noteworthy Great Mall event from 2012 appears to have occurred in April, when a suspicious package was found at the mall. The Olathe Fire Department’s bomb squad evacuated the northeast corner of the mall and used the Remotec Andros F6B robot (aka “The Tin Man II”) to render the package safe. No details were given on what was inside the box, but everything was back to normal after a couple of hours, so I assume it was innocuous.
The parking lot guide, 2012. (Photo by Mike Kalasnik of Dead and Dying Retail)
In June of 2013, the Great Mall’s Community Improvement District and accompanying tax were terminated. There was no article about it, just a formal notice in legalese in the The Olathe News, but it would seem to indicate that at this point, 2010’s plans to revitalize the mall were no longer on the table.
2014 was a relatively bustling year for the mall. In January, Skills to Succeed opened up Create: Art Studio, which taught art skills to individuals with autism and developmental disabilities. In April there was an article about Rock School KC, a rock band style music school in the Great Mall. And in June, the Great Mall hosted the Friends of the Johnson County Library’s Annual Sizzlin’ Summer Used Book Sale. Oddly enough, I was unable to find any mention of Fourth of July celebrations at the Great Mall in 2014.
Sportibles, 2015. (Photo by Bryan Cisler)
A handful of stores opened, and in June Sportibles expanded for a third time. Since 2004 Sportibles had gone from 1,500 square-feet, to 6,000, and finally to 25,000 in 2014. The year also brought some closures, such as Wetzel’s Pretzels and Claire’s Accessories (originally Claire’s Boutique), both original tenants. Hibbett Sports, which had been around since 2005 also closed.
One big opening came in October, when the Martin City Melodrama and Vaudeville Co. opened its 30th season in a new location inside the Great Mall. Previously the Martin City Melodrama had spent 14 years at Metcalf South Mall, which closed in September of 2014. Unfortunately, the Melodrama’s stay at the Great Mall would be very short-lived.
Outside Zonkers. (Photo by Terri Bostic)
Before we get to the worst news, I’d like to take a minute to look around the Great Mall of the Great Plains one last time. I think that I only ever went to the mall once when it was in its heyday. I didn’t grow up particularly close to it. However, between 2010 and 2015, I walked around the mall with a friend on a pretty regular basis. Like Metcalf South Mall, it was just a nice place to go where we could walk around in a big, uncrowded, temperature-controlled space and chat about nothing in particular. There were plenty of random stores to poke around in. You could scope out the model train, pop into the store that had all the aquariums and animals, play some glow-in-the-dark miniature golf, wonder how old the gumballs in the enormous broken gumball machine in the food court were, marvel at the giant monkey outside Zonkers, and just bask in the late-90s glow of the place. In its final years, the Great Mall was like this barely-touched, abandoned time capsule that you could spend some time in every now and then. It might sound like I’m poking fun or only ironically appreciating the mall, but I’m really not. Johnson County can be a fairly cutthroat place for retail, where the hottest thing one month is gone the next, and there are crowds and traffic to contend with everywhere you go. It was nice to pop into the mall and see all of the uses the various spaces were being put to (a church, the Christmas Bureau, the DMV, the trains, etc.). It was clear that nobody was making a lot of money off of this, but it was cool to have a place like that.
The author of this blog post in the Cosmic Mini Golf Party Zone, 2015. (Photo by Bryan Cisler)
Which brings us to 2015.
In February of 2015, with occupancy down to about 50%, the Great Mall of the Great Plains announced that it would be closing in the fall. VanTrust Real Estate (apparently the entity over Great Olathe Center LLC) was managing the property at the time, and their vice president Jeff Smith told the KC Star that they needed to get the mall closed down so they could better plan the future of the area. Demolition seemed likely.
The Kansas City Business Journal reported that a retail study by the real estate feasibility company Jeff Green Partners had found that the mall could now only justify a fraction of its retail space. According to the report, “the structure, maintenance costs, and layout do not support preservation of the current building.”
VanTrust said they were working with the Olathe Chamber of Commerce and the Olathe Economic Development Council to determine what would be next for the area. Tim McKee of the Olathe Chamber said that they would be working with the remaining businesses in the mall and helping them relocate if they needed it.
Mall entrance of what was once Dillard’s and later VF Factory Outlet. (Photo by Mike Kalasnik of Dead and Dying Retail)
Purrfect Pets, a cat shelter that had moved into the Great Mall in late 2014 after Metcalf South closed, was understandably upset that their new facility (which they had upgraded at a cost of $12,000) was about to be shut down. However, one GoFundMe later, they landed on their feet at a space inside Oak Park Mall, where they still exist as of early 2020. The Martin City Melodrama expressed similar disappointment in the KC Star and also started a GoFundMe. They survived the misfortune and moved first to Crown Center and then to Grandview, where they remain to this day.
In April, dozens of volunteers moved the Johnson County Christmas Bureau out of the mall. According to Jennifer Bhargava in the KC Star, “volunteers on Saturday included everyone from the St. Thomas Aquinas High School rugby team to the Leawood Rotary Club. […] UPS donated trucks and drivers to take the boxes and equipment to four different storage facilities in Lenexa.” The Bureau opened in the not-yet-demolished Metcalf South later that year, and although I couldn’t figure out every place they’ve been since then, it looks like they have found other unoccupied retail spaces, and still open up every year.
In July, the Great Mall hosted its last Fourth of July celebration. Aquariums Wholesale and Pet Supply moved to around the Olathe Landing area at 135th and I-35, and Sportibles moved over there with them but closed that particular location in 2016.
Zonkers closed on August 2nd. Dickinson Theatres had been sold to B&B Theatres in late 2014, turning the Great Mall 16 into the B&B Olathe Great Mall 10. It closed on August 17th. The DMV closed and moved out in December. Soon, the only store still open was the Burlington Coat Factory.
On Monday July 11th, 2016 – almost nineteen years after it opened – the demolition of the mall began. It continued for several weeks. Today all that remains on the spot is the Burlington Coat Factory, the surrounding restaurants and hotels, and a big field. I wasn’t able to figure out why Burlington stayed up, but it must be doing good enough business to justify its existence.
An aerial view of the mall area in 2020 (Photo from Bing Maps)
Indian Springs Shopping Center also came down in 2016. Metcalf South Mall came down in 2017, after being closed for a couple of years.
In late 2016, the Olathe City Council created a Sales Tax Revenue (STAR) bond district around the Great Mall site. STAR bonds were/are meant to provide money to developers for large tourist attractions in Kansas, and although Olathe didn’t have concrete plans for any major tourist attractions at the time, they wanted to declare the district ahead of time in case something appealing came up.
In 2018 the Kansas City Business Journal reported talk of a $300 million project at the former Great Mall site that would include a hockey arena, “interactive golf concept,” gym, movie theater, restaurants, retail, and hotels. Later that year the project was named “Mentum.” However, a rival project in Overland Park was soon announced called “Bluhawk.” The projects competed throughout 2019, trying to show how they would be major tourist destinations that deserved STAR bonds and/or other tax incentives. In October of 2019, the state awarded $66 million in STAR bonds to Overland Park’s Bluhawk project, making Olathe’s Mentum look less likely, but not impossible.
In March 2020, Olathe and the developers announced that they were no longer pursuing STAR bonds, but still planned to move the development forward. However, this is a history blog, and we are getting dangerously close to the present, so I will conclude.
Thank you for reading this history of the Great Mall of the Great Plains. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed researching and writing it. I would like to thank all of the journalists at the Kansas City Star, the Kansas City Business Journal, and The Olathe News whose hard work I drew from. I would also like to thank everybody who provided pictures and/or anecdotes. Special thanks to Bryan for research tips and spending countless hours walking malls with me. And finally, thank you to all of the people who made the mall possible, and everybody who worked and shopped there and made it what it was during its all-too-short existence. If you have any memories about the mall you would like to share, please leave us a comment, or shoot me an email at kellerm@jocolibrary.org. Also, if you have any pictures of the mall you’d like to share, please send them my way!
-Mike Keller, Johnson County Library
JoCoHistory Blog 
There will always be a soft spot in my heart for The Great Mall, as sad as it was. It opened right as I hit my teen years, and was the perfect place to hang out with friends. I worked there in high school- didn’t everyone? Customers coming into Foozles would ask for specific books, only to be told if it was a new book or a bestseller, we weren’t gonna have it. But here is a nice selection of cook books no one wants! Even in the later years of the mall’s life, after I had moved out of Olathe, I would bring my small children to play at Monkey Bizness when we were in town. Now those small children are reaching their teen years. I’m somewhat sad they won’t have a mall like that to run around in, trying to make $20 of hard earned babysitting money last for a whole Saturday.
I loved reading this series. Although I didn’t grow up in Kansas City, the malls there have always fascinated me more than other places for some reason. The Great Mall was particularly fascinating to me because the same concept has been very successful in many other metro areas. I loved reading these posts, thank you for writing them!