Northfield Square Mall in Bradley, IL Opened Half Empty in 1990 and Is Village Property in 2026

Water Tower Plaza. Bradley Commons. Target, Walmart, Kohl's, Dick's Sporting Goods, Marshalls, PetSmart. None of that was there before the mall.

Northfield Square is the enclosed regional mall on Illinois Route 50 in Bradley, Illinois, opened in August 1990 by the Edward J. DeBartolo Corporation. It brought the regional-mall lineup to Kankakee County.

Then more chains started building next door, in open-air centers where you park at the door you want. Venture liquidated in 1998 and Carson's split into two boxes to cover the gap.

Sears and both Carson's stores closed in 2018, three anchors in eight months. JCPenney closed in 2020. Bradley bought the rest of the property for $6.5 million and closed on it in February 2025.

A developer signed a letter of intent in June 2026 for a potential $150 million project. The mall that opened the corridor is still waiting to be rebuilt.

Northfield Square opened half empty

On July 31, 1990, 3,000 people walked through a shopping mall that wasn't open yet. The next day it was.

Northfield Square opened on August 1, 1990, on the west side of Illinois Route 50 near Larry Power Road, just off Interstate 57 at Exit 315.

The mailing address says Bourbonnais. The land sits inside the Village of Bradley. Both have been true the whole time.

It was the first fully enclosed regional mall the Bradley-Bourbonnais-Kankakee area ever had.

Four department stores: Carson Pirie Scott, JCPenney, Sears, and Venture.

A movie theater, a food court, and one long low concourse, 770,000 square feet in all.

Opening day drew a crowd estimated at 25,000.

The actor who played Skippy on "Family Ties" turned up, and so did a young woman who would be crowned Miss America five weeks later.

Around 70 businesses were operating.

And 60 percent of the space was leased. The mall that 25,000 people came to see had empty storefronts in it on day one.

Bradley needed a mall after Roper left

The village wanted this badly, and it had a reason.

The Bradley Roper plant shut down in 1982. Unemployment in the area climbed into the high teens, then past 20 percent.

In December 1983 Bradley joined an enterprise zone to pull investment back in and rebuild its tax base.

By the late 1980s Bradley and Kankakee were competing for the same shoppers, in public.

In 1988, Kankakee aldermen talked about going to court to stop a proposed Bradley shopping center, because every dollar spent up north was sales tax the city wouldn't collect.

The project went ahead anyway.

The developer was the Edward J. DeBartolo Corporation, one of the biggest mall builders in the country, working near the end of the era when anyone still built these.

The formula was standard: one level, enclosed, department stores at the ends, parking all the way around.

Before it opened, a family that wanted that kind of selection drove out of town. After August 1990 they didn't have to.

When Venture closed, Carson's took two boxes

The discount store went first. Venture liquidated in 1998, and the Northfield Square location closed with it.

Carson Pirie Scott filled the hole.

It split its merchandise in two: women's apparel stayed in the original store, and men's, children's, and home goods moved into the old Venture box.

From the parking lot the mall now looked like it had five anchors. Two of them had the same name over the door.

Ownership had changed by then too.

Simon Property Group and DeBartolo Realty completed their merger on August 9, 1996, a $3 billion deal that moved 49 malls into the combined company.

And for a good stretch, the place worked. Occupancy in the smaller-store space was 72.7 percent in 2002 and 83.7 percent the year after.

By 2012 it stood at 88.3 percent, below the 90.4 percent Simon had reported earlier.

The theater kept the parking lot busy after the shops locked up, and the building held school performances and the Strawberry Jazz Festival.

The arrangement that lasted through those years also tied two of the five anchor doors to a single corporate parent.

The corridor that grew up around it

Northfield Square helped prove the Route 50 location worked. Then other developers built on that proof.

Water Tower Plaza went up across the corridor with Target, Barnes & Noble, Marshalls, and PetSmart.

Bradley Commons came later with Walmart, Kohl's, and Dick's Sporting Goods. Restaurants and hotels filled the ground between them.

For a shopper the difference was simple. At the new places you parked in front of the store you wanted and walked in.

At the mall you parked, went through a door, and walked the concourse past everything else.

That walk is what an enclosed mall sells to its small tenants: the assumption that somebody crossing from Sears to JCPenney stops and buys something in between.

Chains noticed. In an open-air center a single retailer could open, close, or expand without anyone redesigning the rest of the property.

Bradley had been sharing sales-tax revenue with the mall's ownership under an agreement scheduled to run out in 2013.

By then the mall was competing with a corridor built for front-door parking.

The loan came due in February 2014

There was a mortgage on Northfield Square, and it started at $32 million.

The balance came down slowly, to $30.7 million in 2006 and $26.5 million in 2012. It matured on February 11, 2014.

Simon said it couldn't repay the rest. The company didn't pay.

Foreclosure followed and nobody contested it. When the property went up for sale that summer, one bidder showed interest. One.

Wells Fargo held the mortgage and ended up holding the mall.

By January 2016 Northfield Square was bank-owned property, with $25.2 million in reported exposure.

In July 2016, Namdar Realty Group bought it for $9.6 million. That is less than a third of the original loan.

Namdar's business is buying older malls cheaply and running them lean, and that is what happened here.

The lights stayed on, and very little money went into the building.

Three anchors dark in eight months

On January 4, 2018, Sears announced that the Northfield Square store was on a national list of 103 closures.

The auto center went in late February, the store in April.

That was 107,000 square feet, empty, at one end of the building.

Sears had been there since opening day, selling appliances, tools, clothes, and car service.

Less than two weeks after Sears shut its doors, both Carson's stores were going too.

Bon-Ton had failed to find a buyer and was liquidating everything. Both closed by late August, and up to 70 jobs went with them.

Three department-store spaces went dark in eight months, and one had only been filled because Venture went under 20 years earlier.

In December 2017 occupancy was near 60 percent. Once the closures were counted, the projected figure fell below 40 percent.

Smaller tenants did arrive: an Express Factory Outlet near Carson's, a beauty school, a barbershop.

Spirit Halloween took the Sears box a season at a time.

Then in 2019 Famous Footwear gave up 6,000 square feet near center court. That is how it can travel.

A chain looks at its own sales and at what is open next door, and empty anchors hurt both numbers.

JCPenney's exit and the village's first buy

JCPenney was the last one left from 1990.

It survived 2018 and the first months of the pandemic.

The mall shut in March 2020 under state restrictions and reopened in late May. JCPenney came back in June for a closing sale.

The company filed for bankruptcy that May, and on June 4 it put Northfield Square on a list of 154 stores to be liquidated.

Four department-store boxes now sat empty: Sears, JCPenney, the original Carson's, and the old Venture space.

Cinemark was the only business left at anchor scale.

Bradley had already started moving. In December 2018 the village board paid $15,000 for a study on what could be done with the property.

A year later it bought the former Carson's men's store for $1.1 million, roughly 80,000 square feet.

In June 2021 it added the JCPenney parcel for $577,500.

A redevelopment plan finished that April proposed cutting the superblock apart with new public streets, a 5.25-acre public square near the end of Ken Hayes Drive, housing around the edges, and demolition of parts of the mall.

Nothing in it was funded and nothing was built.

What's open at Northfield Square now

In November 2024 the village board authorized $6.5 million for the rest of it, 43 acres across nine parcels, and the sale closed on February 14, 2025.

Bradley now owns most of the 65-acre property. Cinemark stayed out of the deal and still sells tickets.

Most of the attention since has gone to the waterpark.

Bradley began studying one in September 2023, and the first drawings attached it to the mall itself.

In December 2025 the village moved it onto farmland southeast of the building and signed a deal to use Mattel brands.

The Mattel Wonder Indoor Waterpark is estimated at $90 million to $100 million, targeting spring 2028.

Which left the mall needing a plan of its own.

In June 2026 the board approved a $465,000 contract to design an entertainment district across the 65 acres, tying it to the waterpark and to the Bradley 315 Sports Park a mile north.

At the same meeting the board received a letter of intent for a project valued around $150 million.

As of August 2026 there is no final demolition plan and no start date.

What there is: a long corridor of vacant storefronts, four dark anchor boxes at the ends, and a handful of businesses still trading inside.

Crafts and Things is one, on the All Illinois Shop Hop route this year. In June the parking lot held the 315 Music Fest.

The theater still runs shows, and the craft shop is open when you walk in.