Prairie Village's Mission Road Is Having Two Different Comebacks at Once
For most of last year, driving past 71st and Mission meant passing the same tired scene: orange construction fencing, a mostly dark building, and a Macy's sign that had stopped meaning anything since the store closed in 2020. Half a mile south at Corinth Square, another Mission Road landmark was going quiet too, as the Mexican restaurant that had anchored that corner for more than three decades served its last margaritas. Two shopping centers, two closures, same road.
This year both spaces reopened. But they reopened in almost opposite ways, and that difference says more about how Prairie Village is actually changing than any single ribbon-cutting could.
The Shops of Prairie Village had a rough stretch even by empty-storefront standards. A transformer fire in a basement near the vacant Macy's in early 2025 set back an already-delayed redevelopment. Then came a second phase of construction that blocked entrances to the shopping center for more than a year. One longtime tenant, the boutique Scoobie, closed after seven years when the disruption made it impossible to keep operating as a storefront. For a while, some businesses in the center were seeing a handful of customers a day.
Big Grove Brewery changed that math in May. The Iowa-based brewery and restaurant opened a roughly 12,000-square-foot taproom on the second floor of the old Macy's at 7060 Mission Road, one section of a building that once held 120,000 square feet of department store. Its soft opening on a Tuesday generated five-figure sales before the official grand opening two days later. The space includes an outdoor patio with fire pits, corn hole, a kids' play mound, and garage-style bay doors that open the dining room straight onto the patio. It's dog-friendly, it's open 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily, and the tap list runs about 20 beers deep, including Big Grove's own Easy Eddy Hazy IPA and Citrus Surfer alongside Kansas City staples from Boulevard Brewing and Martin City Brewing. For every case of its Neighborhood Beer lager sold, the company routes a dollar into micro-grants of $250 to $1,000 through a program called Big Grove for Good, aimed at groups around the Kansas City metro.
Big Grove wasn't meant to be the only new name in that building. Hen House, the grocery chain currently operating from its longtime spot at 6950 Mission Road, is relocating into the lower level of the former Macy's, with an opening expected next month. GolfTRK, an indoor golf brand, signed on for a flagship location and corporate headquarters at 7068 Mission, just west of Big Grove, with a summer opening planned for what the company describes as a blueprint for future franchise locations elsewhere.
None of these are Prairie Village companies. They're a Solon, Iowa brewery with locations in Cedar Rapids and Omaha, a regional grocery chain, and a golf startup using this address as its national test case. The building sat empty long enough that filling it took outside capital willing to bet on a vacant department store rather than a homegrown concept testing its first location.
Corinth Square took the opposite path. When Salty Iguana closed in early 2025 after 33 years at 8228 Mission Road, the space went to Robin Krause, a Prairie Village native who graduated from Shawnee Mission East, the high school two blocks north. Krause already runs Billie's Grocery, the healthy-eats concept she opened in Kansas City in 2020 and later brought to Ranch Mart North in Leawood, with another location planned for the Bluhawk development in Overland Park. Casa Ama, which opened at Corinth Square in June under her newly formed Alfred & Co. restaurant group, is her first Mexican-inspired concept, and it happens to occupy the exact space where her son worked his first job.
The name loosely translates to "the house that loves." Marketing director Marie Effertz described the intent behind it plainly: the restaurant is rooted in connection and gathering around food, cooking with intention, and creating a space where people can relax. The menu leans into that idea with dishes like chicken Caesar smash tacos, cast-iron fajitas cooked in skillet burners Krause specifically sourced after seeing them used at a restaurant in Austin, and a birria starter, alongside cocktails developed by Christopher Ciesiel, who also owns The Campground and Sagebrush bars in Kansas City.
This wasn't an outside brand scouting Johnson County real estate. It was someone who grew up eating at Salty Iguana deciding the space deserved a second life under her own name, in the neighborhood where she was raised.
Put those two stories side by side and a pattern emerges that neither one shows on its own. Prairie Village isn't experiencing a single wave of new investment. It's experiencing two distinct kinds at the same time, in shopping centers less than a mile apart on the same street. At 71st and Mission, a stalled, fire-damaged redevelopment finally got filled by companies from outside the metro willing to take a chance on unproven local demand. At 83rd and Mission, a beloved local business closed and was immediately replaced by someone with deep roots in that exact spot.
For a resident, this matters more than it might seem. It means the character of Mission Road over the next year won't be uniform. The stretch near 71st Street is going to feel more like a regional destination, complete with a brewery built to host vintage markets and fitness classes as much as dinner, a grocery relocation, and a golf brand using Prairie Village as a national showcase. The stretch near Corinth Square is going to feel more like it always has, just under new ownership that already understands what made the old tenant work.
Neither pattern is inherently better. But knowing which one you're walking into changes what you should expect when you get there.
Whatever is happening on Mission Road, Harmon Park keeps doing its own thing. The Prairie Village Jazz Festival returns on September 12, 2026, an event the city has run since 2010, in a park within walking distance for hundreds of residents. It's the one fixture in this story that isn't tied to a redevelopment timeline, a construction delay, or a corporate expansion plan. It just happens every fall.
The logistics, if you're planning to go:
It's a small, deliberately low-key counterweight to everything happening a few blocks away. The businesses on Mission Road will keep turning over. Harmon Park in September will look almost exactly like it did the year before.
If you've been wondering what to make of the construction fencing, the new tenants, and the restaurant that came back under a different name, the short version is this: Prairie Village isn't becoming one thing. It's absorbing two different kinds of change at once, and the neighborhood is large enough, and settled enough, to hold both without losing what made either shopping center worth visiting in the first place.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home you already own here, or you're just curious how these changes might shape values on your particular block, Capri Swanson has been tracking Prairie Village and the rest of the Kansas City Metro closely enough to talk through it without any pressure to do anything but ask questions. Let's Connect.
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