At 1365 North Dupont Highway on August 4, 1982, the parking lot was filling by mid-morning. Inside, shoppers walked past raised brick planters and elevated walkways circling a central fountain.
The food court was already busy - 1 Potato 2, Great Hot Dog Experience, and Sbarro had all set up in the new space.
Three anchor department stores bookended the corridors: Boscov's, Sears, and Leggett. Dover Mall cost roughly $20 million to build.
For Boscov's, a Pennsylvania-based department chain, the Dover location carried a distinction - it was the company's first store outside of Pennsylvania.
Dover itself was a small state capital of about 25,000 people, but it was also the main commercial hub for all of Kent County.
Four miles south on the same corridor, Blue Hen Mall had been handling that job since 1968. On August 4, shoppers were signaling with their feet which option they preferred, and a lot of them drove north.
Dover Mall and the Anchor Stores That Shaped It
Blue Hen Mall had been near Route 13 since 1968, and for fourteen years, it was Dover's only enclosed shopping mall.
When Sears started looking for a place in the city, Blue Hen was the obvious mall to talk to first. But no deal was made.
Sears chose the new site on North Dupont Highway instead and became one of Dover Mall's original anchor stores, along with Boscov's and Leggett.
That choice shaped the rivalry between the two malls before there was much time to see how either one would perform.
Blue Hen was older, established, and closer to downtown. Dover Mall was newer and larger, and it had the Sears store that Blue Hen had not secured.
JCPenney was still at Blue Hen in 1982 and had not moved yet, but the pattern was already starting to show.
Six Screens Open and a Lawsuit Follows
December 6, 1983 - a little over a year after the mall opened - a six-screen cinema started operating inside the building under the name Dover Mall Cinema.
The opening weekend featured "Trading Places," "A Christmas Story," "Christine," "All the Right Moves," "Amityville in 3-D," and "Seven Doors of Death."
The theater gave the property an evening draw that department stores could not provide on their own.
Blue Hen Mall challenged the cinema in court, pointing to a 1979 lease with Fox Theatres that barred another theater within five miles.
The lawsuit did not close the theater down. Dover Mall Cinema kept running under Fox's management and later passed to other operators as the cinema industry changed hands.
In 1988, owner Cadillac Fairview added more space to the site. Dover Commons, a 52,000-square-foot strip center, opened directly in front of the main mall.
Silo - an electronics and appliance chain - and Pier 1 Imports anchored the strip.
Dover Commons was folded into the same property and passed through the same ownership history as the mall.
Cadillac Fairview was treating the site as a growing retail cluster rather than a single enclosed building.
JCPenney Arrives and Blue Hen Mall Falls Behind
On September 28, 1992, construction started on a 116,500-square-foot east-side addition to make room for a fourth anchor.
JCPenney filled it, opening on August 4, 1993 - the mall's eleventh anniversary - after relocating from Blue Hen. Blue Hen's decline moved faster after that year.
The renovation that accompanied the new wing changed the 1982 interior significantly: the raised planters and central fountain were replaced with new flooring, benches, skylights, and palm-tree decorations.
Around this time, the mall counted 95 stores and reported 96.5 percent occupancy. October 1, 1993, saw a mall-wide smoking ban take effect after shopper polling showed strong support.
Silo at Dover Commons closed in 1995 after the chain went under, and the space was later filled by Chuck E. Cheese.
Leggett shut its Dover Mall location on March 15, 1997, after Belk acquired the chain. Strawbridge's opened in that same space on November 21, 1997.
Boscov's and Sears both received renovation work during this period, and the mall stayed close to full capacity through most of the decade.
Three Owners and a Changing Anchor Lineup
After Carmike Cinemas took over Fox's theater portfolio in 1996, Carmike expanded the Dover cinema from six screens to fourteen in 1999, alongside a food court renovation and a new entrance from that area.
By the early 2000s, Mills Corporation had acquired Dover Mall from Cadillac Fairview, with the property appearing in Mills' 2003 portfolio materials.
Mills also considered adding roughly 500,000 square feet to the site, including entertainment concepts like an ice rink and a skate park. None of it was built.
In 2007, Simon Property Group acquired Mills Corporation, and Dover Mall came with the deal.
Simon's initial stake was about 34.1 percent, but later filings show that interest at 68.1 percent and the ground lease extending to 2041.
Strawbridge's became Macy's as Federated Department Stores took over the May Company, following the broader wave of national department-store consolidation.
In November 2013, Dick's Sporting Goods added a 53,000-square-foot store as a new anchor. By the middle 2010s, the mall was running at 91.5 percent occupancy across about 928,000 square feet.
A Proposed Route 1 Connector and a Stalled Dover Mall Expansion
In 2017, Simon and outside developer Western Development pushed a concept that required one thing above everything else: a new road connection from Delaware Route 1 directly to the mall property.
The proposed road improvement was priced at around $31 million and described as the foundation of a much larger project.
The full plan called for adding roughly 54,700 square feet to the enclosed mall and constructing a 22-building power center with more than 550,000 square feet of additional retail space.
Later versions of the concept put the total project value at over $100 million, with 647,000 square feet of high-end retail, restaurants, and a grocery anchor.
A state feasibility study examined interchange options near the mall, and legislation was passed allowing a possible public-private partnership to fund the connector road.
Better Route 1 access was supposed to unlock the entire development. By 2019, the expansion had gone idle, and the Route 1 connector was never built.
Sears Goes Dark and Macy's Turns to Shipping
Liquidation sales at the Sears store in Dover Mall began in May 2018, and the store closed in August. It had opened 36 years earlier as one of the mall's original three anchor stores.
The large space Sears left behind sat at one end of a mall that had been built partly around that store.
Two years later, Macy's stopped operating there as a regular department store.
In October 2020, Macy's changed the space into an omni-service center, a location focused on filling online orders.
Curbside pickup, returns, and bill pay still remained available on-site. The City of Dover's 2021 annual report noted renovation work at the Macy's fulfillment center.
Dover also approved a zoning amendment in 2021 that allowed warehouse and distribution uses at the mall.
The change directly reflected the Macy's conversion and a vacancy rate of about 12 percent. The mall's estimated value fell from $129 million in 2011 to roughly $41 million by 2021.
Empty storefronts had also become a common sight in corridors that had once been nearly full.
Furniture, Truck Driver Training, and a Closed Theater
AMC Classic Dover 14 closed after its final showings on March 17, 2024. That ended a movie theater run at the site that had lasted since December 1983.
The theater had been one of the mall's steady sources of customer traffic, especially in the evenings and on weekends.
The former Sears anchor space got a new tenant when Furniture & More held its grand opening there on May 10, 2024.
One former small storefront was turned into a classroom for Walmart's truck driver training program.
Slime Zone & More opened in March 2024 in another vacant space.
The traditional anchor stores still operating at the mall are JCPenney, Boscov's, Dick's Sporting Goods, and Old Navy. The former Macy's space is now vacant; the Dover Mall location closed in early 2024.
Dover Mall is still open, still bringing in shoppers, and still home to well-known names.
But the building operating there today is no longer the same kind of enclosed department-store mall that opened at this address in 1982.
Dover Mall
Shopping mall in Dover, DE
Address: 1365 N Dupont Hwy, Dover, DE 19901
Opened: August 4, 1982
Developer: Homart Development Company
Owner: Simon Property Group
Floor area: 927,414 square feetClosest cities:
Smyrna, DE
Milford, DE
Middletown, DE
Georgetown, DE
Seaford, DE
Easton, MD
