This Once-Thriving, Iconic Mall In Kansas Was Abandoned Before Suffering A Heartbreaking Fate

Topeka residents of a certain age all have White Lakes Mall stories. It's where they hung out with friends, got their hair cut, and their ears pierced. They ate taco burgers from Brass Rail and onion soup with Swiss steak at Town & Country Restaurant while organ music washed through the mall. During the Christmas season, locals attended puppet shows. And year-round, they'd come to see the koi pond and visit the squirrel monkey in a cage. However, the White Lakes Mall is no more.

Like so many malls around the U.S., it peaked long ago and spent the last few decades losing tenants and falling into disrepair. White Lakes Mall — named for the White Lakes Country Club, which once had a 9-hole golf course on the same site — opened in 1964, according to Abandoned Atlas Kansas. For more than 20 years, it was a beloved social epicenter. But the mall was later abandoned and eventually met a fiery end.

The rise of malls, car culture, and suburbia went hand in hand. More than 1,200 malls were constructed in the 1950s, with the '60s bringing even more, per The Science Survey. Developers designed them as places for people to connect, whether by eating in food courts, catching a movie, or playing in video game arcades.

White Lakes was in synch with this movement. Sears and J.C. Penney, the top department stores in the 1960s, were its anchors when the $8 million project opened. Topeka locals came to shop and stayed to socialize. Longtime Topeka resident Shane Wenrick told The Topeka Capital-Journal about his father and his father's friends showing off their muscle cars in the mall parking lot during the 1970s and 1980s. Local Patty Lanum told Abandoned Atlas Kansas about meeting the man who would become her husband at White Lakes Mall on a freezing day in January 1983. "I loved White Lakes," she said. "I miss the familiarity and the simplicity."

But White Lakes Mall began to lose the loyalty of Topekans in the 1980s. West Ridge Mall opened in 1988, luring away shoppers — and tenants. Anchor stores Sears and J.C. Penney both moved to West Ridge, leaving huge holes in White Lakes. Patty Lanum and her husband, who met at White Lakes, later lived across the street from the mall as it declined, "and could see it from our home as it became an eyesore," she said. These were definitely not Topeka's best views, like the State Capitol building.

However, it wasn't just West Ridge Mall that spelled the doom of White Lakes. Around the country, newer malls replaced old malls. And then came e-commerce. Between Amazon's founding in 1998 and smartphones in 2007, shopping went online. To many people, brick-and-mortar stores became obsolete. By 2000, most stores had moved out of White Lakes Mall. It turned into an office complex with a few retail stores, a daycare center, and a fitness studio. In 2009, a new owner bought the mall, planning to redevelop it into an exterior-entranced office and retail space. But after he went bankrupt in 2012, the mall was truly forgotten, like many other abandoned malls around the U.S. Wichita, Kansas, also lost Boulevard Plaza, a once-thriving mall, to a changing culture.

Then three teenagers set the abandoned Topeka mall on fire in December 2020. Since they posted the video on Snapchat, they were easy to catch. But the damage was done. Firefighters couldn't enter the burning mall due to black mold and asbestos. Poor old White Lakes Mall was condemned. After asbestos abatement, the mall fell to the wrecking ball in 2022. Now it's a mixed memory for Topekans of the rise and fall of an era in American life.