Towne East Square opens one anchor at a time
On January 22, 1975, JCPenney opened at Towne East Square on East Kellogg in Wichita, Kansas, while the rest of the enclosed mall was still being finished around it.
Melvin Simon & Associates was building the center as a $50 million project of about 1.1 million square feet, and its department stores arrived one by one.
Henry's opened on May 11, 1975, moving its business out of the old Twin Corners store at Douglas and Oliver. In July 1975, Sears was announced as a future anchor, with an opening expected 12 to 18 months away.
The grand opening itself was August 14, 1975, the day Dillard's had set back in June for its new store.
That day the 182,000-square-foot Dillard's opened its doors, and television host Ed McMahon cut the ribbon on a mall where JCPenney had been trading since January.
Among the shops along the corridors were Waldenbooks, Kinney Shoes, County Seat, and Spencer Gifts.
Just inside the main east entrance, Farrell's Ice Cream Parlour, open from the mall's first months, dressed its staff in pinstriped shirts and straw hats.
A Farrell's Zoo, a sundae of about 8.5 pounds, came out to bells and sirens, carried by two employees.
Henry's role later passed to Von Maur, which opened at the mall in August 2002.
Sears closed in 2019, and the mall also added a Round1 entertainment venue.
Since July 2023 the old Sears space has held SCHEELS, a big sporting-goods and recreation store.
It stands with Dillard's, Von Maur, and JCPenney as one of the mall's four anchors.
Oak Park Mall opens with a trolley and adds Nordstrom
For the opening of Oak Park Mall in August 1975, Macy's ran a double-decker trolley built in the London style, and one of its stops was at 75th Street and Lamar Avenue.
The trolley's destination was a new enclosed mall at 95th Street and Quivira Road in Overland Park, Kansas, set on ground the J.C. Nichols Co. had leased to its developers, Copaken, White & Blitt.
Macy's was one of four department stores the mall was planned around, along with JCPenney, Montgomery Ward, and Stix, Baer & Fuller.
At the ribbon cutting a developer worked a pair of scissors set with diamonds and worth $15,000, in front of a crowd of about 200.
Inside, the Ramos Group designed the mall for daylight.
Light came down through skylights, and fountains stood in the concourses among pieces of modern sculpture, including two titled Yellow Ball and Stablitt XVI.
Outside, the parking had room for 7,000 cars.
In 1998 Oak Park added a wing. Its anchor was a Nordstrom of 200,000 square feet, and the rest of the new wing left room for about 25 shops.
Smaller spaces turned over as well: the former Rainforest Cafe later held American Girl and then Giselle's Bridal KC, and the spots where Maid-Rite and Quiznos once sold food became a Chipotle.
In 2005 CBL bought the mall.
LEGO, Build-A-Bear, H&M, LUSH, and Miniso are among its smaller stores today.
The anchors are Nordstrom, Dillard's, Macy's, and JCPenney, and two of those names, Macy's and JCPenney, come from the mall's original four of 1975.
Flinthills Mall turns six old shops into Ollie's
On June 8, 1974, an F4 tornado went through Emporia, Kansas, and tore into Flinthills Mall.
The building had gone up in 1973, and the shopping center had been fully open only since early 1974, a few months before the storm damaged a large part of it.
Flinthills was built for Emporia, a far smaller market than Kansas City or Wichita.
By 2014 the mall covered about 253,000 square feet and was about 82 percent occupied.
JCPenney and Sears were among its anchors that year, alongside Sutherlands and the cinema.
The lineup kept moving. JCPenney closed in 2020, and Dunham's Sports took its place, holding a grand opening in July 2022.
In 2024 and 2025 a run of familiar smaller shops left, Buckle, Maurices, and Claire's among them, from the stretch of storefronts between the center court and Sutherlands.
That stretch is where the mall found its newest tenant.
In March 2026 management announced that Ollie's Bargain Outlet would join several of those former spaces, the old Bath & Body Works, Claire's, Buckle, Maurices, Glik's, and GNC Nutrition shops, into one store planned at 30,000 square feet or more, more than a tenth of the floor area the whole mall measured in 2014.
Ollie's opened on November 4, 2026.
A few months earlier, in June 2026, the eight-screen cinema passed from B&B Theatres to a new operator, Golden Ticket Cinemas.
Ollie's, Dunham's Sports, and Sutherlands trade there now, in the spaces that once held a department store and a row of mall shops.
Between the stores, the corridors stay open for indoor walking and community events.
Indian Springs Mall goes from shopping center to empty land
In 1971 Montgomery Ward left its old department store at Seventh Street and Minnesota Avenue in downtown Kansas City, Kansas, and reopened out at 47th Street and State Avenue.
There, beside the newly built Interstate 635 corridor, Indian Springs Shopping Center had just opened as an enclosed mall, one of the bigger ones in the Midwest at the time.
The store that made the trip was an old downtown name, and with it a piece of downtown's trade went out to the highway.
Under one roof and out of the weather, Indian Springs became a place for shows as well as for shopping.
Truck shows and boat shows took over the concourses, and so did art fairs, pet shows, and fashion shows, along with exhibits of goods from abroad.
Beauty contestants competed there too, in the Miss USA preliminaries for Kansas and for Missouri.
By 1977 the center's sales had doubled from their 1972 level, and it ranked eighth among the shopping centers around Kansas City.
Later, as other shopping destinations in the area grew, Indian Springs lost much of its retail business.
From 1990 to 1998 the shopping center housed Wonderscope Children's Museum.
The enclosed mall eventually closed to ordinary retail, and in 2016 the whole complex, stores and concourses alike, was demolished.
No replacement development has been built in its place.
In November 2026 a committee of the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas, voted 5-2 to resume negotiations with Eastside Innovation over Midtown Station, a proposal for new homes and businesses across a wider area.
The tax incentives and the terms of a deal are unsettled, and no project has been approved.
The land at 4601 State Avenue, where the concourses once held boat shows and beauty pageants, sits vacant.
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