The first Christmas at Alton Square came in 1978, weeks after the mall opened, and the volunteers wrapping gifts in its new corridors worked at banquet tables Famous-Barr had lent them. The store had taught them how to tie the bows, too.
A Cookie Factory was there from that first November. Olga's Kitchen came upstairs in 1980. Until 2015, walkers could come in at 6 a.m., before the stores opened.
Both restaurants are gone now. The cookie shop moved out in December 2024, after 46 years under the roof, and Olga's closed in December 2025, the last restaurant inside.
The library, there since 1985, has a lease that ends in 2028, and it is looking at a building of its own. What else is still open in the mall around it?
Famous-Barr opened a month before the mall
For a month in the fall of 1978, Famous-Barr was open in Alton with no mall around it.
The St. Louis department store, part of May Department Stores, opened on October 16, the first piece of the new shopping center to open its doors.
Alton Square itself opened on November 15, 1978.
It was an enclosed mall on two levels, built for $8 million, and JCPenney opened the same day, with the corridors running between the two department stores.
Neither of them rented from the mall.
Famous-Barr and JCPenney each owned their own buildings, which stood apart from the small shops strung between them, and that arrangement would outlive both the mall's first owner and the Famous-Barr name.
A Cookie Factory was open by that November.
The first Christmas brought the Alton Community Service League, which set up a gift-wrapping station in the new mall.
Famous-Barr put the volunteers through a two-day workshop on wrapping and tying bows, then lent them the banquet tables they worked at.
By 1981 the wrapping table had become the league's yearly fundraiser, and it would still be there long after Famous-Barr was gone.
A public library moved in upstairs
The upper level filled with more than shops.
Olga's Kitchen opened on the second floor in 1980, and in 1985 the mall's owner donated 3,800 square feet up there to the Hayner Public Library, which opened a branch, lent books, and held programs inside the mall.
The halls, upstairs and down, were shared, and so was the bill for keeping them up.
S.G. Adams Printing & Stationery, one of the early tenants, had been paying $337 a month as its share.
Around February 1980 the charge went to $1,000. The stationer refused to pay the higher amount, and the mall's owner took it to court.
A monthly bill turned into a fight over whether the small shop was entitled to the cost agreements other tenants had signed, and in 1987 the Illinois Appellate Court ruled that those agreements stayed confidential and sent the case back to the lower court.
Simon added a Sears wing
In February 1993 Simon bought Alton Square for $8.3 million, a little more than the mall had cost to build.
By June 1996 only about 59 percent of its space was occupied.
Simon put up a Sears anchor building in 1997 and renovated the mall around it.
The project added roughly 95,000 square feet and gave Alton Square a third department store, and for a while the halls filled back in: by the end of 2003 occupancy had climbed to about 79 percent, and by 2005 Old Navy was listed among the mall's major tenants.
Then the first name went. In 2006 Federated Department Stores, which had bought May, turned the south-end Famous-Barr into a Macy's.
The store that had opened a month ahead of the mall, the one that had lent the banquet tables, now carried another chain's name.
By the end of that year occupancy had slipped to about 64 percent.
In August 2007 Simon sold the mall and its shops to Coyote Management.
The Macy's and JCPenney buildings stayed out of the deal, still in the hands of the stores.
The library moved into the Waldenbooks space
Two bookstores left Alton Square in 2008. B. Dalton closed on June 14.
Waldenbooks cut its stock to half price and held on until September 26, when it closed too.
Upstairs, the Hayner branch had already grown once, by about 2,200 square feet in 1997 and 1998.
In 2008 its board decided against expanding again where it stood and chose the first floor instead: the Waldenbooks store, the space GNC had given up, and the storefronts beside them, joined into one branch.
On paper the library would grow from about 6,000 square feet to about 18,000.
When the new branch opened in March 2009, it filled about 20,000, and the shelves went back into the rooms where the town had once bought its books.
The branch had no door of its own to the street.
Anyone headed for the library walked in through the mall and down its corridors, past the shops on the way.
One piece of the old arrangement stayed upstairs: a large room the library kept for performances and programs.
A theater promised for summer 2010
In March 2009 Coyote and Premiere Cinema brought the city a plan for a stand-alone theater with 10 screens, to be built north of the Sears.
Their presentation to city officials closed on a date, summer 2010.
The plan leaned on public help: a 5-percent amusement tax, with up to $950,000 of it rebated to the developer, and a federal block-grant loan.
A council committee voted 6-0 to recommend it.
Summer 2010 came without a theater.
By spring the mall was in receivership, run by a manager the court appointed, and by that August Coyote was in default on $12.8 million.
In September 2010 Marquette, the lender behind Coyote's loan, took ownership of the mall.
Under the lender, the mall took on public work.
In January 2011 the city named the food court a warming center for cold days, and in June 2012 it opened the same room as a cooling center for hot ones.
Sears, the newest of the three department stores, closed in June 2012, and in 2013 Illinois Wholesale Furniture moved into the empty store.
In March 2014 artists began installing the Alton History Mural in the mall, a series of paintings of the city's people, places, and events.
The first panel they finished copied an early map of the area.
Hull cut the benches and the early walks
Hull Property Group took over Alton Square in July 2015.
Ross opened that same month in 28,000 square feet at the front of the mall, and inside, the new owner began clearing the halls.
The customer-service kiosk by the Ross entrance came out, and with it the toddler strollers that had been rented there.
The wheelchairs that used to wait by the doors went to the security office next to the food court.
By late July nine benches were left on the lower level, and fewer upstairs.
The walkers lost their mornings.
Under the previous owner they could come in as early as 6 a.m. From July 2015 their hours began at 9 a.m., and at 11 a.m. on Sundays.
People complained, and the new hours stayed.
In 2016 the empty storefronts upstairs disappeared behind drywall and crown molding, and murals of local scenes and events were planned for the new walls.
The furniture store left the old Sears that same year, and the third department store building stood empty again.
Macy's came down and Sears became a cinema
In January 2017 Macy's announced that its Alton store, with 54 workers, was one of 68 it would close.
Regular business ended on March 12, 2017. The next day the big Macy's sign came off the building Famous-Barr had opened in 1978.
By 2018 about 58 percent of the mall stood vacant.
Hull tied its rebuilding plan to public financing, and in 2018 Alton's City Council voted 6-1 to approve a tax increment financing district for the mall, which lets future growth in property taxes help pay for the work.
By April 2019 the 180,000-square-foot Macy's building was gone.
A new mall entrance stood at that end, second-floor tenants were moving down to the first, and work was under way to close the opening between the two levels.
The upstairs food court, the warming and cooling room of the lender's years, was promised a new use as well: in March 2019 OSF HealthCare announced plans to put a 12,000-square-foot rehab center there.
On June 21, 2019, the Steve Miller Band and Marty Stuart played the mall's upper parking lot, after flooding forced them to find another stage.
In January 2020 Hull announced an eight-screen NCG Cinema for the old Sears, possibly by summer 2020.
It opened on March 31, 2021, with more than 850 recliners, beer and wine, and $5 tickets on most Tuesdays.
More than a decade after the theater promised for summer 2010, Alton Square had its movies.
The cinema had no door into the mall, though, and moviegoers came in from outside and left the same way, without walking the halls.
The last restaurant left Alton Square
In July 2022 walking got an organized form, when OSF started a mall-walker program on a loop of about 0.2 mile, with distances logged at the rehab center or the library.
In December 2023 the Community Service League marked its 45th year of wrapping gifts at the mall, at a table on the lower level between the library and JCPenney, two tenants that had been there for most of those Christmases.
The next two Decembers took the food.
Cookie Factory closed its shop inside on December 24, 2024, Christmas Eve, after 46 years, and reopened in January 2025 at 192 Alton Square Mall Drive, outside the enclosed mall.
Olga's Kitchen closed on December 28, 2025. No restaurant is left inside the mall.
The only one on its directory is Santino's Steak and Pasta, in a separate building on the grounds.
Alton Square is still open, and Hull Property Group owns it. Its directory lists 15 businesses and services.
JCPenney has been there since opening day and is the last department store left.
Ross is still open at the front of the mall, alongside the NCG Cinema in the old Sears, OSF Rehabilitation in the old food court, a post office, and the library.
The library is the tenant whose future is in play.
The Hayner district pays $20,000 a month plus utilities, handles repairs inside its space, and holds a lease that ends in 2028.
In June 2026 the mall's management showed the library several spaces and a plan to keep it at the property.
The district wanted about 3,400 square feet of public space in one connected piece, and the rooms on offer were scattered, so it is pursuing a building of its own.
The library came to Alton Square in 1985, on 3,800 square feet upstairs that the mall's owner gave it.
It has outlasted the bookstores and two of the mall's three department stores.
Its evening programs still meet upstairs, in the performance room, and everyone headed to them still comes in through the mall.
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