When Northland Mall opened in 1973, Sterling and Rock Falls got a mall where every store sat on one floor, under one roof. On June 22, 2015, part of that roof came down.
Severe weather brought down the sporting-goods store's roof and one of its walls, broke a gas line that the fire department had to shut off, and flooded the center. Nobody inside was hurt, and the store was back the next summer.
JCPenney and Bergner's were both gone by August 2018. The building kept taking in tenants anyway: a gym in an old pet-supply store in 2016, and in 2022, when small shops were offered up to six months without rent, a toy store started by a longtime candle shop.
That leaves the one roof every store opened under in 1973, and what becomes of it.
Weise, JCPenney, and an empty anchor space
In August 1970, the Charles V. Weise department store committed to a shopping center that existed only as a plan.
Northland was meant for East Lincolnway, the U.S. Route 30 corridor on Sterling's east side, several miles from downtown, and a department store had now put its name on the project.
Northland Mall opened in Sterling, Illinois, on February 27, 1973, as a one-story enclosed mall at 2900 E. Lincolnway. Every store sat on one level under one roof.
JCPenney and Charles V. Weise were its two department stores, and Woolworth and Walgreens were among the tenants that opened with them.
The Weise chain belonged to Bergner's, yet the store at Northland carried the Weise name, and the new mall became the main enclosed shopping center of the Sterling-Rock Falls area.
The Weise store later took the Bergner's name.
In 1999 the mall was renovated, and afterward it measured about 304,000 square feet, with Bergner's and JCPenney as its department stores and upward of 20 smaller shops and service businesses.
Bath & Body Works, Maurices, Christopher & Banks, and Pet Supplies Plus were among the larger ones. More big stores arrived on East Lincolnway in those years.
Walmart, Kmart, and Menards settled on the same corridor, and that stretch of large-format retail, Northland included, competed with downtown Sterling for its shoppers.
Inside the mall, with Bergner's and JCPenney both still open, an anchor space stood empty and was offered for lease. It measured 33,300 square feet.
Dunham's Sports rebuilds after a storm
Pet Supplies Plus closed its Northland store in June 2014, and that fall a tenant of a different kind arrived.
Dunham's Sports announced its Sterling store in late October and set the ribbon-cutting for the morning of October 31, 2014. It gave the mall a large sporting-goods store.
On June 22, 2015, severe weather brought down the roof and a wall of the Dunham's store. A gas line broke, and the fire department shut it off, while water flooded part of the center.
Nobody inside the mall was hurt, but the store stayed shut for repairs into the next year. In August 2016, Dunham's announced that its Sterling store was back.
Late that year, Planet Fitness opened a gym in the space Pet Supplies Plus had left in 2014, a use that did not rely on department-store shoppers.
By the end of 2016, Northland had a sporting-goods store and a gym alongside JCPenney and Bergner's.
JCPenney and Bergner's close
In March 2017, JCPenney put its Northland store on a list of 138 stores it would close, and the store shut later that year. The loss reached past the mall.
Sales tax paid for about a third of Sterling's roughly $12 million in yearly operating revenue, and every sale at JCPenney had added to it.
At the end of 2017, Namdar Realty Group added Northland to the malls it had been buying up. Bergner's stayed open through the sale, but its parent company, Bon-Ton, went bankrupt in 2018.
By April the chain was headed for a liquidation auction that would take the Sterling store with it, and the store closed that August along with the rest of the chain.
From that August on, Dunham's and Planet Fitness were the largest tenants Northland had left.
Both department-store buildings stood empty, the old Bergner's at about 60,000 square feet and the JCPenney space at about 100,000.
Free rent for small shops, then Hobby Lobby
In 2021, Sterling adopted its Comprehensive Plan 2040, which named Northland directly.
The plan called for breaking up the mall's big boxes, building on outlots, and opening the site to office, light-industrial, and residential uses, and it included an adaptive reuse concept for the mall itself.
The mall that plan described changed hands in January 2022, when Brookwood Capital Advisors bought it for $1.7 million.
Brookwood went after small tenants with an offer of up to six months without rent. Thirteen storefronts were empty when it took over. By March, only one of them was still vacant.
Among the new arrivals was The Toy Store, opened as a second shop by the operator of Bushel Basket Candle Co., a longtime tenant.
Out of the Box Vintage Resale and Emmie B's Boutique moved in too, and Brookwood upgraded the heating and cooling and laid new asphalt across the parking lot. The JCPenney wing stayed shuttered.
In May 2022, Brookwood put Northland up for online auction, with bidding scheduled to open in June at $1.5 million.
The mall went to bidders with a signed 10-year lease from Hobby Lobby for the old Bergner's space.
It changed hands again by September, and at that point every store space was either occupied or committed, the last commitment being Hobby Lobby's.
Hobby Lobby took all 60,000 square feet Bergner's had left behind, in a building that had stood empty since August 2018.
The chain's 42nd store in Illinois, open six days a week and closed on Sundays, opened on Friday, August 4, 2023.
Sterling draws a tax district around the mall
In December 2023, Sterling created the Northland Mall Business District.
From the start of 2024, shoppers there paid an extra 1 percent on general merchandise, 9.25 percent in all instead of 8.25, and the district was set up so that the money from that extra percent went back to the developer.
In May 2024, the city hired SB Friedman Development Advisors to study a larger tool, a tax increment financing district for the mall and the parcels around it.
The mall's owner, Sterling Investments LLC, agreed to cover the cost of the study. The work was finished in January 2025, and under Illinois law the area qualified as a conservation area.
Every main building in it was at least 35 years old, and the area had buildings in poor repair, too much empty space, utilities that fell short, and structures that failed minimum code.
Inside the mall, 15 storefronts stood empty in May 2025, while Dunham's and Selmi's Formal Wear kept trading.
In June 2025, the City Council approved the study and its redevelopment plan, created the Greater Northland Mall Redevelopment Area, and adopted tax increment financing for it.
The council set up a way to pay for a future project and approved no project itself.
Open stores and a possible future beyond the enclosed mall
Northland Mall is open, and both of its former department-store buildings have retail tenants again.
Hobby Lobby trades in the old Bergner's building, and Illinois Furniture and More sells furniture in the former JCPenney space.
Dunham's sells sporting goods, while Planet Fitness runs its gym overnight for much of the week, on a schedule apart from the mall's shopping hours.
Bath & Body Works, The Toy Store, and Selmi's Formal Wear have stores inside.
The redevelopment district around the mall allows up to $40 million in eligible costs.
About $19 million of that is set for public works, $6 million for assembling property and preparing sites, and $6 million for rehabilitating buildings.
The $40 million is a ceiling, and new property-tax growth in the district flows into a special fund that can pay eligible redevelopment costs and financing obligations.
Northland's next version may not operate as one enclosed shopping center. In March 2026, Sterling officials said the owner was weighing different ways to reuse the property.
Sterling's 2021 plan called for breaking the mall's big boxes apart. Both now hold stores, the building is still an enclosed mall, and on election days several of Sterling's precincts vote inside it.
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