Leawood Village luxury apartments occupy old Ward Parkway parking lot

By Ben McCarthy

After sitting largely empty for decades, signs of life at the once unused parking across from Ward Parkway Center are drawing a mixed reaction from neighbors and local businesses.

Leawood Village, a mixed-use development, finally opened its doors to residents on October 15th after two years of construction. The building’s community manager, Cheryl Cox, says that about a third of its 182 luxury apartments units are now occupied. The building will also house three to four business tenants on the west-facing side of the structure’s first floor.

The apartments at 8660 State Line Rd in Leawood occupy a space that once belonged to the shopping center, but the mall’s prior owners (Farallon Capital Management LLC of San Francisco) sold the property separately before finalizing an agreement to sell the retail property on the Missouri side to the Houston-based Fidelis Realty Partners in December of 2022.

Ward Parkway Marketing Director Dave Claflin has been with the mall since 2011, and confirms that the former parking lot wasn’t being served by mall attendees, and is glad to now see it finally being turned into an asset for the area, rather than just an unused parking lot.

“I can say confidently that in the last 15 years it was just sitting there,” Claflin said. “Once in a while it would serve as overflow parking when things got really busy around Christmas time shopping.”

“That Hanson concert years ago was probably the apex of that parking lot.”

Claflin’s reference to a famous free concert that occurred on November 18th, 1997, is still remembered by much of Kansas City.

The pop rock sensation Hanson was then a trio of mostly teenage brothers from Tulsa that burst onto the scene earlier that year with their smash hit “MMMBop.” The free concert, put on by Mix 93.3 FM, brought out an estimated 20,000 or more fans to the Leawood parking lot. Fresh off performing that national anthem at game one of the 1997 World Series, Hanson sent the fans home happy after performing eight songs, after originally planning to only play three. Reached for comment through the group’s management, Taylor Hanson, now 41 (and the middle brother of the trio), recalled the group’s first performance in Kansas City as being a huge success.

“It was an extraordinary experience to see thousands of our most devoted fans showing up simply to hear a few songs from three kids from Tulsa,” Hanson said. “One of the things that made us most proud was that we knew that the event was a free concert from the radio station, so in lieu of a ticket, we encouraged fans to bring food donations for the local food bank – a great number of people were helped that day.”

While Claflin says that local shops and restaurants in and around the Ward Parkway Center are happy to see the first wave of hundreds of more new residents, local residents in the adjacent Leawood neighborhood remain upset with the new building and its implications for their properties.

In addition to apartment units (which range from one bedroom units listed at $1700 to $2000, and three bedrooms that top $3500) twenty-four townhomes are still under construction on the building’s north side, with plans to start selling them to future residents in the coming months, according to Cox.