North Riverside Park Mall sits at 7501 West Cermak Road in North Riverside, Illinois, an enclosed two-level shopping center 10 miles west of Chicago.
That mall opened in 1975 with JCPenney, Montgomery Ward, Carson Pirie Scott, and a junior anchor called Madigan's. The three full-line anchors stood on ground the mall's landlord didn't own; JCPenney is the only one of the four still trading there.
Carson's closed in August 2018. The parcel went into foreclosure after that, so the building sat shut through a court process the mall didn't control. The mall's owner, The Feil Organization, bought the 11.55-acre Carson's parcel in January 2023. It's 181,000 square feet on the west side.
The store is still empty today, advertised for retail, entertainment, hospitality, or medical use, and available in pieces. Nothing has been built there. The rest of the mall is 96 percent leased.
North Riverside Park Mall opened in 1975
North Riverside Park Mall opened in 1975 at 7501 West Cermak Road in North Riverside, Illinois, an enclosed two-level shopping center 10 miles west of downtown Chicago.
It opened with three department stores around the concourses, JCPenney at the south end, Montgomery Ward at the north, and Carson Pirie Scott on the west side, plus a junior anchor from the Chicago family chain Madigan's.
JCPenney is the only one of the four still trading there in 2026.
JCPenney came from Cermak Plaza in Berwyn, where it had about 60,000 square feet.
Its new store at the mall was about 266,000 square feet, and the building it left behind became a Service Merchandise. Smaller businesses followed it in.
The Mister Shop, a men's clothing store that had been in Riverside, moved that September and ran a sale on the way in: $165 Petrocelli suits at $79.99, leisure suits at $69.99, slacks at $8.99.
The land under the anchors was owned separately from the mall.
JCPenney held its own parcel, the store and the parking south and east of it, from the opening period until 2021, and the anchor properties stayed outside the mall's ownership for most of the center's life.
Madigan's closed and the space was split
Madigan's closed in 1992. The mall cut the two-level space into smaller units and leased them out, and by 1994 Foot Locker and T.J. Maxx were open in parts of it.
Two years from a shut department store to two working storefronts.
The larger half kept turning over after that. T.J. Maxx was gone by 2005 and Steve & Barry's took the space, then failed in the 2008 retail downturn.
Conway opened there in November 2009 and changed its name to Fallas in May 2015, and Fallas went into liquidation in 2018.
Four retailers came through the same box between 1994 and 2018.
Some handoffs were quick; Conway simply became Fallas, and after Fallas closed, part of the old Madigan's space stayed empty.
A new owner bought the mall, not the anchors
Urban Retail Properties rebuilt the inside of the center for the 2003 holiday season.
The point was to send more foot traffic toward JCPenney and Carson Pirie Scott.
Both levels got new floors, ceilings, lights, and signs; the escalators were upgraded, and center court got a new elevator finished in glass and stainless steel.
A year later the mall changed hands. The Feil Organization bought the shopping center in 2004 and still owns it in 2026.
What Feil bought was the concourses and the inline stores.
The three department store buildings that the rebuilt corridors fed, and large stretches of the parking around them, belonged to other companies.
Three anchors on the campus, none of them Feil's.
That arrangement held for the next 20 years, and it decided what could be done each time one of the three closed.
The Sears building came apart
Montgomery Ward closed at the north end in 2001. Sears bought the property, not just the lease, and opened its own store there in 2002.
Then in 2015 Sears sold the real estate to Seritage Growth Properties and stayed on as a tenant in a building it no longer owned.
By late 2017, Sears had squeezed itself into roughly 90,000 square feet upstairs, optical counter and portrait studio included.
Seritage was already shopping the ground floor and auto center to other tenants.
The split became physical: an east-west corridor divided the lower level, while the old central escalators and south-end elevator disappeared, cutting the new ground-floor spaces off from Sears above.
Round1 took about 45,000 square feet of that lower floor and opened on December 22, 2018, with bowling, arcade games, billiards, and karaoke, and a 17-foot bowling pin over the west entrance.
A health care office took another piece of the same floor by 2019. Most of the old Sears Auto Center became a Blink Fitness by 2020.
Sears itself lasted until that year. Seritage ended the lease, store-closing signs went up in June, and the fixtures were sold along with the merchandise.
Forman Mills signed for the whole roughly 94,000-square-foot upper floor in January 2022 and opened later that year.
One department store had become a bowling and arcade hall, a medical office, and a discount clothing chain on two floors that no longer connected, all of them leasing from the parcel's owner rather than from the mall.
Carson's closed and the mall couldn't redevelop it
A fire broke out on the Carson Pirie Scott loading dock on November 12, 2014 and filled both levels of the store with heavy smoke.
Nobody was hurt, and fire officials believed the cause was electrical.
Carson's stayed shut for more than three months and spent close to $1.3 million putting it back, from the smoke evacuation system and fire hose connections to ceilings, walls, paint, and light fixtures.
Customers were allowed back on February 20, 2015; the grand reopening followed at 8:45 in the morning on February 26.
That work bought the building three and a half more years.
Carson's parent filed for Chapter 11 in February 2018 and then liquidated, and the North Riverside store's last day was August 29, 2018, with the last clothes on the racks marked to $7 and then $5.
The building belonged to somebody else.
Foreclosure on the Carson parcel started in September 2018, which put the empty store and a large share of the west parking lot into a court process the mall didn't control.
By 2019 three prospective users were being weighed for the space, two of whom would have demolished it.
Feil made an offer for the parcel, and the offer went nowhere against the foreclosure.
A court-appointed receiver put 11.5 acres on the market in 2021, including the 181,000-square-foot store and the parking with it.
What Feil could build on was the ground it already owned.
In 2020, it planned two outlot buildings on the east parking area, the first a two-story, 38,000-square-foot 24 Hour Fitness with a lap pool and a sports court.
COVID-19 stopped it, and neither building went up.
On the west side the mall kept a closed department store in its wall for four and a half years and had no way to do anything with it.
What North Riverside Park Mall owns now
Feil bought the Carson parcel on January 12, 2023 for $3.075 million.
The owner before had paid a little more than $14 million for the same ground in 1998.
Two weeks after the sale closed, Aldi opened a freestanding store on part of the north parking lot, and early that year Seritage sold the 13.2-acre north anchor property to an affiliate of Fidelis Realty Partners: the old Sears box, the Aldi outlot, the Blink building, and much of the north and west parking.
In February 2023, Feil met with village officials about demolishing the Carson store and putting a mix of commercial and rental residential uses on the site.
Three and a half years later the building is still standing and still empty, advertised at up to 181,000 square feet for retail, entertainment, hospitality, medical offices, or services, and available in pieces.
The division shows up in the mall's own debt.
When the loan reached maturity in October 2024 without being paid off, it covered about 447,000 square feet of a 1.06-million-square-foot center, because roughly 646,000 square feet of the place belongs to the anchor owners.
JCPenney still trades at the south end, on ground that stopped being JCPenney's in 2021, when the chain handed the parcel to a trust its creditors set up.
Round1 and Forman Mills work the north end on Fidelis's property.
The mall is 96 percent leased with roughly 130 shops, and the largest empty space in it is the one Feil finally owns.
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