Round1 Bowling & Amusement occupies 50,000 square feet on two floors of space that once held smaller mall tenants. That arrival in 2017 started the change now shaping Fox Valley Mall: over 140 shops and restaurants led by Macy's, JCPenney, and entertainment instead of four department stores.
Fox Valley Mall opened on July 30, 1975, at 195 Fox Valley Center in Aurora, Illinois. Route 59 runs along its eastern edge; East New York Street and U.S. Route 34 bracket it north and south.
The mall's 1.5 million square feet serve Aurora, Naperville, and the broader western Chicago suburbs. Since 2018, it has lost two of its original four department-store anchors, leaving Macy's and JCPenney as the only two still operating.
627 apartments now occupy the former Sears and Carson's parcels, converting land previously used for retail into a residential neighborhood connected to a still-operating enclosed mall.
Fox Valley Center Opens on a Route 59 Cornfield in 1975
On July 30, 1975, a new enclosed shopping mall opened on what had recently been open farmland along Illinois Route 59, roughly equidistant between Aurora and Naperville.
The land was flat, the parking lots were enormous, and the building smelled of fresh concrete.
Sears and Marshall Field's had already been drawing crowds since February 18 of that year. JCPenney arrived in April 1977. Lord & Taylor opened that August.
Four department-store anchors, roughly 160 shops, and enough surface parking to lose your car for an afternoon.
The development team included Urban Investment and Development Company and Homart Development Company, the real-estate arm connected to Sears.
They chose Route 59 deliberately. The western Chicago suburbs were expanding fast, and Aurora and Naperville together represented a retail market with no dominant enclosed mall.
Fox Valley Center was designed to fill that gap, and by 1977, it was generating about $115 million in annual sales.
Market materials from 1997 put total mall square footage at about 1.5 million, counting all four anchors.
Sears alone occupied about 314,000 square feet. The full small-shop program ran about 599,000 square feet.
Those figures placed Fox Valley among the largest shopping centers in the western suburbs for most of its first two decades.
The original layout was entirely standard for its era. Department stores anchored the ends of interior corridors. An internal ring road wrapped the building, connecting anchor entrances and outparcel development.
The Route 59 frontage drew traffic directly off the highway into the parking fields, exactly as the developers intended.
The Anchors That Defined Fox Valley Mall's Peak Decades
Marshall Field's was the prestige address inside the mall for three decades. Carson Pirie Scott arrived in November 1996, nine months after Lord & Taylor closed on Valentine's Day of that year.
The swap dropped a luxury department store and added a midmarket one. The four-anchor format survived, but the mix had shifted.
The next decade brought a rebranding rather than a retail change.
Fox Valley Center became part of the Westfield portfolio in the early 2000s, operating first as Westfield Shoppingtown Fox Valley, then simply Westfield Fox Valley after Westfield dropped the "Shoppingtown" label from its U.S. properties.
In 2006, Marshall Field's converted to Macy's as Federated Department Stores absorbed the May Department Stores chain nationally.
By the mid-2010s, Fox Valley Mall had been operating for four decades without losing a single anchor to permanent closure.
That record ended after Westfield completed the sale of five U.S. malls, Fox Valley among them, to a venture that included Centennial Real Estate Company, Montgomery Street Partners, and USAA Real Estate (since rebranded as Affinius Capital) in December 2015.
The deal was valued at about $1.1 billion. Westfield kept a minority stake. Centennial took over day-to-day management. The property dropped the Westfield name and returned to Fox Valley Mall.
Round1 Bowling & Amusement signed on as an entertainment tenant in 2017, taking a two-story space of about 50,000 square feet with bowling, billiards, arcade games, and karaoke.
Two Anchors Gone: The Closures That Reshaped the Property
Bon-Ton Stores filed for bankruptcy in February 2018. Store-closing sales at the Fox Valley Mall's Carson's location began in April of that year. The chain's remaining stores were set to close before the end of summer.
Sears followed in September 2018, part of a national store-closing program that would eventually eliminate most of the chain's remaining locations.
Two of Fox Valley Mall's four traditional department-store anchors were gone within months of each other, leaving Macy's and JCPenney as the remaining two.
The Sears space alone had been about 314,000 square feet. Carson's had been about 115,000 square feet.
Together, they left roughly 430,000 square feet of vacant anchor space and large parking areas that no longer served their original purpose.
By 2020, about 40 percent of the mall's store space was sitting empty. Corridor planning from 2018 had put retail vacancy in the broader Route 59 area at about 22 percent and office vacancy at about 18 percent.
The corridor had wide roads, large parking lots, limited pedestrian movement, and an aging development pattern.
In November 2020, Aurora created the Fox Valley Mall Area Tax Increment Financing district.
Future increases in property-tax value from redevelopment would pay for the infrastructure, roads, and site work the transformation would require.
The mall's equalized assessed value, the figure local governments use to calculate property taxes, was about $51.2 million at the time.
Projections suggested redevelopment could push that figure to somewhere between $150 million and $200 million over the TIF's 15-year term.
Lumen at Fox Valley: The First Apartments Take Over the Old Sears Site
Demolition of the former Sears building started in January 2020. The site was about 11.1 acres on the east side of the mall, between Route 59 and the mall's internal ring road.
Aurora approved the final plan for the first apartment phase on February 2, 2021.
The developer team included Atlantic Residential, Focus, and Centennial-related interests.
The approved plan called for three 3-story buildings with 304 apartments: 26 studios, 193 one-bedroom units, and 85 two-bedroom units, ranging from about 657 to 1,382 square feet.
Parking included 70 tuck-under garage spaces, 234 covered spaces, and 154 surface spaces, for a total of 458 spaces.
The design used gray and white brick, faux stone at the first story, fiber-cement panels, and masonry corner treatments.
Lumen at Fox Valley opened in November 2022. The project added a fitness center, office space, an outdoor pool, a plaza, a dog park, and linear park space alongside the residential buildings.
Its completion moved the mall from a retail-only property to a mixed-use site where 304 households were now living adjacent to the enclosed mall.
The buildings were oriented to face Route 59 with something more active than a parking lot. A second, larger residential phase was already in planning before Lumen accepted its first residents.
Lucca at Fox Valley: A Second Residential Phase and 55,000 Square Feet of New Public Space
Lucca at Fox Valley broke ground in 2023 on a separate parcel adjacent to the mall. The developer group was Focus, Atlantic Residential, Centennial, and Affinius Capital, previously known as USAA Real Estate.
The project is a 4-story, 323-unit building with about 486,200 square feet of total building area.
The building topped out in September 2024. Interior work, courtyard construction, and park installation followed through late 2024 and early 2025.
The first residents moved in during early 2025. The grand opening took place on June 18, 2025.
At that point, about 20 percent of units were leased and about 9 percent occupied. Studio rents started around $1,775. One-bedroom units started at around $1,965. Two-bedroom units started around $2,600.
The unit mix runs from studio to two-bedroom and den layouts, with sizes from about 500 to 1,500 square feet.
Amenities include a pool courtyard, cabanas, grill stations, a fitness center, an indoor and outdoor coworking space, a resident market area, and a dog park.
The project added about 55,000 square feet of new public open space, including a west linear park with seating and gaming areas and an east triangular park.
Demolishing Carson's and Rebuilding the Mall's Circulation System
The former Carson Pirie Scott building did not become apartments. It was torn down.
The demolition formed part of a 24-acre redevelopment program covering the former Carson's parcel, the nearby parking areas, and the mall's circulation zones.
Crews relocated about 1.2 miles of inner and outer ring roads. They built new sidewalks and upgraded lighting.
They refreshed the landscaping and moved thousands of feet of dry and wet utilities. Water and fire mains were upgraded.
Dry utility and fiber duct banks were installed.
Six intersections were created or modified. The original circulation system had served one enclosed retail building surrounded by parking.
That design was too limited for several independent buildings with separate roads, utility connections, and pedestrian paths.
The program also prepared two new outparcel sites. Utilities, grading, curbs, and landscaping went in.
Discussed uses included a grocer, restaurant-oriented space, a theater, and additional retail. No final tenants had been announced as of mid-2025.
Fox Valley Mall Today: Half Retail, Half Neighborhood
Macy's and JCPenney continue to anchor the enclosed mall. More than 140 retail shops, restaurants, and services operate inside.
H&M, Forever 21, Express, Victoria's Secret, American Eagle, Aeropostale, Books-A-Million, Bath & Body Works, Brighton, Buckle, Build-A-Bear, and Round1 are among the active tenants.
Center Park provides an interior gathering area, and the Treehouse Tower operates as a children's play feature.
The property surrounding the enclosed mall looks nothing like 1975. The former Sears parcel has 304 apartments on it.
The area where Carson's stood is cleared, regraded, and waiting for its next phase. New roads cross the site where parking lots once stretched without interruption.
Pedestrian paths connect the residential buildings to the mall and to Route 59.
Aurora's 2022 northeast-side planning added another layer of approved development.
Plans on that side included a reconfigured lot arrangement, a future retail pad, and a proposed 5-story senior-housing building with 108 independent-living units, 84 assisted-living units, and 22 memory-care units.
The proposal included underground enclosed parking and a new private road extension from one of the mall's entrances onto East New York Street.
A northbound right-turn lane from that entrance was among the required traffic improvements.
Fifty years after it opened on a Route 59 cornfield, Fox Valley Mall is no longer just a mall.
It is a working enclosed shopping center, a residential neighborhood of 627 apartments, and a redevelopment site still rewriting itself one parcel at a time.
