If you visit 26th Street and Grand Boulevard in Kansas City, Missouri, today, you'll find an 85-acre spread with office buildings, shops, two big hotels, theaters, and fountains. Nice place.
But in the early 1960s? Total disaster zone. Joyce C. Hall, who founded Hallmark Cards, and his son Donald J. Hall would look out their company windows and see nothing but urban decay.
Parking lots with deep ruts everywhere. Warehouses sit empty with busted windows. Shacks made of tarpaper stuck to a limestone hill covered in old advertising signs.
The whole area looked like a graveyard for failed businesses.
The Halls had two options. Pack up and move to the suburbs like everyone else, or stay put and fix the mess themselves. They picked option two.
The result was Crown Center - named after the crown in Hallmark's logo. What started as cleaning up 85 acres of blight turned into one of the first big mixed-use developments in America.
Before World War One, this area was part of downtown Kansas City and the Union Hill neighborhood - a real community. By World War II, it had gone to hell.
Old warehouses, used car lots, empty buildings. The only things worth a damn were Hallmark's headquarters at 26th and Grand, occupied since 1956, and Union Station.
Getting the Plan Together Took Some Work
Donald J. Hall Sr. took over as President and CEO of Hallmark Cards in 1966. His dad, Joyce, had wanted to fix up the neighborhood for years, and Donald jumped on it right away.
Hallmark started buying up property around their headquarters without making a big deal about it.
They brought in urban planning experts to figure out if they could build what they were calling a "city within a city" on the land they were grabbing.
The Halls got advice from some big names - Walt Disney, James Rouse, people like that. They dumped millions into it and then sat back and waited.
They knew this wasn't the kind of thing that pays off next quarter. Victor Gruen and Associates, out of Los Angeles, drew up the first master plan.
Then Edward Larrabee Barnes from New York came in and changed things around and actually made it happen. Kansas City gave the thumbs up by the end of 1967.
They announced the whole thing to the public in January 1967. On September 16, 1968, they broke ground on phase one: underground parking, five office buildings, and a big landscaped square.
Crown Center would be privately financed but got tax breaks through Missouri's Chapter 353 redevelopment law, which was designed exactly for situations like this, bringing blighted areas back to life.
The First Buildings Go Up
The office complex came first - five buildings all connected together, seven stories each, opened in 1971. That gave them 660,000 square feet of office space.
They started building the hotel the same year. Harry Weese designed it in that Brutalist style - you know, all concrete and bold shapes.
It opened in May 1973 as the Crown Center Hotel. Western International Hotels ran it. The coolest part?
They built a 60-foot waterfall right into the natural limestone, incorporating that old Signboard Hill into the design.
That waterfall ended up being one of the most photographed spots in Kansas City.
The shopping center opened in 1973, too. Three levels, nearly 300,000 square feet.
They had this wild idea at first - make it like an international bazaar with a crazy maze section called West Village. Architects Francois Dallegret and Joseph Baker designed it.
Turns out people hated the maze. They replaced it with a normal layout.
Homes came in 1976. Architects Collaborative out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, designed them under Norman Fletcher's direction.
They built more than 230 condos in two buildings. There's the 30-story San Francisco Tower and the seven-story Santa Fe Place.
Six acres total for the residential part, with a clubhouse, pool, and gardens. The 2345 Grand Boulevard office complex came next - a 27-story tower in 1977, then another 11-story tower in 1986.
Then Came July 17, 1981
They opened a second hotel on July 1, 1980. The Hyatt Regency Kansas City - 40 stories, 731 rooms.
Don Hall wanted it to anchor the revitalization and turn Kansas City into a convention destination. The roof had collapsed during construction, but they fixed it and got it open.
Thirteen months later, everything went to hell. July 17, 1981. Friday night. A tea dance competition filled the hotel lobby - a super popular event.
People packed onto the third and fourth-floor walkways to watch the dancers below.
At 7:05 PM, the fourth-floor walkway gave way. Just dropped. Concrete, steel, people - all of it crashed down onto the second-floor walkway. Then both walkways fell onto the dancers.
114 people died. More than 200 got hurt. Worst accidental structural failure in American history. The hotel shut down for 75 days.
Don Hall wrote to his employees the next day: "The past 18 hours have been the darkest of my life as one of the worst in Kansas City history.
I find it difficult to even talk about the events of last night." Kansas City's a small enough place that everyone knew someone who got touched by this.
In 1982, investigators concluded the collapse was triggered by a late design change to the hanger-rod detail, how the rods were connected, which sharply increased the load on the walkway connections.
The engineers got blamed.
Picking Up the Pieces and Moving On
Lawsuits piled up - $3.5 billion worth. But within 18 months, Hallmark stepped up, accepted liability, and put together a settlement package.
Final total: over $140 million. Rich Roberts from RDR PR said later that the Halls' moving fast to settle instead of waiting helped the hotel recover.
Plus, people knew the Halls actually cared about Kansas City. That counted for something. Edward Larrabee Barnes redesigned the hotel lobby.
The hotel's called the Sheraton Kansas City Hotel at Crown Center now. Sixty-five percent is convention business, 35 percent is leisure travelers.
The Hall Corporate Foundation kicked in $50,000 for a memorial to victims and first responders.
Crown Center kept growing. 2405 Grand Boulevard opened in 1987 - 14 stories, 245,000 square feet.
Marsh Inc., Fleishman-Hillard, and Children's Mercy Kansas City moved in. In 1991, they finished a 279,000-square-foot tower at 2600 Grand.
Henry Cobb from Pei Cobb Freed and Partners designed it. In November 1997, they broke ground on 2301 McGee. Eight stories.
It opened in January 2000 with the Crown Center Exhibit Hall, 52,000 square feet. Then came 2555 Grand Boulevard in 2003.
Big one - 24 stories, 682,000 square feet. Shook Hardy and Bacon, Kansas City's biggest law firm, took the whole building.
What's There Now for Shopping
Both hotels got major makeovers in 2013 - the Westin and the Sheraton. Combined $22 million renovation project.
They closed down Skies, the old revolving restaurant. In 2014, Crown Center added a new Halls store - 60,000 square feet.
Hallmark Cards owns and runs it. High-end stuff - designer clothes for men and women, cosmetics, china, crystal, home decorations.
The Link connects the two hotels. It's this glass-enclosed elevated walkway - cost $5 million to build, 880 feet long.
You can walk between the hotels, shops, and offices without going outside. Pretty nice when it's freezing or pouring rain.
They've got about 6,000 parking spaces in covered garages all over the place.
The Crown Center Shops have three levels with more than 30 shops and restaurants. A mix of national chains and local places.
There was a Crayola Cafe until 2020 - only one in the world. Fritz's Railroad Restaurant delivers your food on a miniature train.
You can get fast food or sit down for a nice meal. The American Restaurant used to be there until 2016 - it was the Forbes Travel Guide four-star restaurant in Missouri.
Now they mostly do special events. Nearly 300,000 square feet of retail space total.
Stuff to Do Besides Shopping
The Coterie Theatre does professional shows - classic and contemporary stuff. Musical Theater Heritage brings musicals to life in small settings.
Hallmark sponsors two free things: Kaleidoscope lets kids ages 5 to 12 make art with leftover materials.
The Hallmark Visitors Center shows you the company's history.
SEA LIFE Kansas City has over 30 displays with more than 5,000 sea creatures. LEGOLAND Discovery Center is for kids 3 to 10.
The Crown Center Ice Terrace is Kansas City's only outdoor public ice rink. Runs November through March.
They just started their 53rd season in 2025-2026.
The Mayor's Christmas Tree is huge - 100 feet tall. Taller than the trees at Rockefeller Center or the White House.
They string it with over 7,200 white lights. Some celebrities flip the switch every year on the day after Thanksgiving.
After the holidays, they cut it up and sell ornaments for the Mayor's Christmas Tree Fund. The 2025 ornament is "Sweet Snowman" by Hallmark artist Sheyda Best. It's number 39 in the series.
Crown Center Square has ethnic festivals, outdoor movies, and live music. The fountain shoots water 60 feet high.
The Hospital Hill Run happens every June. The Museum of BBQ opened in April 2025. About 5 million people visit Crown Center every year.
The Hotels and What's Coming Next
The Westin Kansas City's got 724 rooms, a ballroom, a health club, meeting spaces, plus a brasserie-style restaurant and bar on site.
That 60-foot waterfall carved into the limestone is still one of the most photographed things in Kansas City.
The Sheraton has 733 rooms in a 40-story tower, meeting facilities, and the biggest hotel ballroom in Kansas City - 17,400 square feet.
They've got Spectators Gastro-Pub for food. Both hotels together give you over 1,450 rooms.
Crown Center's got over 2.2 million square feet of office space. Hallmark Cards' world headquarters is there.
Two of Kansas City's biggest law firms - Shook Hardy and Bacon, and Lathrop GPM - have their headquarters there, too.
The buildings house insurance companies, PR firms, tech companies, and medical organizations.
The future plan calls for almost 2 million more square feet of office space in maybe four new buildings.
There's a two-acre park south of 2600 Grand that Daniel Urban Kiley designed - that'll be the centerpiece. They want to add retail, more homes, parking structures, and walkways connecting everything.
Kansas City's streetcar Main Street Extension finished in October 2025. The Riverfront Extension should open early in 2026.
The Grand Boulevard District Plan wants to turn everything from the River Market to Crown Center into something like Michigan Avenue in Chicago.
Crown Center: How It All Turned Out
Crown Center took an 85-acre dump and turned it into one of the first big mixed-use developments in the country.
Over 5 million people visit every year, and it kicked off a bunch of other development nearby. For people looking for fun, it's shops, concerts, and theaters.
For people who live there, it's home-decent apartments and condos. For business folks, it's offices. For travelers, it's two solid hotels. For city planners, it's proof that you can actually fix up a dead part of a city.
Crown Center Redevelopment Corporation - which is a Hallmark subsidiary - runs the whole thing.
Three levels of shops and restaurants, fountains out in the open, theaters, the ice rink, walkways connecting everything, including Union Station.
Joyce C. Hall and Donald J. Hall Sr. started this in the 1960s, and it's still going.
They turned parking lots and empty warehouses into a real working community where people live, work, and hang out. The story's not over yet - there's more building planned, and who knows what else comes next.
