Quincy Town Center sits on the north side of Broadway in Quincy, Illinois, an enclosed shopping center whose own street address still uses Quincy Mall. It has three anchors in its directory. One of them is a medical group.
The mall opened in 1978 with Bergner's and Sears, and JCPenney came over four years later. All three of them closed within a little more than three years, the last two in August 2018.
Quincy Medical Group took the empty Bergner's building, so the floor where the store sold clothes is a cancer institute now, and the surgery center is upstairs.
Stores kept leaving after that. The concourse holds a police substation, a pet adoption center, an art gallery, and a study hall these days, along with food spots and a cinema.
The open-air strip on Legion Boulevard
In 1958, S.S. Kresge, W.T. Grant, National Supermarkets, Kroger, and Shoppers Fair opened in a new outdoor shopping center on Legion Boulevard, far beyond Quincy's downtown retail core.
The Don M. Casto Organization of Columbus developed land acquired from the local American Legion and gave the center the long name American Legion Miracle Mile Town and Country Shopping Center.
The Kresge at 3227-43 Legion Boulevard had 41 people on the payroll in 1963.
Kirlin's opened its first shopping-center store there in 1960, and in February 1975 Jo-Ann Fabrics moved into a closed Del Farm grocery in the same complex.
By the late 1970s, the center was reaching the end of its original lease cycle, and Casto considered building a new mall about 1.5 miles farther along Broadway at 48th Street.
The older center had already shortened its name to Town & Country Shopping Center and added Dickinson Theatres' freestanding twin-screen cinema in 1968.
The council said no to 48th Street
A 48th Street mall was still in play when Bergner's was deciding where to put its Quincy store.
The other choice was the 20-year-old Town & Country property at 33rd and Broadway, where Casto already had a shopping center dating to 1958.
The Quincy City Council denied zoning for the 48th Street proposal, and Bergner's concentrated on 33rd instead.
Bergner's had reason to be looking east of downtown.
A 1978 market study found that about 30 percent of Quincy women were leaving the area to shop, primarily for St. Louis.
JCPenney and Carson Pirie Scott were still downtown, where off-street parking existed but was limited for another large department store.
Bergner's joined the 33rd Street project, and Town & Country was enclosed and remade as Quincy Mall.
Quincy Mall opened enclosed in 1978
The rebuild put a roof over the whole thing.
Quincy Mall opened on November 14, 1978, with Bergner's and Sears at the ends and about 80 storefronts between them, on a site that had opened 20 years earlier with five chain names on it.
The conversion started with Jo-Ann's space in September 1978, and the store remained at 425 N. 32nd Street.
The cinema was folded into the enclosed mall on a new lease, and in July 1979 Dickinson added a third auditorium to it.
Then downtown lost JCPenney. The chain had been at 6th and Maine, and in 1982 it closed that store and opened a new one at Quincy Mall.
Kirlin's had already made the shorter version of the same move, out of the open-air center and into the enclosed one.
By 1982 the mall had three department stores, and one of them had come straight out of downtown.
Three anchors and a sales-tax rebate
For the next three decades the mall carried the roster a regional mall was supposed to carry.
Waldenbooks, Kirlin's, Spencer Gifts, Maurices, Buckle, and Bath & Body Works took inline space, Petco occupied space on the mall property, Aladdin's Castle ran the arcade, and the three-screen theater sat at one end.
In 2006 Casto sold the mall to Cullinan Properties, and the city started putting money back into it.
Under an agreement that began that year, half a percent of the municipal sales tax generated by mall retailers was rebated to the owner for property improvements.
A 2017 amendment raised the rebate to 75 percent of the city's 1 percent municipal sales tax, and in fiscal 2019 that came to $322,000 of city revenue given up.
By then, all three department stores had closed.
Three department stores in three years
JCPenney closed at Quincy Mall on April 4, 2015, after 33 years in the building.
Krieger's had been dark since 2013, and TGI Friday's also closed in 2015. The JCPenney box then stood empty for more than two years.
In 2017, Cullinan committed more than $4 million to mall improvements, including new signs and interior work.
That fall, Slumberland opened in part of the former JCPenney space as the mall's first furniture anchor.
The other two went within three weeks of each other. Sears announced its Quincy closure in May 2018 and shut the store on August 11.
Bergner's, which had been there since the mall opened in 1978, closed in late August while its parent company liquidated.
That left about 105,000 square feet on two floors empty at one end of the mall, and no retailer came for it.
A cancer institute inside Bergner's
Two months after Bergner's closed, Quincy Medical Group applied to put a surgery center inside the empty store and announced plans for a cancer institute there too.
Blessing Hospital opposed the application at a public hearing in January 2019.
In March the state review board issued an intent to deny on a 3-2 vote, QMG came back with more information, and on April 30, 2019 the board approved the project 5-2.
Construction started that summer.
The cancer institute opened on the old first floor in March 2020, with infusion space for as many as 25 patients at a time.
The completed facility had a linear accelerator suite, and radiation oncology was added that July. The surgery center opened above it in 2021.
More than 70,000 square feet of a two-level department store had become medical space, with new canopies at the entrances, a new elevator, and reworked parking outside.
The Sears building took longer and went a different way.
A local developer bought it in 2020, aldermen put $250,000 of business-district money into the redevelopment in June 2024, and Dunham's Sports opened in the roughly 68,000-square-foot box that December with about 40 jobs.
The old Sears Auto Center at 420 N. 34th Street reopened as a Blessing Express Clinic.
Quincy Town Center as longtime stores moved out
Several chains that survived 2018 eventually left the mall, and many stayed in Quincy. Petco moved out to Prairie Trails Crossing in June 2022.
Bath & Body Works closed at the mall in September 2022, after nearly 25 years there, and moved east.
Spencer Gifts and Maurices went to Prairie Trails Crossing too.
Kirlin's closed on August 31, 2024, after 46 years in the mall and 64 on the property, and reopened at Prairie Trails Crossing near 63rd and Broadway.
Buckle was still on the mall directory in March 2025 and was open at Quincy Commons by March 2026.
The mall took the name Quincy Town Center in March 2021.
It's the enclosed shopping center on the north side of Broadway in Quincy, Illinois, around 32nd through 36th Streets, open since 1958 and enclosed as Quincy Mall since 1978.
Its anchors now are Quincy Medical Group, Slumberland, and VIP Cinemas, with Dunham's next door under a separate owner.
The concourse also has offices, services, and public uses.
There's a police substation, a pet adoption center, an art gallery, a study hall, a bank branch, and a USDA office, along with McDonald's, Starbucks, Qdoba, Zales, and Merle Norman.
The Pepsi Play Area is at the east end by the cinema, the library keeps a book drop inside, and the buses still stop outside.
The doors open at 10 six days a week and at noon on Sunday.
A QMG birth center with three birthing rooms opened by May 2026, in the building where Bergner's sold clothes for 40 years.
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