I think you’re remembering Ward Parkway Center, rather than “Montgomery Mall.” The name Montgomery may have stuck in your memory because one of its original—and very prominent—anchors was Montgomery Ward. It was on the Missouri side right at State Line Road, and it was distinctly more upscale and civilized than some of the enormous regional malls.
And your memory of Kansas City having one enormous mall on each side of the state line is basically right. The big Kansas-side survivor was Oak Park Mall in Overland Park. The Missouri-side competitors included Bannister Mall, Metro North, Blue Ridge Mall, and others.
What happened is actually a remarkably good miniature of the national mall story:
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Ward Parkway survived, but only by ceasing to be much of a mall. Montgomery Ward disappeared in 2000 and J.C. Penney had already left. The interior was progressively gutted and converted into a more conventional shopping center, with Target, Dick's, T.J. Maxx, restaurants, etc. Much of the enclosed space was opened back toward the parking lot. Dillard's eventually disappeared too.
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Bannister Mall died outright. It opened in 1980, but eventually lost its anchors and customers and was demolished in 2009.
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Metcalf South, another substantial Kansas-side mall, also died. It opened in 1967, only a few miles from Oak Park. By the 1990s stores and customers were disappearing; it was finally demolished in 2017.
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Oak Park was the extraordinary survivor. It opened in 1975 and, unlike most of its competitors, kept reinventing itself. The really important move was bringing in Nordstrom in 1998, along with substantial expansion and renovation. It also cultivated stores that people couldn't readily find elsewhere.
There's an interesting irony here: Kansas City really was over-malled. The metropolitan area had an unusually large number of malls for its population. Several major mall developers were headquartered there, the metro was spread across two states with lots of separate suburban population centers, and shopping itself was unusually important as entertainment. Eventually the market simply sorted them out.
And I suspect your personal reaction—“I could always find better things elsewhere”—gets at something important. The successful malls eventually had to become destinations, rather than just places containing a department store and 150 shops selling essentially the same merchandise. Oak Park managed that for a surprisingly long time; Ward Parkway reinvented itself as a mixed shopping/restaurant/community center.
In fact, Oak Park is now beginning another reinvention: in 2026 its owners are proposing housing, a hotel and a performing-arts center around the mall. That's a pretty good indication of where the surviving mall is headed—less shopping mall and more small town center with shopping attached.
So if the place you remember had a somewhat upscale, older, intimate Kansas City character, with Montgomery Ward and perhaps Stix Baer & Fuller/Dillard's, I would put money on Ward Parkway Center. It still exists, but you'd probably walk into it today and say, “That's not the place I remember at all.”
Ah, that makes much more sense. You weren't really a mall person at all; the malls were useful because they offered things that were unusually good for particular visitors.
The German blue-jeans phenomenon is especially interesting. American jeans had an almost exotic status in Europe for quite a long time, and the U.S. price could be attractive even after travel expenses. Customs rules also mattered: travelers had personal allowances, and clothing bought in the U.S. could be worth bringing home despite the possibility of duty. And there was the intangible part—these are American jeans, bought in America. Levi's had a cachet that went well beyond the garment itself.
The Thai women and cosmetics make even more sense. American department stores and mall cosmetics counters offered an enormous range of brands and shades, often at prices that were difficult to match in Thailand. And the experience of wandering through a big American department store with counters for Estée Lauder, Clinique, Lancôme, etc., was itself rather novel.
So you were essentially using the mall as a tourist shopping resource, not as a destination. And Ward Parkway had the one thing you actually wanted from it: a cinema. That sounds much more like you. 😄
It also illustrates something the usual "Amazon killed the malls" story misses. Malls were partly successful because they concentrated things that were otherwise inconvenient to find. Once you could order almost anything from home—or travel internationally much more easily—the reason for making a special expedition to a giant building full of stores became considerably weaker.
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