Crown Center Shops



location = 2450 Grand Boulevard Kansas City, MO 64108 | owner = Hallmark Cards | master architect = Edward Larrabee Barnes|

Crown Center is a neighborhood of interconnected buildings in Downtown Kansas City, Missouri. The complex is home to a shopping mall, high rise housing, several restaurants, two hotels, and the corporate headquarters of Hallmark Cards, Shook, Hardy & Bacon, and Lathrop & Gage. The shopping center is anchored by two theaters, SEA LIFE Kansas City, LEGOLAND Discovery Center Kansas City, and Halls, an upmarket department store which is owned and operated by Hallmark Cards. The entire complex is linked together be a series of elevated walkways known as the Link.

Edward Larrabee Barnes was brought on to be the master architect of the complex while Harry Weese designed the Westin Crown Center Hotel. Warren Plattner designed the American Restaurant, which closed in 2016. The space is now rented out as a special event venue. Prior to its closure, the American Restaurant was the only Forbes Travel Guide four-star restaurant in the state of Missouri.

Halls Crown Center Department Store
The Halls department store at Crown Center was the third downtown location for the two store chin. The new store was designed by Paul László, who had previously been commissioned to design department stores for Bullock's Wilshire, Goldwaters, Robinson's, Saks Fifth Avenue, Hudson's Bay and Ohrbach's. In 2011, work began to convert the first two floors of Halls into SEA LIFE Kansas City and LEGOLAND Discovery Center Kansas City in a $30 million project. Halls would eventually renovate the majority of the third floor of the shopping mall for a new 60,000-square-foot store called Halls on Grand.

The Mall
J. C. Hall's original concept for the Crown Center shops was a kind of international bazaar, part of which was a maze-like area known as West Village designed by architects François Dallegret and Joseph Baker. Mr Hall had purchased the Siamese Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair with plans to have it reassembled at Crown Center. The concept was to bring in craftsmen of fine goods from from villages in Europe and Asia and offer them a place to compete in the new mall. When West Village opened, it was hailed for its architecture, but never attracted the intended international vendors or clientele. The plan was quickly scrapped and replaced with a replaced with a more conventional design. Today the shopping mall consists of three floors with the first floor primarily housing restaurants, the second speciality stores, and the third, which was previously home to stores such as Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works, was gutted to become a new location for a relocated Halls Department Store.

The Westin Crown Center Hotel
The Westin Crown Center Hotel is home to a 12' waterfall fountain carved out of what once had been known as Signboard Hill. The fountains circulation system operates at 250 gallons per minute.

The Sheraton Crown Center Hotel
The Sheraton Hotel opened opened on July 1, 1980, as the Hyatt Regency Crown center. The hotel is famous for being the location of the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse on July 17, 1981, in which 114 people died. The Sheraton Hotel is currently the tallest hotel in Missouri and was once home to a revolving restaurant on the top floor.