 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Shopping Centers Today -> October 2003
 PRINT THIS STORY: |
  CHANGE TEXT SIZE: |
|
DDR PARTNERSHIP REVAMPS KANSAS CITY CENTER
BY IAN RITTER
 |
Ward Parkway Center, Kansas City, Mo., was a retail magnet for years after its 1959 opening, despite some hefty competition — it shared a city with the famous Country Club Plaza.
The 811,343-square-foot center lies on the Missouri side of the Kansas-Missouri border, between State Line Road (the actual physical border, in the city’s metropolitan area) and Ward Parkway, a thoroughfare leading north to downtown
Kansas City through some of the area’s wealthiest neighborhoods.Now-defunct developer Krogh Bros. opened Ward Parkway Center in 1959 as a two-level enclosed mall. For the next two decades the center was one of the biggest retail draws in the city, says Doug S. McFadden, a senior associate at the Kansas City office of CB Richard Ellis.
“It was a mall that really attracted folks in a three-mile radius,” he said.
The area’s high-income residents were drawn to the center and anchor tenants such as J.C. Penney and Montgomery Ward. The Ward store was especially successful, and for years posted the highest sales of any store in the chain, according to McFadden.
But in the 1980s the area started to change, as did the tastes of many residents, McFadden says. While the Kansas side of State Line Road remained high-income, the homes on the Missouri side became rental properties, attracting students and lower-income workers. The more-affluent Kansans began frequenting the newer malls on their side, such as Oak Park Mall, in Overland Park. That 1.6 million-square-foot center, developed by Leawood, Kan.-based Copaken, White & Blitt, is anchored by two Dillard’s stores, J.C. Penney, a Jones Store and Nordstrom.
Ward Parkway Center’s clientele trended younger with the opening of an AMC theater there in 1991. “It became known as an overgrown arcade,” said McFadden. “[Customers] had to rifle through a pile of teen-agers.”
Then came the closures of J.C. Penney in 1996 and Montgomery Ward in 2001, when the latter went out of business.
The center has gone through a number of owners, too. In 1999 Dallas-based Todd Interests and Washington, D.C.-based Madison Marquette bought it from Daiwa Financial, which had succeeded a long line of owners. Todd and Madison Marquette began “de-malling” Ward Parkway Center in the mid-1990s, replacing the tenants on the building’s east side with new anchors such as 24-Hour Fitness, a Dick’s Sporting Goods and a Stein Mart store. Target, another current anchor, replaced Montgomery Ward in October 2002. That side of the center is now open-air; the west side remains enclosed.
The pace of change is not slowing under the latest owner. In June, Coventry Real Estate Fund II, a partnership between Developers Diversified Realty and Coventry Realty Advisors, bought Ward Parkway Center from Todd and Madison Marquette for $48.5 million.
Beachwood, Ohio-based Developers Diversified now manages the center for the fund. While keeping the center’s anchors, the owners will add more big-box tenants and a grocery store, for which they plan to begin construction next year.
“We’re taking over a property that has been substantially redeveloped,” said Richard E. Brown, senior vice president of real estate at Developers Diversified. “We see an opportunity to continue that redevelopment.”
 | Current Issue March 2010 |