Eastland Mall is an enclosed shopping mall on East Empire Street in Bloomington, Illinois. Four of its five department stores have closed.
It opened in February 1967 with Sears and J.C. Penney. Bergner's, Kohl's, and Famous-Barr came later, and by 2000 there were five anchors around the ring.
The losses came fast. Macy's closed in March 2017, and Sears closed in November 2018. Bergner's and J.C. Penney went in between.
Kohl's is the last one trading. A gym has part of the old J.C. Penney building. The mall is still open, and the other three anchor boxes have taken no department store since.
Two stores opened before Eastland did
Sears opened at the corner of East Empire Street and Old Route 66 on February 17, 1966.
The store had 51 departments in 100,000 square feet, an eight-bay garage for auto service, and counters for catalog orders, gift wrapping, and custom draperies.
The mall it was built to anchor was still a construction site.
J.C. Penney opened on the same site that November, in a store about four times the size of the downtown Bloomington one it replaced.
The downtown store closed the day before. For three months, two department stores traded while crews worked around them.
Eastland opened officially on February 16, 1967, with a ceremony at the central pagoda. An orchestra played, and 300 to 350 people came.
That day 18 more stores opened. An A&P had opened ahead of all of them, the first tenant in the center that wasn't a department store.
The pitch was 72 degrees indoors, held constant, and 2,200 free parking spaces outside.
Inside there were two fountains, indoor plantings, and shops that opened straight onto the corridor with no doors on them.
Bergner's brought a wing with it
The first big change to the building came in 1973.
Bergner's opened on the east side in about 140,000 square feet, the first new department store Bloomington had seen in decades.
It cost about $4 million. The entire original mall, six years earlier, had cost $4.5 million.
The store didn't come by itself.
The same work added roughly 33,000 square feet of shops east of the original center, a new run of storefronts ending at the Bergner's doors.
Eastland had opened as one corridor between two anchors. Now it had three, and more inline space than it started with.
A fourth anchor, a food court, and Walgreens moves outside
Kohl's came in 1984 as the fourth department store, through an expansion reported at about $3.7 million.
The work added more than 90,000 square feet and made room for about a dozen more businesses alongside the anchor, B. Dalton and Jack Lewis Jewelry among them.
The inside kept changing after that. A food court opened in 1989, and a mall-wide renovation followed in 1990.
The merchants who had come out from downtown in the 1960s were leaving.
W.H. Roland's closed its Eastland store in 1988, years after giving up its downtown one.
Chadband's Jewelry closed at the mall in 1989. Walgreens stayed at Eastland but moved out of the interior in 1991.
Kohl's objected, and Famous-Barr waited a year
The fifth department store almost didn't fit.
Kohl's objected to the first site plan for Famous-Barr, and the project lost about a year before the city took it up in November 1997.
On paper the trouble was parking. Code required 3,390 spaces and the plan drew 3,706, a count that only worked if the stalls got smaller.
The city said yes: stall dimensions cut by one foot, drive aisles at 24 feet instead of 25, and a landscaping variance that reduced the required planting area by 1.1 percent.
Famous-Barr opened in November 1999 in about 120,000 square feet.
Five department stores now sat around the ring, which is as many as Eastland would ever have.
Woolworth had closed two years before that, and Old Navy later took the space.
Occupancy in the fall of 2002 was reported at 98 percent. CBL & Associates Properties bought the mall in November 2005.
Four anchors closed in less than two years
Famous-Barr became Macy's in 2006, after its parent company was bought.
On January 4, 2017, Macy's announced the Bloomington store would close, and it closed on March 31.
Three weeks after the announcement, CBL paid $2 million for the anchor building itself.
J.C. Penney announced in March and closed later that year. Bergner's went on August 31, 2018, when Bon-Ton Stores liquidated.
Sears closed in November 2018, 52 years after it had opened first. Four of the five department stores were out of the building in less than two years.
One box got rebuilt.
CBL cut the old Penney store into smaller pieces for a gym and a clothing chain, 53,000 to 55,000 square feet of work with a new exterior facade and mechanical work heavy enough to need a helicopter.
Three old units came off the roof that way, and 12 new ones went on in two roof areas. The bill was about $11.0 million.
H&M opened there on October 4, 2018, and closed in 2021. Planet Fitness is still in the building.
Outback Steakhouse opened that December on a pad at the northeast corner, on ground that had been parking.
A university studio and a voting center
Illinois State University has leased space inside Eastland since April 13, 2022, for an MFA studio.
The lease covers 12,000 gross square feet, of which the university's 2026 inventory counts 9,800 as assignable.
McLean County took another piece.
Unit 1474, the old MC Sports space near the Kohl's end, was used for elections in 2022 and then leased from January 1, 2024.
For the primary and the general election that year, the county and the Bloomington Board of Election Commissioners ran it together as an early-voting and voting center.
From October 26, 2024, it was the only place in McLean County where anyone could vote early on a weekend.
Voters came from Bloomington and from the rest of the county.
Eastland today, and a bank going back into a bank
Northwest of the mall stands a building that Talbots used to occupy. It went up in 1962 as a bank.
In April 2026 the city started reviewing plans to turn it back into one, a $1.3 million job for Bank of Springfield covering offices, a drive-through canopy, and a new roof.
Inline occupancy was 56 percent at the end of 2024 and 48 percent a year later.
City officials and CBL had been talking since 2024 about redeveloping the whole site, with housing, medical space, and some demolition among the options discussed.
Nothing has been approved.
In 2026 CBL moved Eastland into the group of properties it holds outside its core portfolio, and it hasn't said what that means for the mall.
Eastland Mall is still open, at 1615 East Empire Street in Bloomington, Illinois.
It opened in February 1967 with Sears and J.C. Penney, and Kohl's is the only department store left.
The property lists 76 stores across 732,700 square feet.
About 2.4 million visits were estimated for 2025, and the doors are open from 10 in the morning to 8 at night Monday through Saturday, then noon to 5 on Sunday.
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