This Week in Kansas City: a baker's own shop, a mall's second act, and 700 backpacks

Welcome back to This Week in KC, The Stare’s weekly recap of the stuff that actually makes this a city worth living in.

A note on the date: this edition is retropublished. It covers August 8–14 and was assembled and published on August 20, after the Friday it belonged to came and went without it. The bakeries still opened, the donations still landed, and a grand opening deserves its page in the record whether or not we were at our desk that week. So here it is, in its place.

Each section carries a counter: how many stories fell into that corner of local life this week, across the KC newsrooms we read. The bar shows how it stacks against the others. It’s not a ranking by volume. It’s a ranking by new to you.

The best opening of the week is the one that took a whole career to get to. Megan Garrelts has been baking since she was a kid in the Chicago suburbs, and for nearly fifteen years she and Colby Garrelts have run Rye in Leawood. This week, per the Johnson County Post and KCTV5, she unveiled Cornflower Baked Goods, a sweets shop of her own, in Leawood. Some restaurants are an empire move. This one reads like a childhood finally getting its own storefront.

The rest of the openings, briskly. Flower Child, the health-focused fast-casual chain, served its first meals at Corinth Quarter in Prairie Village, its first Johnson County location. In the Northland, World Fresh Market celebrated its grand opening at 4357 NE Chouteau Trafficway on August 7, per Northeast News: a long-vacant commercial footprint on the Chouteau corridor, found alive. In Blue Springs, The Co-op at the Table opened a coworking space with rentable offices and a corporate kitchen, aimed at small businesses that need a room before they can need a building. In Overland Park, the former Painted Tree, whose sudden nationwide closure in April caught its vendors off guard, reopened under new ownership as The Collective Boutiques, with a Saturday soft opening and the same vendors getting their second chance.

Coming attractions: Bay Vanithbuncha, who grew up in Thailand where boba was the daily ritual coffee is here, is bringing her boba concept Bruu Cafe to Bluhawk, closer to her Overland Park home. Oak Park Mall adds JD Sports, Miss A and Happy Beauty this fall. The Warwick Theater opened its second season since the 2024 fire (basement to roof, the damage ran) with The Shark Is Broken, which after a fire is either brave programming or perfect programming.

The Pitch’s KC Sipps counted three Italian-inspired restaurant openings in one week, plus the 816 Day deals. A KC brewery spent back-to-school season hosting a shelter-cat adoption event (“looking for a study buddy?”), which is the correct use of both a brewery and a cat. The long effort to land a second Dillons in the Northland shifted plans again, per KCTV5; the original nine-storefront site plan is being reworked, which is how you can tell somebody still wants it to happen.

The serious note first. The Kansas City Call, the city’s landmark Black newspaper, publishing since 1919, missed its weekly edition, and FOX4 reports longtime readers and former employees are asking why and getting no answer. A paper that has printed through everything does not skip a week for no reason. We don’t know the reason either. We’re watching.

Elsewhere in people: Johnson County Community College is planning a new healthcare education building to meet workforce demand, a building-shaped bet that the region needs more nurses more than it needs anything else on that campus. Kansas City PBS opened submissions for its third annual Reel Black Film Fest, set for February 6. Olathe’s Old Settlers Festival announced its return for a 128th year of carnival and parade. A De Soto high schooler won the first-ever Patriot Games in Geneva, Ohio, and was congratulated by the President, which, whatever else is true, is a sentence that kid’s grandparents get to laminate.

This was the week the metro packed backpacks. KMBC’s Stuff the Bus drive delivered to Operation Breakthrough, enough that 700 Kansas City-area families have school supplies this year. United Way’s Classroom Refresh put volunteers into early-childhood classrooms on the Missouri side and then, newly expanded, across the state line into Kansas. Blue Springs School District opened The Closet at Valley View High: free clothes for district families, no appointment needed, and the quote that names the whole genre: “It’s for them.” A local church threw a Back-to-School Bash to “lighten the load” for parents. Kiewit handed Brookeside Charter School $1 million for its literacy program, which buys a lot of research-based reading instruction and exactly zero naming rights anybody will remember.

Beyond the school run: ReeceNichols agents’ Gold Key Project has put $217,000 into Ronald McDonald House this year, about 2,170 free nights for families with sick kids. A night of food and music at Union Station raised scholarship and mentorship money for Hispanic families, per Dos Mundos. Area animal shelters spent the week reminding struggling pet owners that help exists before surrender does, and northern Platte County, which has no animal shelter, now has a public microchip scanner to get lost pets home. In Kansas City, Kansas, the Douglass-Sumner neighborhood pushed for lead-tainted soil money and got it: a $3.7 million EPA grant, one of the largest awarded nationwide this year, to remediate 54 vacant lots. That one wasn’t given. It was won.

Biggest section of the week, and it isn’t close, because Johnson County decided to redraw itself.

Oak Park Mall, the county’s last traditional enclosed mall, filed a rezoning bid to become a mixed-use district: apartments, a hotel, an expanded theater, a performing arts center. Filed the same week: a $500 million proposal to remake Corporate Woods into townhomes, retail and trails, and a Chick-fil-A asking to relocate across the mall’s own corner. Whether any of it gets built is a question for hearings; that the county’s two most 1980s pieces of real estate both blinked in the same week is the story.

Smaller and closer to the ground: Joe D. Dennis Park in Westwood, after years of controversy and lawsuits about its future, became the second-ever Variety KC Ten Parks Project site, in line for a fully accessible playground. Johnson County loaned $2.5 million toward a downtown Overland Park housing project for people with disabilities. Downtown KC’s Luminary Park is expected to break ground this year, starting with the unglamorous tunnel-and-deck work every future park photo will stand on. Overland Park put up meme-filled safety signs for young e-bike riders, on the theory that a helmet ad a teenager actually reads is worth ten they don’t. Families closed out summer at KC Wine Co.’s Sunflower Festival. Downtown’s Bus Bus Stop (the bus stop built inside a bus, months old) got rocks through its windshield, because we can have nice things for approximately ninety days at a time.

This Week in KC is assembled from coverage across the Kansas City newsrooms The Stare reads daily; each item is credited to the outlet that reported it. This edition was retropublished on August 20, 2026, covering August 8–14. Corrections: corrections@kcstare.com. Know something good happening in KC? tips.