Randhurst Village is a regional open-air, mixed-use shopping center in Mount Prospect, Illinois, within the northwest suburbs of Chicago in Cook County.
The 94-acre property carries about 931,800 square feet of retail, dining, office, and hotel space. The center sits at the junction of Rand Road, U.S. Route 12, and Elmhurst Road, Illinois Route 83.
The name Randhurst comes from combining those two arteries, which together feed traffic from across the northwest suburbs.
Randhurst Village works as a primary retail, dining, and entertainment hub for Mount Prospect, Arlington Heights, Des Plaines, Prospect Heights, Palatine, and Park Ridge.
Anchors include Macy's, Costco, AMC Theatres, Home Depot, and Jewel-Osco. Opened on August 16, 1962, Randhurst was the Chicago area's first enclosed regional mall.
Rebuilt as an open-air center in 2011, it competes with Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg.
Randhurst Mall in Mount Prospect: From Farmland to Regional Mall
In the mid-1950s, the last farm parcels in that part of Mount Prospect were still in place. Fence lines marked where corn had once grown along Rand Road.
By 1955, the village board had started changing the zoning map. Mount Prospect annexed land and updated utility plans.
In 1955, Marshall Field's began construction on Old Orchard in Skokie. Around the same time, Carson Pirie Scott moved to establish a presence in the northwest suburbs and secured an 80-acre site at Rand and Elmhurst.
Market studies estimated 300,000 people in the shopping area, with another 100,000 expected by 1965.
The name "Randhurst" came from combining Rand and Elmhurst into one word. In 1959, Carson's partnered with Wieboldt's and Montgomery Ward to form the Randhurst Corporation.
Montgomery Ward operated through its subsidiary, The Fair, rather than using its own name.
Village records from November 1960 note "preliminary ground preparation" at the site. The project had a budget of about $21 million.
Plans included around 90 stores, 7,500 parking spaces, and a fallout shelter large enough to hold all of Mount Prospect's residents.
Victor Gruen's Triangle Design and the 1962 Opening
In 1962, most shopping malls followed a simple barbell layout, with one department store at each end and a row of shops between them.
Victor Gruen designed Randhurst differently, using an equilateral triangle. Each corner held a major anchor store.
Shops lined the three sides on two levels, with a mezzanine and a lower "bazaar" level set half a flight down.
Offices occupied a full floor above. Beneath the complex, about half a mile of service road allowed deliveries to move out of public view.
At the center of the triangle was the Galleria. A 200-ton dome covered a four-level open space.
Clerestory windows with colored panels cast tinted light across the floor.
Artist Harold Kerr of Palatine created a sculpture for the space, and Vern H. Walt added more. The artwork inside the mall was valued at close to $100,000.
Randhurst opened on Thursday, August 16, 1962. There were six ribbon-cutting ceremonies at the arcade entrances.
A parade moved through the site, and 10,000 balloons were released. About 100,000 people attended on opening day.
The following Sunday, even while the mall was closed, people drove over just to see it through the glass.
Each of the three anchor stores had two floors above ground and a full basement. Carson Pirie Scott's entrances featured turquoise accents, with colored lighting along the building's exterior.
Inside the mall were stores such as Baskins, Charles A. Stevens, Jewel, S.S. Kresge, and Woolworth's.
More than one million shoppers visited during the first month.
Woodfield Opens, and Randhurst Starts to Slip
Woodfield Mall opened in Schaumburg in 1971. By October of that year, sales at Randhurst had dropped 15 percent across the board.
The mall tried to push back. Montgomery Ward expanded. Jewel moved outward to the northeast edge of the property.
An ice hockey arena went in. The Fair store had already taken the Montgomery Ward name in 1963, and a Ward auto service center operated at the mall's perimeter.
The Rouse Company bought Randhurst in 1981. Rouse converted the upper sub-level of offices into a food court in 1984, one of the first in the Chicago area.
A full conventional second floor was built out by 1990. The bazaar level was reworked to be easier to reach.
Rouse stripped the outer coating off the dome's structural steel and added a glass elevator to play up the interior.
The food court opened as "The Picnic" on October 4, 1984. A grand reopening on November 17, 1989, showed off a new upper-level center court.
Wieboldt's went bankrupt in 1986. Bergner's took the space. Joseph Spiess Company put up a 61,000-square-foot minor anchor next door.
MainStreet built another minor anchor near Montgomery Ward, just before Kohl's bought that chain.
The Carson's Shuffle and the 1990s Peak
Spiess expanded too fast into a market that was shrinking. The Randhurst store closed on January 31, 1992.
Bergner's had bought Carson Pirie Scott in 1989 and closed the Randhurst Bergner's store in 1990. Carson's then moved into the larger former Wieboldt's building.
JCPenney slid into the old Carson's spot.
Wickes Furniture took the vacant Spiess box for a short run. Circuit City and Old Navy split the space in 1995. Filene's Basement moved into most of the bazaar level.
Three major anchors, four minor anchors, and 1.4 million square feet of retail: this was Randhurst at its fullest.
Home Depot opened at the perimeter in 1995. Jewel-Osco was rebuilt at the northeast edge of the property in 1996. A Borders opened in June 1999 along the mall's outer edge.
Foot traffic kept dropping. Stores kept leaving. Filene's Basement shut its Randhurst location in 1999, along with three other Chicago-area stores.
Anchor Collapse in the Early 2000s
Deer Park Town Center opened up north in 2000 as one of the Chicago area's first lifestyle centers, pulling shoppers toward open-air formats.
JCPenney labeled its Randhurst store an underperformer and closed it in 2001. Montgomery Ward rebranded as Wards in 2000 in a last attempt to save the chain, then liquidated months later.
Kohl's moved in 2003 to a former Venture and Big Kmart site at Elmhurst and Dempster on the south end of town. By August 2003, the mall had been "significantly underutilized" for at least four years.
In 2004, the former JCPenney and Kohl's boxes came down for a roughly 151,000-square-foot Costco with no door into the mall itself.
Part of the old Montgomery Ward space was torn down to create a promenade entrance.
No upscale retailers ever signed on for the new wing. Applebee's relocated from inside the mall to an outdoor-only spot on the promenade.
A Buffalo Wild Wings went up on an outlot near Carson's and Jewel-Osco.
Circuit City closed in early 2005. Old Navy left for Arlington Heights. Bed Bath & Beyond took the Circuit City space. Steve & Barry's moved into the former Applebee's and Old Navy footprints in 2004 and 2005.
The Dome Comes Down in 2009
Casto Lifestyle Properties bought a 50 percent share in 2007 with a plan to replace the enclosed mall with an open-air Main Street layout.
Mount Prospect's board approved the redevelopment agreement on August 19, 2008.
The planned unit development allowed demolition of the enclosed core, a hotel, a fitness club, parking structures, gaming rooms, and possible residential use in a defined section.
Randhurst's final shopping day was Tuesday, September 30, 2008. Only two stores were still open inside: Fashion Plus and Your Choice Gifts. Both were ordered out by 9:00 pm.
Demolition started with the mall offices near Carson Pirie Scott, so a new loading ramp could go in for the department store.
Crews gutted the interior to handle asbestos insulation. By summer 2009, the core was coming apart in full view.
On August 28, 2009, the 64-foot signature dome was pulled down. The expected 1962 time capsule was not found.
The surviving anchors stayed standing through the work. The full redevelopment was valued at $190 million.
Randhurst Village Reopens in Stages
Bon-Ton remodeled the Carson Pirie Scott anchor starting in May 2009 and finished in November 2010.
A new 12-screen AMC theater replaced the old Randhurst 16 outparcel cinema, with soft openings starting April 18, 2011, and a public grand opening on April 29, 2011.
The old theater closed after.
A 120-room Hampton Inn & Suites opened in 2012. The 1962 fallout shelter was converted into underground parking for hotel guests.
T.J. Maxx arrived that year. Old Navy came back. The Sports Authority took the Steve & Barry's box.
PetSmart, World Market, Tony Sacco's Coal Oven Pizza, Subway, and Verizon all opened in 2012. Tony Sacco's closed in 2014. Smokey Bones closed in 2019.
BlackFinn Ameripub, The Children's Place, Charming Charlie, and Panera followed. Chef Rodelio Aglibot opened E+O Food and Drink in early 2013.
It closed in 2019. A new time capsule was planted in 2011, containing material from the rebuilt center.
Sports Authority filed for Chapter 11 in 2016 and closed. Michael's took the second half of that box in 2017. DSW took the first half in 2019.
DLC Management Takes Over, and Carson's Closes
JPMorgan Chase put the 1-million-square-foot center up for sale in 2014 after 22 years of ownership.
New York-based DLC Management closed the deal in 2015 on roughly 94 acres for about $100 million. It was the largest asset in DLC's portfolio at the time.
Bon-Ton announced the liquidation of all its stores on April 18, 2018.
Carson's at Randhurst, a tenant going back to 1962, closed for good on August 29, 2018, nearly ten years after the indoor mall shut down. The vacancy was enormous.
Bed Bath & Beyond announced in January 2020 that its Randhurst store would close, along with about 40 others across the U.S. Village officials worried less about that single box than about how hard it had become to refill large-format retail space at all.
HomeGoods opened in a corner of the former Carson's in March 2022. Bath & Body Works returned in January 2024. Planet Fitness opened inside the former World Market in September 2024.
DLC subdivided the property into 16 lots in 2021 to sell off a limited number of parcels and pump capital back into the center.
Macy's Opens Inside the Old Carson's
Bon-Ton closed in August 2018, and left behind a hole that DLC spent the next six years trying to fill.
HomeGoods grabbed a corner of the building in March 2022. The rest sat dark.
A Macy's opened there in November 2024. 37,600 square feet, small-format, tucked into what Bon-Ton had left behind. Planet Fitness took the old World Market box in November.
Hong Dae Korean Bar & Grill, Meat Moot, Altea Vietnamese Coffee & Boba, and Waxing the City all signed leases.
Bath & Body Works came back in January. More than 100,000 square feet of new leases were signed across the property that year.
Time Mission, an interactive entertainment venue, opened in December 2025. The Randhurst Village website lists Skechers as opening sometime in 2026.
Newmark was hired to handle the sale of the property starting in October 2025.
The 94-acre, 931,800-square-foot property was priced at around $100 million, leased at 92 percent once the leftover Carson's space was stripped from the count.
Mount Prospect's comprehensive plan calls for the site to become a walkable mixed-use entertainment district, with residential development and a parking redesign attached to that vision.
