Some time after a 1970 mall renovation, dozens of animal sculptures vanished. But for about a decade prior to that disappearance, the artwork turned a shopping center into a family-friendly space speckled by sculpted giraffes, kangaroos, walruses and penguins.
In 1960, the J.C. Nichols Company commissioned local artist Jac T. Bowen to create something special for its new shopping center at 63rd and Troost, then known as The Landing. According to author Marybeth Lake, who chronicled Bowen’s career, the mall’s name was derived from Westport Landing, the rock ledge near the Missouri and Kaw rivers where Kansas City first emerged as a trading center in 1834. Bowen took that origin story a step further. Drawing inspiration from the biblical story of Noah’s Ark, he reimagined it as a Missouri River paddleboat, loaded with animals “about to come in for a landing,” Lake wrote.
The result was a sprawling installation of roughly 30 sculptures arranged along the pedestrian mall. Bowen, who’d already established a relationship with J.C. Nichols through his work weatherproofing the beloved bunny sculptures throughout the Country Club Plaza, designed The Landing’s animals to withstand both the elements and rough play. Built primarily from cement and fiberglass, according to Lake, the sculptures were durable enough for children to climb and sit on daily.
And that was very much the point. The sculptures weren’t roped off or elevated on pedestals. Kids could climb aboard a towering elephant, sit astride a kangaroo or pose with a zebra. The animals were “reproduced in natural coloring and, where possible, shown in their natural habitat and characteristic pose along the length of the pedestrian mall,” according to Lake’s research. Bowen even created custom trash receptacles shaped like tree trunks, adorned with squirrels, rabbits, owls, deer and other woodland creatures.
The Landing itself reflected a midcentury vision of experiential retail. The shopping center officially opened on March 1, 1961, according to The Wednesday Magazine. A 1961 Kansas City Star advertisement listed family-friendly stores including The Landing Toy Store, The Chick-a-Dee Shop for Tot’s ‘n’ Teens, and Shoe Land, a children’s shoe store—businesses that encouraged families to linger rather than rush from errand to errand.
But in 1970, everything changed. A major remodel enclosed the open-air shopping center and transformed it into The New Landing Mall. When the doors reopened, the animals were gone.
According to research from the Missouri Valley Special Collections at the Kansas City Public Library, the sculptures were supposedly destined for the Kansas City Zoo, but they never arrived. Some pieces found temporary homes elsewhere (a pair of giraffes briefly appeared at Bowen’s studio), but most disappeared entirely. No formal records detail where they went, who removed them or whether they were preserved, sold or destroyed.
Today, The Landing still stands, but at a crossroads. In December 2024, Mayor Quinton Lucas asked for public input about the mall’s future, acknowledging the vacant storefronts and noting that the city had been working with the owners Block & Company on redevelopment plans. While the mall’s future is being debated, a piece of its past remains unaccounted for: the nearly 30 animal sculptures that once lined its sidewalks.
