By the summer of 2006, 54 stores were trading at Legends in Kansas City, Kansas. The place had opened that April as The Legends at Village West, a shopping and entertainment district with factory outlets mixed into it.
Twenty years on, the outlets won. The center changed hands four times, and over those years it narrowed toward outlet apparel; the bowling alley and dinosaur restaurant dropped out of the directory.
Tanger bought the center in September 2025 and renamed it Tanger Kansas City at Legends. It was 96.5 percent leased by June 2026, and most of that space sells clothes at a discount.
A few of the 2006 restaurants are still open. The smokestack is still up on the west side, the fountains still run, and the Kansas history set into the pavement that year is still there to walk.
The theater came before the grand opening
On November 11, 2005, a movie theater opened on ground that had been farmland and scattered houses before Kansas Speedway went in.
Wyandotte County hadn't had a new one in more than 20 years.
Inside, the lobby rose four stories around an arcade and party rooms, with a bar on an upper level.
Beyond it, 14 auditoriums held 3,050 seats; the biggest took 635, including 86 in a balcony.
The theater opened months ahead of the center's grand opening, but not alone.
RED Development was building The Legends at Village West into a district that already pulled people across the state line: the speedway since 2001, Cabela's since 2002, and Nebraska Furniture Mart since 2003.
A first group of stores opened that November beside the theater.
Dave & Buster's, TJ Maxx, Tommy Hilfiger, Hot Topic, Finish Line, and Hooters were trading while the rest of the site was still a construction job.
$114 million of it was public
The theater belonged to the Unified Government.
Of the $246 million the project was stated at before opening, $132 million was private and $114 million came from STAR bonds, which get paid back out of the sales tax the district itself generates.
That money went into buildings and the things inside them, including the cinema and the animatronic dinosaurs ordered for a restaurant that hadn't opened yet.
The dinosaurs became an argument in Topeka while Legends was still under construction.
Kansas had tightened its STAR bond rules in June 2004, and the question was whether Village West had used the older version for things the law was never written to buy.
The dinosaur bonds went out after the amendment passed but just before it took effect, and the commitment stood.
Nothing was unwound, construction carried on, and the state carried the argument into its later policy.
The theater stayed on the public books for 10 more years.
Dinosaurs, bowling, and factory stores
The main opening came on April 22, 2006, with Counting Crows playing a parking lot.
Two days later Nike opened its first factory store in Kansas, more than 15,000 square feet with 40 full- and part-time staff.
Nike sat in a mix that also held Old Navy, Banana Republic, Brooks Brothers, and Gap Outlet.
It held T-Rex Cafe too, which took 1847 Village West Parkway, put a T-Rex skeleton outside the door, and built the inside around moving full-size dinosaurs, a waterfall, an ice cave, and a place to dig.
Legends got the first T-Rex built anywhere.
Pin-Up Bowl ran bowling lanes and a lounge together, and its first-year menu ran from an $8 key-lime martini to a $2.95 bowl of Campbell's soup and a $2.25 Pop-Tart.
Target and JCPenney were still going up on July 24, 2006, when The Legends at Village West counted 54 open retailers across 406,600 square feet.
Factory stores had been in that mix from the first day; Dave & Buster's, Yard House, STIX, Cavender's, and Saddle Ranch Chop House were there too.
Kansas history set into the paving
A 150-foot smokestack went up on the west side of the site, and the fountain in the civic courtyard threw water about 40 feet into the air.
Legends was built open-air, in brick and warehouse shapes, with the shopping broken into outdoor corridors and courtyards instead of a roofed concourse, and the money for the ground between the buildings went into pieces meant to stay.
Ochsner Hare & Hare designed that ground: outdoor seating with fireplaces, banner canopies overhead, specialty paving, entry monuments, pedestrian lighting, and sculpture.
Into it the center set a program of Kansas history, with portraits, medallions, statues, and pavement work tied to Kansas athletes, musicians, inventors, writers, and Indigenous history, and with Amelia Earhart and Gordon Parks among the faces.
A Yellow Brick Road ran through the middle of it. The official walking route later counted 27 stops, and none of them belonged to a tenant.
Legends turns toward factory stores
Fourteen months after the grand opening, RED made the July 2007 sale: a 95 percent interest, with the outparcels folded into the roughly $214.6 million price.
What followed was a years-long outlet push backed by millions in new investment.
The change came one lease at a time, and for a while the original half held.
In 2009 the property still had 29 restaurants and the whole entertainment lineup, T-Rex, Pin-Up Bowl, Dave & Buster's, Yard House, STIX, and the cinema.
By 2013 the pitch had changed completely.
The stores led the pitch: Under Armour, Polo Ralph Lauren Factory Store, Cole Haan, Brooks Brothers Factory Store, Ann Taylor Factory Store, and Saks Fifth Avenue OFF 5TH.
The restaurants were still there, but behind the shopping message.
Seven years after it opened as an entertainment district, Legends was selling itself as an outlet center.
The auction, then T-Rex closed
The loan went into default in November 2011.
U.S. Bank moved to foreclose on debt reported at $179.4 million, a federal court put the center into receivership in June 2012, and on January 25, 2013 the property went to auction in the Robert J. Dole Federal Courthouse.
KKR Legends LLC took it for $131.5 million, which was $47.9 million short of the debt.
The doors never closed through any of it, and the sale completed that March.
The departures had started before the default.
Linens 'N Things was gone by the end of 2008, Saddle Ranch Chop House in 2009, Pin-Up Bowl in 2011, and Home Decorators Collection by that summer.
In December 2015 the Unified Government sold the theater it had owned since 2005, AMC took over the operation, and it reopened as AMC Legends 14 on December 12 with a renovation the following year.
Walton Street Capital bought control of the center a month after that.
T-Rex closed at 1847 Village West Parkway in August 2017, after 11 years, and the dinosaurs went with it.
The 2018 openings were Kate Spade, Michael Kors, HomeGoods, True Religion, and Journeys.
Tanger buys Legends and renames it
In August 2019 the center opened The Lawn beside the smokestack on the west side, more than 4,000 square feet of turf with shaded places to sit and room for yard games, and it has run free movie nights there ever since.
Tanger bought the whole property in September 2025 for $130 million and put its own name on it.
Legends Outlets Kansas City, the open-air shopping, dining, and entertainment center at 1843 Village West Parkway in Kansas City, Kansas, that opened as The Legends at Village West in 2005 and 2006, is now Tanger Kansas City at Legends.
It has about 693,200 square feet of leasable space. Occupancy was 93.5 percent at Tanger's first quarter-end and 96.5 percent nine months later.
Nike, Coach, Kate Spade, Polo Ralph Lauren, Under Armour, and Levi's trade there now, with H&M, Sephora, TJ Maxx, and HomeGoods among them.
Dave & Buster's, Yard House, STIX, Jazz, Cavender's, and the theater are all still open, 20 years on.
About 10 million visits a year come through, and the people making them still walk the Yellow Brick Road between the fountains and the smokestack, on a route the center laid out with 27 stops.
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