Windward Mall opened in July 1982 with three department stores, one at the end of each of its three arms. It's a two-level enclosed shopping center at the corner of Kamehameha Highway and Haiku Road in Kaneohe, Hawaii.
Sears had one arm. JCPenney had the second and Liberty House the third, and none of those three names are in the building now. Macy's, which succeeded Liberty House, was the last department store left, and it closed in the spring of 2023.
After it closed, the old Macy's space was gutted and split for new tenants, so one of the three arms no longer has the anchor it was designed around. A gym trades in part of it now.
The former Sears and JCPenney buildings are still up too. Target occupies the old Sears, both floors of it. More than 100 stores, restaurants, and services use the rest of the mall, on land Kamehameha Schools owns.
Sears opened before Windward Mall did
Sears opened on April 7, 1982, three months before the shopping center it belonged to.
The company had run a smaller Kaneohe store since 1972 and moved out of it into a two-level building at the end of one arm of a mall that wasn't finished yet.
The rest of the building opened that July, quietly. At Sears, the opening decor came down to one line of colored pennants.
What opened was roughly 530,000 square feet, enclosed and air-conditioned, on two levels, with three arms meeting through a central circulation core.
Each arm ended in a department store. Sears held one, JCPenney the second, and Liberty House, new to Kaneohe that year, the third.
The inside stayed as built for a long time.
A description from 1993 records dark reddish clay tile underfoot, wood railings with narrow white vertical members, globe light fixtures, hanging planters, and a large circular skylight over the center of the mall.
JCPenney left, and the building was split
JCPenney was the first of the three to go.
The company said in April 1998 that its Kaneohe store would close that year after weak sales, and it left behind about 87,500 square feet spread over two floors at the end of one arm.
No other department store replaced it.
What the mall wanted there was a cinema.
In August 1999 the operator asked four theater companies for proposals, and by January 2000 Pauahi Management, the Kamehameha Schools subsidiary running the property then, had picked Consolidated Amusement: a 10-screen complex on the upper floor, a parking garage beside it, and retail with a new mall entry below.
The deal never closed.
Consolidated had already opened Koolau Stadium 10 at nearby Temple Valley in 1999, so when Signature Theatres finally opened Windward Stadium 10 in the old JCPenney upper level in 2001, Kaneohe already had 10 screens a short drive away.
By the 2006 renovation, the old JCPenney box had become two very different spaces.
Upstairs, the theater could only be reached from inside the mall, a choice management had made to keep movie traffic moving through the shopping center.
Downstairs, more than 40,000 square feet was still empty and being offered for retail.
Ruby Tuesday and IHOP were treated differently elsewhere in the project: because their hours could run beyond the mall's, both had negotiated exterior entrances.
Three tenants under the theater
The ground floor took nine years to fill.
Borders opened there in late July 2007 in 22,000 square feet, with a Starbucks cafe and a Paperchase shop inside it, and the rest of the old department store floor was cut into smaller storefronts beside it rather than handed to one tenant.
Borders closed when the chain liquidated in 2011.
Sports Authority took the same space and opened in 2012 at 26,700 square feet. In January 2016 it was preparing an expansion.
Months later the national company abandoned its reorganization and moved to close every store, and the Kaneohe unit was empty by 2017.
Ross Dress for Less came next and took most of it, about 31,000 square feet, after the space was stripped and rebuilt from its customer areas to its mechanical systems.
It opened in October 2018 and it's still there.
Each rebuild claimed more of the old JCPenney than the one before it, while the cinema overhead kept trading through all three.
Target moved into the Sears shell
Sears ran for nearly 37 years and closed on April 28, 2019, after the company decided during its bankruptcy reorganization not to take the Kaneohe lease with it.
The auto center had shut earlier that month.
That left the mall's largest original building empty, both of its floors, at the end of the arm where the whole place had started trading in 1982.
Nothing was announced for two years.
In July 2021 Target applied for permission to demolish the interior of the former Sears while declining to confirm publicly what it was doing in there, and the mall named it as the replacement anchor that October.
The store opened to the public on July 12, 2023.
Sears had roughly 131,000 square feet. Target kept almost all of that footprint, roughly 128,000 square feet across the same two floors.
Inside went the pharmacy, Ulta Beauty, and Starbucks.
The old box also got four ways in: two through the mall, plus a mauka entrance and a makai entrance from outside.
It's the one arm that still reads from outside as the department store it was built as.
The anchor that never went vacant
Liberty House was the only one of the three that never had a vacancy.
The store opened with the mall in 1982 and kept trading until the chain was folded into Macy's in 2001.
The building didn't change. The name over the door did.
Macy's stayed through the renovation, through the JCPenney wing's three lower-floor tenants, through the Sears closure and the pandemic.
In January 2023 the Kaneohe store went onto the company's closure list, and it shut that spring.
The vacancy was large enough to move Oahu's retail vacancy figures for the quarter.
Then the old Macy's was gutted and divided.
By August 2024, crews were turning the former department store into three spaces, and Planet Fitness opened in part of the former Macy's area in late 2025.
So 41 years of continuous trading under two names ended with the old anchor carved up for new uses, while the mall's own information still puts the children's play area in the Lower Level Macy's Wing.
Windward Mall in 2026
Windward Mall is a two-level enclosed shopping center at 46-056 Kamehameha Highway in Kaneohe, Hawaii.
It opened in July 1982 with Sears, JCPenney, and Liberty House, and it's anchored now by Target, Ross Dress for Less, a 10-screen Regal cinema, and Planet Fitness.
Not one of them is a department store.
More than 100 stores, restaurants, and services trade there, and three of them have been in the building since 1982: Maruki-Tei, Ko'olau Pets, and Hot Dog on a Stick.
Center Court still runs as an event space. The farmers market has set up inside the mall since around 2009, and it now runs on Wednesdays and Sundays.
Kamehameha Schools still owns the land and the mall, and the program it put to the community at an April 2024 open house is a re-tenanting strategy for the building that's there.
No demolition plan for the enclosed mall has been announced.
What stands in place of the three department stores is a big box, a discount store under a cinema, and a gym.
Twice a week the market fills the middle of it.
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