Prairie Village's Summer Has Moved Upstairs

For more than a decade the second floor of the old Macy's at 71st and Mission sat dark, a hollow shell tucked behind the south end of the Shops that most residents had trained themselves to walk past. This summer it is where half your neighbors are eating dinner.

Big Grove Brewery opened on the second floor of the old Macy's in Prairie Village in late May, and the effect on how the Shops feel on a Tuesday night is bigger than any single restaurant opening should be. The clock tower is still the clock tower. The pie contest still happens on July 4. What has changed is the vertical axis of the block: for the first time since anyone can remember, there is a reason to go up.

The Upper-Level Map, Redrawn

The Macy's redevelopment is not a one-tenant story. It is a coordinated backfill of a wing of the center that has been effectively closed since the 2025 transformer fire in the basement near the former department store.

Here is what is happening on the upper level at 7060–7068 Mission and along the adjacent frontages:

• Big Grove Brewery, 7060 Mission. The upper level of the shops at 7060 Mission Road. Roughly 10,000 square feet with indoor seating and an outdoor patio accessed through garage bay doors, and yes, the patio is dog-friendly. Open 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily.
• GolfTRK, 7068 Mission. A flagship location and new corporate headquarters just west of Big Grove on the upper level, with a planned summer opening in a space that will serve as a blueprint for future franchise locations.
• Hen House. Relocating from its current space at the shopping center into the redeveloped Macy's building, with the current grocery footprint eventually turning over to a new tenant.
• Clairvaux, 3944 W. 69th Terrace. The locally owned shop relocated from the Shops at Fairway into the former Chico's space after six years, with founder Joni Johnson wanting more room and a center with more traffic and a stronger community hub feel.
• Scoobie. Leaving the Shops of Prairie Village after seven years and closing its online store, with owner Sarah Jabbour citing 17 months of ongoing construction that ultimately made it impossible to continue as a brick-and-mortar store.

Read that list twice. Two of the moves are inbound relocations from other centers, one is an out-of-market brand choosing Prairie Village as its Kansas City debut, and one is a longtime tenant that could not survive the construction the redevelopment created. That is not a normal spring at a suburban shopping center.

What Big Grove Actually Changed About A Tuesday

The Iowa brewery arrived with a scale that reset expectations for casual dining at the Shops. The 13,000-square-foot taproom launched with a grand opening featuring giveaways and children's happy-hour face painting, and the soft opening two days earlier generated five figures in sales. The staffing and menu depth show up in the small stuff: roughly 20 beers on tap including local pours from Boulevard Brewing Co. and Martin City Brewing Company, plus a dining room where customers can watch the on-site brewing through glass windows.

If you have lived within a five-minute walk of the clock tower for any length of time, you already know what the dinner options were: Tavern in the Village, Caffetteria, Minsky's Pizza, Penny's in the Village, and Scratch Gourmet Kitchen, plus quick stops. Every one of those is still open, still busy, and still worth your Tuesday. What Big Grove adds is capacity, a patio that reads more like a park pavilion than a restaurant deck, and a menu built for a table that cannot agree on what to eat. Dishes range across cultural influences, from hot honey bao buns and tuna poke bowls to tikka masala fries, gyros, and fried chicken sandwiches.

The taproom marketing manager has said the goal is to partner with local businesses and community organizations to host events at the space, including vintage markets and fitness classes, so it is not just a place to grab a bite and a drink. Whether that follows through is next summer's question. This summer's question is simpler: the patio is open, it is shaded by the building's own footprint after 6 p.m., and it holds a lot of people.

The Clock Tower Still Owns The Calendar

For all the vertical rearranging, the ground-plane rituals at the Shops have not moved. The clock tower plaza is still the anchor of anything with a lineup, a jury, or a lawn chair.

The season effectively opened Memorial Day weekend with the Prairie Village Art Show's 69th year, with more than 15,000 guests expected across the weekend to browse artist booths, enjoy live music under the clock tower, visit Kids Village, and take advantage of special food, beverage, and shopping offerings from the Shops merchants. Two additions this year hint at how the tenant reshuffle is already showing up on the event calendar: Cocina Club KC, powered by Scratch Gourmet Kitchen, joined the show with slow-braised beef, adobo chicken, and a vegetarian street corn power bowl, and Big Grove ran a mobile bar near booth 100 along Mission Lane on Saturday and Sunday, pouring Easy Eddy, Neighborhood Beer, and Citrus Surfer.

Here is the rough shape of the rest of the summer, anchored to the plaza and City Hall two blocks north at 7700 Mission Road:

The pie contest is worth flagging because most residents forget the rules until the day of. All pies must be entered by 8:30 a.m. on July 4 inside City Hall, judging begins at 9 a.m., and winners are announced at 10:30 a.m., with the registration form due by July 1. Pies are judged on appearance, crust, filling, taste, texture, and originality, must be made from scratch, and no pre-mixes, canned filling, or frozen crusts qualify. There are three categories: adult fruit, adult "other," and youth.

For the food side of the Art Show weekend and any pop-up Saturday, watch Playa Bowls, which is celebrating its one-year anniversary with a prize wheel featuring discounts, samples, giveaways, and a chance to win a free bowl or smoothie. Small anniversary, but a useful signal that the ground-level tenant mix stabilized before the upper level opened up.

Reading The Tenant Shuffle

Two data points from the last month tell you where this center is heading.

The first is that Big Grove's own director of marketing said the company toured several locations in the city for several years before choosing Prairie Village. A regional brand with five other taprooms did not pick the Plaza, did not pick the Crossroads, did not pick a Leawood pad site. It picked the second floor of a suburban shopping center that had been dark for a decade. Whatever their read on foot traffic and demographics was, it landed on this ZIP code.

The second is Clairvaux. A local boutique with a working customer base at the Shops at Fairway chose to leave a functioning center and move here mid-redevelopment. Founder Joni Johnson said the pull was more traffic and a stronger community hub. That is the kind of judgment a small operator makes with their own money, and it is worth more than any leasing brochure.

The counterweight, honestly, is Scoobie. A transformer fire in early 2025 was the beginning of the end, and the second phase of construction with the courtyard blocked off entrances to the point where the store would see four people a day. Some tenants expect parking issues to continue with the popularity of Big Grove, the new Hen House, and the eventual replacement tenants for the current Hen House space. If you live on the residential streets east of Mission, you have already noticed the overflow from the Big Grove patio on a Friday.

The honest read for a resident: the Shops are more crowded than they have been in years, the walk from the clock tower to the upper-level patio is genuinely new territory for most people who have lived here a decade, and the parking situation between now and the Hen House swap is going to be worse before it gets better. Everything else about your summer here is the same. The pool is the pool. Harmon Park is Harmon Park. Sunday morning at the Farmers Market is Sunday morning at the Farmers Market. But the center of gravity between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. has moved thirty feet up and a hundred feet south.

If the moves at the Shops have you thinking about what your own block looks like against this backdrop, or you're curious how the redevelopment is landing in nearby sale prices, the team at Livin KC tracks Prairie Village at the street level and can walk you through what any of it means for your home.

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