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I drive past the Bannister Mall every day going back and forth to work.
It's been useless as a real mall for several years. Nothing but flea market stuff in ther the past couple years.
BM died for a couple reasons. It started going down hill when people were getting mugged and carjacked in the parking lot. When that happened, people from Grandview and Raytown and from across the state line in JoCo stopped going because of safety concerns.
Then Lee's Summit built a mall on Chipman Road, and JoCo has plenty of shopping south of I-435. That whole area just withered away. Not only the mall, but all the other stuff that was built around the outskirts of the mall too. Now it's a ghost town.
Shame, because all that land used to be part of Benjamin Ranch, where you could go horseback riding and the trails were plentiful and stretched a long way. That land is part of the original Santa Fe Trail, so back when it was a horseback riding ranch, it was cool, because you could ride on the original Santa Fe Trail. Now its all just asphalt and empty strip mall buildings. Even Wal-Mart bailed out, because they flattened the Blue Ridge Mall and built a Wally World on the property. Now all the slime from South KC goes to the Blue Ridge Mall for Beef Jerkey, Doritos, Smirnoff Ice and diapers.
I've heard rumors that the city would like to take over that land, flatten the mall, and build the Wizards a soccer stadium, but nothing concrete has come around on that yet.
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