West Ridge Mall in Topeka, KS Is Giving Up 400,000 Square Feet of Stores, and That Is the Plan to Save It

West Ridge Mall opened on March 2, 1988 on SW Wanamaker Road as the biggest enclosed shopping center in Topeka, Kansas: 992,000 square feet, two levels, and a six-screen movie theater tucked into the northwest corner.

Five department stores anchored it by 1990. Dillard's is the only one left.

Furniture Mall of Kansas sits in the building that was The Jones Store, then Macy's for less than six years.

The founders of the Topeka company Advisors Excel bought the mall through an LLC in September 2023 for less than $10 per square foot.

They're stripping 400,000 square feet down for their own headquarters and keeping about 600,000 for shops, restaurants, and entertainment.

Shawnee County approved up to $48 million in industrial revenue bonds for the work in August 2025.

Phase one finished in May 2026 and the demolition moved outside in July.

A mall built to hold nearly a million square feet of stores is being rebuilt to need less of it. Here's how it got to that point.

The day West Ridge Mall opened

On March 2, 1988, the doors opened at 1801 SW Wanamaker Road on the west side of Topeka, Kansas, and West Ridge Mall was in business.

A national television personality from Wheel of Fortune took part in the ribbon-cutting.

Melvin Simon & Associates built it as a two-level enclosed mall with four department stores on day one: Dillard's, JCPenney, Sears, and The Jones Store.

West Ridge 6 opened the same day in the northwest corner of the lower level.

Crown Cinema ran it, and the opening promotion, tied to local station KTKA, sold six older movies for 49 cents apiece.

First-run films started two days later. A Baskin-Robbins sat right there in the theater lobby.

The building came in at 992,000 square feet.

That made it the largest enclosed shopping center in Topeka and the third-largest enclosed mall in the state of Kansas.

The site slopes, and the mall used that.

Some outside doors put you on the upper level and others put you on the lower one, with parking beside the department stores and their exterior entrances.

White Lakes lost its two biggest stores

Topeka already had a mall.

White Lakes had been the city's main enclosed shopping center since the 1960s, and in 1988 it lost Sears and JCPenney to the new place out west.

Both chains packed up. Both took their crowds with them.

Montgomery Ward opened at West Ridge in 1990, and now five department stores sat under one roof.

The restaurants and the big-box stores came next.

LongHorn Steakhouse, Olive Garden, Red Lobster, IHOP, and Chili's went up on and around the mall's edges.

A strip center called West Ridge Plaza went up across the road. Target and T.J. Maxx opened nearby.

The stretch of Wanamaker Road between Interstate 70 and SW 21st Street, with the mall sitting 1.5 miles south of the interstate, turned into the shopping district for the whole city.

Shoppers came from Topeka and from the counties around it.

For the next two decades, if you needed a department store in this town, you drove out to Wanamaker.

The theater closed, the buffet closed

West Ridge started losing its reasons to come at night.

Hollywood Theaters took over the six-screen West Ridge 6 from Crown Cinema in December 1996.

Old Country Buffet, one of the mall's original restaurants, closed in 2003.

Then a 14-screen theater opened 1.6 miles north at the Shops at River Hill, and on April 21, 2005, West Ridge 6 ran its last showtime after 17 years.

The Baskin-Robbins in the lobby closed with it, and 11 people who worked there lost their jobs.

The room sat empty for two years.

In 2007 it was gutted and turned into store space, and the corner where you once bought a ticket and a cone was gone for good.

The theater had given the mall a reason to be open after the department stores locked up for the evening.

The screens went north, and West Ridge lost its original after-hours draw.

Macy's came back to Topeka, then left

Montgomery Ward closed in 2001 when the chain liquidated.

The empty store held a Kansas International Museum exhibit for a while, and Burlington Coat Factory opened in the building in October 2007.

The Jones Store became Macy's in September 2006.

The Macy's name had left town in 1986, when the downtown store closed, so this was a homecoming 20 years in the making.

It lasted less than six years and closed in March 2012.

Furniture Mall of Kansas moved into the building in late 2013 and never left.

In between, Simon renovated the place across 2008 and 2009. The mall looked better than it had in a decade.

The new finishes didn't keep the department stores. Burlington closed in January 2018 and left the old Ward building empty.

Sears closed that September, 30 years after it had opened with the mall.

Spun off, defaulted, sold at auction

Simon handed West Ridge and 97 other smaller centers to a brand-new company called Washington Prime in May 2014.

A few months earlier the mall had been appraised at $67.8 million, and its owner had just taken out a $54 million loan against it and the plaza across the street.

Then the department stores kept leaving, and West Ridge fell behind on required loan reserves.

By November 2018 the lender had issued a notice of default on $49.8 million.

In February 2019 Washington Prime announced it would hand West Ridge and the plaza across the street over to that lender.

Giving up this mall and one more in Wichita would save the company $3.5 million.

The building went to a Shawnee County sheriff's auction that December.

Wells Fargo, the creditor in the foreclosure, bought it for more than $27 million.

The Woodmont Company was already running it under a court appointment.

The mall stayed open through all of it.

But by 2021 only 39 percent of the space was occupied, and the pandemic had landed in the middle of everything.

One of six escalators still worked

In January 2022 the mall changed hands again, this time to Kohan Retail Investment Group, a Long Island company that buys up struggling malls.

The stated plan was local: local merchants, restaurants, food vendors, and activity-based businesses, on shorter and more flexible leases.

The Kohan stretch ran about 20 months.

National stores kept leaving, no redevelopment got finished, and the building's machinery kept getting worse.

By 2023, one of the mall's six escalators was running.

Word traveled, too. Kohan's other Kansas mall, Towne West Square in Wichita, had utility shutoffs that made the news.

West Ridge never got that far.

Still, this was a building Topekans had shopped in since the day it opened, and the decisions about it were being made from an office on Long Island.

Local businesses worried about the upkeep and about how far away the landlord sat.

Topeka wanted an owner who lived in the same town as the mall.

Two local men bought West Ridge Mall

On September 2023, two co-founders of Advisors Excel, a financial-services company built in Topeka, bought West Ridge Mall through an LLC.

They started out wanting one empty box, the old Burlington.

Then they worked out that a headquarters inside a failing mall would be stuck with whatever happened to the rest of the mall.

So they bought the mall around it.

The price was never made public.

The mall cost less than $10 per square foot, and the founders said buying it would cost half as much as putting up a new headquarters.

The mall already had the parking, the utilities, the structure, and enough floor space to bring together employees who had been split across separate Topeka campuses.

Then they went after the parts they still didn't own.

JCPenney closed on May 25, 2025, after 37 years, and that building came into the project.

So did the old Sears, more than 121,000 square feet on two floors.

The plan cuts the shopping down to 600,000 square feet and turns 400,000 into offices, with three redesigned public gateways called the Meadow, Valley, and Ridgeway gateways.

On August 4, 2025, Shawnee County approved up to $48 million in industrial revenue bonds for the work, and county taxpayers owe nothing if the project fails.

Not every tenant stayed through the change.

Worth A 1000 Words Studio had been paying $2,000 a month; its owner said the proposed rent was $10,000, and the studio moved downtown in 2024.

What's open at West Ridge now

By May 6, 2026, phase one was finished.

Behind the temporary walls, the JCPenney interior had been stripped bare, new chillers and cooling towers were going in, and the electrical work was moving along out of public view.

In July, crews started removing sections of the outside of the building.

Four of the five department-store names are gone.

Dillard's is the last one standing, and Furniture Mall of Kansas holds the building where The Jones Store and then Macy's used to be.

Plenty is still open.

Sky Zone, Hot Topic, Bath & Body Works, Kay Jewelers, LensCrafters, Zumiez, Champs Sports, R&D Collectibles, the Book Nook, Our Stories Museum, Cafe Barnabas, Topsy's Popcorn, mini golf and a super bungee.

The children's play area was moved and improved while the construction went on around it.

Home At Last relocated into the mall this spring. Petland is planning its biggest store here yet.

West Ridge LIVE concerts still run in the food court.

On a normal Saturday, 5,000 people come through. No Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Nordstrom Rack, or Nike has been announced.

The headquarters is set to open in 2027 and the full job is tentatively set to finish in mid-to-late 2028, when more than 1,000 people will work inside a mall Topekans have shopped in since 1988.