KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Flood after flood tore through the strip mall at 103rd Street and Wornall Road over the years, and the most devastating in 2017.
After sitting vacant for more than two years, demolition of the buildings started Monday.
"I would tear up every time I went by it," Chris Carle said. "It was an eyesore and had to come down, but I had to be here to say goodbye."
Carle said watching the backhoe rip into her old bar, Coach's, was like watching an old friend die.
"It's very bittersweet," Carle said. "The building obviously needed to come down, but we have a lot of good memories from this place."
The demolition comes to many people's relief.
In 2018, the city spent about $2 million in GO Bonds to buy the property.
"It took some time to acquire the building, to get the funding, to get the public permits, to open the bid, award the bid," KC Water Spokeswoman Heather Frierson said. "Now that we have that all out of the way, we'll start demolishing the buildings."
The strip mall will be torn down to create a green space that will help absorb the floodwater from Indian Creek.
"There really should have never been a building on this site and it was, and the flooding did exacerbate the situation," Diana Johnson, a city storm water engineer, said, " and when there were water rescues conducted that really hyped things up."
Carle and her co-owner, Brian Darby, were rescued from their own building in summer 2017 when floodwater forced them into the rafters. The other businesses couldn't re-open, either. The strip mall has been empty since then.
"I think it's a good idea because all the homeless people stay in there and they set it on fire," Robert Wellman, a man who frequents the area, said, "and I don't think they really need to be staying in these buildings."
Wellman knows a few of the homeless folks who stay in the buildings. Neighbors blame them for recent fires; one happened in May and another in late September.
"I know after they catch on fire people still try to break the windows and take the boards down and still stay in there," Wellman said.
Carle said it's a shame it got to this point. She and Mike Darby, Brian's dad, opened Coach's 37 years ago. It became a staple in the community.
Darby was killed two months before the big flood that shut them all down.
"Today was Mike Darby's birthday, would have been. Thought I would be here for him," Carle said.
Brian told 41 Action News he was avoiding the area on Monday.
Contractors have 90 days to finish demolition. They plan to tear down the main strip first and then start on the buildings on either side.
"We wanted to do something to minimize the flooding near the Indian Creek and when it rains now, the concrete, all that water has nowhere to go," Frierson said. "It just goes into the creek and the creek floods, so we wanted to turn it into a green space so it can soak up some of that rain, absorb the rain water and hopefully minimize some of that flooding."
It's not uncommon for the city to do something like this. It has turned at least seven other properties in the city into green spaces to alleviate flooding.
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