JCPenney has been open at Northwoods Mall on War Memorial Drive in Peoria, Illinois since January 1974. It's the only one of the mall's three original department stores left in the building.
Carson Pirie Scott, Montgomery Ward, and JCPenney built the place together on 56 acres. It opened in 1973 and cost $25 million.
Carson's name came off in 1983 and Ward's in 1997. Sears took over the Ward building and closed it on February 16, 2020.
Today the Sears entrance is dark. Bowling lanes fill the lower floor of the old Carson building, and the furniture showroom above them sits empty. The city has drawn a tax district over the whole site and hasn't picked what goes on it.
A lawsuit held the land for five years
Carson Pirie Scott bought the ground at Peoria's northwestern edge in 1961, the same year it took over the old Block & Kuhl department-store business downtown.
Then it brought two downtown competitors into the project as equal partners.
Montgomery Ward and JCPenney each took a third. All three were still trading downtown at the time.
Downtown noticed. In 1965 merchants from the central business district and from Sheridan Village challenged the rezoning and sued Carson.
The suit ran for years while the land sat rural between Interstate 74, War Memorial Drive, and Sterling Avenue.
It settled out of court, the City Council approved the zoning in February 1970, and the first construction ceremony came on October 26, 1971.
The purchase and the opening sat 12 years apart. The merchants who sued lost more than the fight.
Carson eventually closed its own downtown Peoria store, and in 1998 Sears left downtown for Northwoods as well.
What Northwoods Mall opened with in 1973
Northwoods Mall is a two-level enclosed shopping center at 2200 W. War Memorial Drive in Peoria, Illinois.
It was dedicated on August 16, 1973 as the city's first large indoor mall, and it still operates as an enclosed mall today.
The $25 million project covered 56 acres and more than 700,000 square feet, with nearly 3,700 parking spaces on all four sides.
At the opening it was called the largest indoor mall between Chicago and St. Louis.
Two of the three anchors were trading that day. Carson had 155,500 square feet on two levels and Montgomery Ward had 149,800.
JCPenney's 156,400-square-foot store didn't open until January 2, 1974.
The equal-thirds partnership showed up in the buildings themselves. The largest anchor and the smallest sat 6,600 square feet apart.
Ward and JCPenney each ran a freestanding auto building out on the lot, which is how the site came to have service garages that were never part of the enclosed mall.
Within a year of the opening, a study found sales had fallen in Peoria's old central business district.
The founders' thirds started changing hands in 1983
Carson closed its Northwoods store in 1983, 10 years after opening the mall with it. The selling started the same year.
Carson sold its one-third interest to Jacobs-Visconsi-Jacobs in May, and Montgomery Ward sold its share to Melvin Simon and Associates in October.
By November, Simon was running the mall and Harold Carlson Associates, which had managed it since the dedication, was out.
Simon's later filings list Northwoods as acquired in 1983 and held at 100 percent ownership.
The accessible record never shows the step where the last third came across.
The Carson building stayed dark until October 1985.
Famous-Barr opened in it in October 1985 and took the existing two floors instead of putting up a new anchor.
Every replacement after that reused the building.
Sears took Ward's box and kept the deed
Montgomery Ward closed at Northwoods in 1997.
Sears moved in the following year, out of downtown Peoria and into the Ward building, and traded there for 21 years.
Its auto center sat on a pad of its own out toward Sterling Avenue, the way Ward's had.
Sears closed the department store on February 16, 2020. The doors have been shut for six years.
Washington Prime's 2020 redevelopment material identified that box as owned by Sears rather than by the mall.
On its own, the landlord couldn't lease it, divide it, or clear it.
One of the three original anchor buildings had passed out of the mall's control while still standing at the mall's west end.
There is no verified permanent reuse for it now.
Buying the Macy's building to split it
Famous-Barr became Macy's in 2006, when Federated converted the May Department Stores nameplates.
Macy's announced the Northwoods closure on January 6, 2016 and shut the store that March.
Washington Prime bought the building in January 2017. It had to own the box before it could change it.
Then it cut the store in half by floor, with the redevelopment budget settling at $18.5 million.
Round1 opened 56,000 square feet on the lower level in November 2017, with bowling, arcade games, food, and a bar.
The RoomPlace opened 62,500 square feet of furniture upstairs in May 2018. One department store, two tenants, two kinds of customers.
Neither lasted six years. Round1 closed on May 21, 2023.
The RoomPlace announced its Peoria closure in February 2024, began liquidating in April, and left the upper floor empty.
The lower level came back.
Tilted 10 opened there on October 8, 2024, 17 months after Round1 closed, with 14 bowling lanes, two miniature-golf courses, bumper cars, and more than 100 arcade and redemption games.
The upper floor is still on Summit's vacancy list.
The parcels at the edge finally moved
The two service buildings on the rim of the site finally turned over.
Discount Tire bought the old Sears Auto Center and had it under renovation by June 2024.
It now runs six service bays there at 4400 N. Sterling Avenue.
That building had never been part of the enclosed mall, so nothing about the mall's leasing had to be settled first.
The Firestone parcel nearby sold in late 2024 for $1 million, to two limited-liability companies buying from Washington Prime's management arm.
The old building came down in March 2025.
A Raising Cane's went up on the cleared ground and opened December 9, 2025, serving customers roughly a year after the parcel changed hands.
Northwoods Mall in August 2026
Summit Properties USA runs Northwoods now. It owns 360,400 square feet of a 669,400-square-foot center, a little more than half.
The rest belongs to other people, and the Sears building is part of the rest.
Peoria has been working the boundary problem from its own side.
The City Council approved a Northwoods Mall tax increment financing district on February 10, 2026, covering the mall and the commercial land around it, including Westlake Shopping Center.
City staff had counted 13 vacant parcels inside the proposed area. Nobody spoke at the public hearing the previous November.
On August 19, 2026 the city held a meeting about extending the district south along Sterling Avenue toward Newman Parkway and the old Kroger center, and that expansion is still a proposal.
The district lets the city capture growth in property-tax revenue for eligible redevelopment costs. It doesn't approve construction.
As of late August there was no site plan, no unit count, no demolition schedule, and no named developer.
So the pieces move at their own speeds. JCPenney unlocks its doors at 11 a.m. most weekdays in the building it has held since January 1974.
Tilted 10 runs until midnight on Friday and Saturday, one floor below an empty furniture showroom.
Shoppers park in 3,276 spaces around a mall with one department store still trading and one shut since February 2020.
Summit can market the empty floor above Tilted 10. It can't market the Sears building.
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