Crown Center remade 85 acres of Kansas City in Hallmark's image. It also provided competition for real-estate developers.
The subject of this week's feature, Crown Center introduced significant new hotel, residential, retail and office space. Upon its completion in 1971, the five-section, seven-story building that unfolds alongside Pershing Road added 660,000 square feet to the commercial real-estate market.
City boosters tend to operate under the notion that a new office park or shopping mall creates economic activity out of thin air. More likely, the shiny new thing simply moves an existing business from one side of town to another.
Waddell & Reed, the financial services company, was one of Crown Center's first major new tenants. Founded in 1937, Waddell & Reed moved to Crown Center from the New York Life building, the striking Renaissance Revival at Ninth and Baltimore. The New York Life building eventually became vacant and needed taxpayer assistance to be rescued.
Waddell & Reed did not remain at Crown Center. In 1990, the company moved to its current location in Overland Park; Waddell & Reed took over the former Breech Training Academy that TWA used to school its pilots and flight attendants.
Crown Center was able to land a few corporate headquarters not already located in Kansas City. The American Nurses Association arrived in 1972 from New York City. But like Waddell & Reed, the move was not permanent. Twenty years later, the group left Kansas City for Washington, D.C.
Crown Center was part of a package city officials put together in 1997 in an attempt to keep from the NCAA from bolting to Indianapolis. The deal, valued at $29.5 million, would have placed the NCAA into a new building north of the Hyatt Regency.
The NCAA, of course, left for Indiana. Crown Center ended up filling the building next to the Hyatt with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, which relocated from 12th and Wyandotte.
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