What’s next for historic Kansas City Star building in the Crossroads? Here’s the latest
There are a couple of former Kansas City Star buildings.
The best known is the Press Pavilion, the green glass structure at 1601 McGee St., visible from Interstate 670. Opened in 2006 and spanning two city blocks, it’s where the papers were printed. The Star sold the building in 2019. It is now owned by the Privitera family and was considered as a possible site for a new home for the Royals until the stadium sales tax vote failed in April.
But for 106 years, the Star’s journalists (as well as advertising, technology and other administrative employees) worked out of a brick building down the street, at 1729 Grand. The Star sold that property in 2017 to 3D Development, a local firm. (Employees moved to the Press Pavilion for a few years, then into offices at Crown Center, where we are based today.)
3D Development, which has redeveloped other Crossroads projects like the Creamery building and Corrigan Station, hoped to debut a multi-use mix of office and commercial spaces at the property in 2020. Original plans mentioned a grocery store, a food hall, a data center, rooftop patios, an on-site spa and 500 underground parking spaces.
Six years later, though, Grand Place is still very much a work in progress.
“We did the early demolition in 2018 and 2019, but the pandemic set office (lease demand) back quite a bit,” said Erik Wullschleger, a partner with 3D Development. “We started construction in earnest a little over a year ago.”
Tria Health, a health care benefits provider, is now operating in a space on the east side of the building. BOK Financial has completed construction of a two-story banking center on a former surface parking lot on the northwest corner of the property.
Last week, 3D Development announced another upcoming tenant: Ricochet, a game lounge that plans to open early next year on the northeast corner of the building. It will be Ricochet’s second location; its first is in Des Moines. The bar serves craft cocktails and local beer and offers ping-pong, skeeball, foosball, board games, bumper pool, bubble hockey, and more.
“It’s a lot of analog-type games — most of their stuff doesn’t plug in,” Wullschleger said. “They’ll have about 10,000 square feet of space and a walk-out patio.”
What’s next for Grand Place?
The food hall, Wullschleger said, is still in play. The working name is Grand Place Market. It will take up somewhere around 25,000 square feet of space on the south end of the building and be operated by DaVinci KC, led by Dante Passantino.
“We expect to see that open by the end of 2025,” Wullschleger said.
But Grand Place Market is not ready to announce any tenants yet. “We have a lot of prospects that (Passantino) has worked with over the years, and a lot of them are still very enthusiastic,” Wullschleger said. “But right now we’re focused on finance and design of that space.”
The food hall will have a “boutique grocery” element to it, Wullschleger said.
“We are thinking it will kind of blend that line between a grocery store and a food hall where you can sit down to eat,” he said. “Maybe the meat counter will also serve steak sandwiches, or the produce section could serve salads and wraps. That kind of thing.”
The underground parking plans have been scaled back. Originally 500 spaces, then 400, the number is now “a little over 100” underground spaces, plus some surface spots.
Wullschleger said they “aren’t ruling out retail tenants” and that there’s an old boiler room space that could make for an interesting performance venue for the right tenant.
“But we think of this as largely office space with high-end amenities — a business club room with breakfast and lunch service, a rooftop space for entertaining, a mezzanine wine bar,” he said. “We want this to be a place employees will want to stick around and spend time in. That’s becoming more and more important since the pandemic.”
