Eastdale Mall is an enclosed shopping mall in east Montgomery, Alabama, at Atlanta Highway and Eastern Boulevard.
It opened on August 3, 1977, and it's still open in 2026. That makes it the city's last working enclosed mall.
Montgomery Mall, the older rival on East South Boulevard, closed in 2008.
The Shoppes at EastChase opened in 2002 and pulled newer retail toward Interstate 85.
Eastdale sat between the two and kept the lights on. Staying open cost it almost everything it opened with.
Montgomery Ward lasted six years. Pizitz became McRae's, then Parisian, then Belk. Gayfers became Dillard's.
Sears left in 2016 after 32 years, the founding families sold in 2020 for $24 million, and the Ice Palace, the year-round rink at the center of the building, came out in 2022.
The mall opened with four department-store anchors and now has three. None of the original names is still on the doors.
The whole history runs on that trade: keep the building, swap what's inside it. Here's how it went.
Eastdale Mall opens on Atlanta Highway
Eastdale Mall opened in east Montgomery, Alabama, on August 3, 1977.
It was an enclosed regional mall of the purest 1970s type: one level, climate-controlled corridors, anchors on the outer edges, and parking fields on every side, built for drivers coming off Atlanta Highway and Eastern Boulevard rather than anyone on foot.
Four department-store anchors opened with it: Montgomery Ward, Pizitz, Parisian, and Gayfers.
So did Eastdale 3, a three-screen movie theater run by Martin Theatres.
The developers were three local families, the Aronovs, Lowders, and Moores, working through Aronov Realty.
Their names would stay attached to the property for more than four decades.
An ice rink in central Alabama
The mall's strangest asset sat in the middle of it.
The Ice Palace offered year-round ice skating inside an air-conditioned building in a state where outdoor ice is a rumor.
The rink gave Eastdale an identity no competitor could copy, and the mall built a family layer around it: a carousel, an indoor train, Santa at Christmas, the Easter Bunny in spring.
Shopping brought people in. The ice, the rides, and the events gave them a reason to stay past the errand.
Montgomery Ward lasts six years
The first anchor to go was one of the originals.
Montgomery Ward closed its Eastdale store in 1983, six years after opening day.
The box didn't sit long. Sears moved in during 1984 and settled in for a run that would last more than three decades.
That space, on the day Ward's doors locked, began a pattern of turnover that would follow it for the rest of the mall's life.
It has held three tenants so far and is waiting on a fourth.
Pizitz, McRae's, Parisian, Belk
The Pizitz anchor tells the story of southern department stores in one storefront.
Pizitz, a Birmingham name, opened with the mall in 1977.
In 1986, the chain was sold to McRae's of Jackson, Mississippi.
The Eastdale sign changed the next year.
The lineage then ran through Parisian, itself one of the mall's original anchors, which had also taken over this former McRae's space to run two Eastdale stores.
In 2007, Belk converted the Parisian stores after buying the chain from Saks.
Gayfers, the fourth original anchor, followed the same script on a different schedule.
Dillard's acquired the Gayfers parent chain and replaced the store in 1998.
Nearly five decades in, two of the four original anchor buildings still held department stores.
Neither held its original name.
JCPenney switches malls
Montgomery's retail map redrew itself in the 2000s, and Eastdale sat in the middle of the shift.
The Shoppes at EastChase opened in November 2002 near Interstate 85 and Taylor Road, an open-air center that pulled newer national retail toward the city's eastern edge.
Dillard's opened a store there in 2004.
Meanwhile, Montgomery Mall, the older enclosed mall on East South Boulevard, was losing tenants fast.
JCPenney left it for Eastdale in 2005, handing Eastdale a major national anchor at exactly the moment its old rival was folding.
Montgomery Mall closed in 2008.
That left Eastdale as the city's only operating enclosed mall, squeezed from the other side by EastChase.
Carmike leaves, Chuck E. Cheese moves in
Carmike took over the theater in 1985, and by the early 1990s it had grown from three screens to eight.
In March 2013, Carmike closed it and moved toward a new 13-screen complex on Chantilly Parkway, taking one of the mall's classic evening draws with it.
The same month, Chuck E. Cheese's announced a nearly 13,000-square-foot space in the Dillard's wing, across from LensCrafters, with its own exterior entrance.
The arcade relocated from a Southern Boulevard site, so the mall traded a movie crowd for a birthday-party crowd and kept families coming through the doors.
Sears closes after 32 years
In summer 2016, Sears closed its Eastdale store and auto center.
Fifty-six people lost their jobs. The mall was down to Belk, Dillard's, and JCPenney.
The vacancy lasted months, not years.
That November, At Home announced its first Montgomery store in the full 105,000-square-foot Sears box, a $1.7 million buildout.
The home-decor chain opened in spring 2017.
The old Ward-then-Sears space had its third tenant, though this one was a big-box furniture-and-decor store rather than a department store, a sign of what kind of anchor an enclosed mall could still attract by then.
The families sell after 43 years
In February 2019, the Aronov, Lowder, and Moore families told their tenants the mall was going up for sale.
In the tenant letter, the families said ownership had passed down to children and grandchildren, many of whom no longer lived in Montgomery, and that they were working with their lender to sell.
Spinoso, an outside management company, took over day-to-day operations in the meantime.
The property got some care on the way out: $250,000 in new air-conditioning units in 2019.
The same year, Chick-fil-A left the food court.
The sale closed in early 2020.
A New York-based group of Namdar Realty Group, Mason Asset Management, and CH Capital Group paid $24 million.
A mall built and run by Montgomery families for 43 years now belonged to a national portfolio of aging mall properties.
Movies come back for two years
One of the new owners' first visible projects was the dark theater.
Renovation work was planned in December 2020, and on May 21, 2021, GQT Movies reopened the eight-screen cinema.
The comeback was short. By late 2023, the theater had closed again, after another short run.
The building had now spent more of the 2010s and 2020s dark than lit, leaving Chuck E. Cheese and the rink as the mall's remaining entertainment draws.
The ice finally melts
By 2022, the Ice Palace had been running for more than 40 years, and it was losing the fight with physics.
Repairs were costing up to $50,000 a year.
When the ice began to melt, management decided to pull the system out rather than fix it, a job that meant removing the tubing, the sand, and the moisture sealant under the surface.
What replaced it opened in December 2022 as Roller Palace, with a ribbon-cutting that included Montgomery's roller derby team.
The hard floor could host things the ice never could: roller skating, derby bouts, pickleball, concerts, boxing matches.
The mall's signature attraction was gone after 45 years, but the space at the center of the building stayed loud.
The big box empties a third time
In October 2024, At Home confirmed its Eastdale store would close by the end of the year, seven years after moving in.
The 105,000-square-foot box had now cycled through Montgomery Ward, Sears, and At Home since 1977, and it sat empty again.
Filling it is the biggest open question on the property, because an anchor vacancy of that size drags on everything around it: foot traffic, leasing, and the case for coming to the mall at all.
Eastdale Mall in 2026
The mall is still open in 2026, still Montgomery's only operating enclosed mall, and still anchored by three department stores: Belk, JCPenney, and a Dillard's running as a Clearance Center rather than a full-line store.
The property is marketed at 759,600 square feet of leasable space; older figures put it at 964,700 square feet, a gap that reflects changes in ownership and how the anchors get counted.
Around 100,000 vehicles a day pass the corner of Atlanta Highway and Eastern Boulevard, and some of them still turn in.
Chuck E. Cheese's, LensCrafters, Bath & Body Works, Jay Jewelers, Cinnabon, and a rotating cast of local tenants still occupy pieces of the corridors, and 2023 brought a stretch with no inline vacancies and a waiting list.
Roller Palace carries the entertainment role the Ice Palace held for four decades, hosting skate nights, derby, and events.
What draws people now is smaller and more local than what drew them in 1977: a birthday party at the arcade, a skate session, a jewelry counter, a department-store errand.
The empty At Home box and the dark theater are the property's open problems.
The skaters circling the old rink floor are its working answer.
