How Times Square Mall in Mount Vernon, IL, Kept Its Big Stores by Pointing Them at the Parking Lot

Times Square Mall sits at Broadway and 42nd Street on the west side of Mount Vernon, Illinois, and it has been open since 1974. It's the one with the Hobby Lobby.

It started as a small enclosed center: Mohr Value at one end, JCPenney in the middle, Mammoth at the other, and a Super Valu grocery past that. A single-screen theater followed in 1975.

Walmart replaced Mohr Value, then left for its own Supercenter. Sears took that space in 1998 and closed in 2013. JCPenney lasted 46 years. Then a $12 million makeover cut the Sears half into three stores.

Hobby Lobby, Ross and Big Lots, each with its own door onto the parking lot and no need for the corridor.

Ashley took the JCPenney building in 2022. Planet Fitness took part of the old Peebles. Ollie's replaced Big Lots on October 1, 2025.

All six big spaces are occupied in 2026, and the vacancies are the small storefronts inside. Every fix this building found pulled it further from being a mall.

How Times Square Mall opened in 1974

There was no single opening day.

On February 1, 1974, Mohr Value was already selling at the Times Square shopping center at Broadway and 42nd Street, in space that had carried the Carp's name.

A fabric store opened that September.

By October the stores at 42nd and Broadway were keeping 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. hours, and Mammoth, Kirlin's and the rest were trading through the November and December holidays.

The place came on in stages, and Mount Vernon just started shopping there.

The name came off the street signs.

42nd and Broadway, the same two names that cross in New York, meet here on the west edge of a southern Illinois town.

Broadway is Illinois Route 15, the main east-west road through Mount Vernon.

The junction of Interstates 57 and 64 sits minutes away, and St. Louis is 80 miles west.

Inside, the walk was simple.

Mohr Value at the west end, Mammoth at the east end, and a Super Valu grocery past Mammoth with no door into the mall at all.

JCPenney came to the middle later. Mammoth was a local department store, and in 1974 it was called the oldest business in the city.

The A&W counter and the mall theater

For a town this size, the corridor held a lot. Kirlin's for cards and gifts. Hancock Fabrics. B. Dalton Bookseller.

Hills Brothers Shoes, Byrd-Watson Drug, Mode O'Day, Fashion Bug. An A&W counter. A mall theater.

That combination did something the anchors couldn't do alone. The department stores brought people in to shop.

The grocery and the movies gave them reasons to come back, and the parking field out front caught drivers coming off the interstate and in from the small towns across southern Illinois.

It was a modest building compared with the regional malls in bigger cities.

But it put clothes, shoes, books, medicine, groceries and a movie screen on one west-side site at a time when much of Mount Vernon's shopping was still downtown.

The lineup started shifting almost immediately. Mohr Value didn't last the decade.

By the late 1970s Walmart had the west anchor, and it kept that space for two decades.

When Walmart left, Sears moved in

Then Walmart built its own store. In the 1990s the chain moved to a freestanding Supercenter on Davidson Avenue.

It stayed in Mount Vernon, and its shoppers stopped coming through the enclosed corridor to reach it.

Mammoth and the Super Valu were gone by the 1990s as well. JCPenney, added in 1976, was the only old anchor left.

The west end got rebuilt in 1998 and Sears moved into the old Walmart space.

Two department stores again, one at each end, the way the building was designed to work. Another construction project followed in 2000.

The problem was that west Broadway kept growing around it. Lowe's, Kohl's, Kroger and Rural King opened as freestanding stores.

Restaurants and strip centers filled in the ground between the mall and the interstate.

Times Square Mall had helped pull Mount Vernon's retail west from downtown in the first place, and now a shopper could finish an entire day of errands on that corridor without walking inside the building.

A quarter of the mall sat empty

By then the mall had a public landlord.

Developers Diversified Realty took it into the portfolio in 1993 as one of the original properties behind the company's stock offering, and filed it under the category the firm used for its smaller centers: mini-mall.

The numbers from those years are not flattering. In 2003 the building measured 268,300 square feet and 76.9 percent of it was leased.

Nearly a quarter of the mall stood empty while Sears and JCPenney were both open and lit.

It improved for a while. Goody's took the east department-store space, and occupancy climbed to 82.2 percent at the end of 2005.

Base rent reached $1 million a year by 2008.

The names kept rotating. Dunham's Sports replaced Goody's among the anchors by 2011.

Peebles, another Stage Stores brand, took the department-store space by 2012.

Inside the corridor you could find GNC, Maurices, Claire's, Bath & Body Works, Glik's, Shoe Sensation and a Subway, with a Wendy's out on the lot.

By May 31, 2012, Developers Diversified had sold the 269,300-square-foot mall to a partnership of Pine Tree Commercial Realty, the Sansone Group and Wanxiang America Real Estate.

The $12 million turn away from the corridor

The new owners didn't wait. In August 2013 Hobby Lobby signed for 52,700 square feet in the Sears half of the building. That fall, Sears closed.

On November 22, 2013, there was a ceremony out front and the mayor sawed through a piece of wood. Construction was under way by January.

What followed cost $12 million and remade the west end. Crews gutted the old Sears and cut it into three stores.

Hobby Lobby took the largest piece. Ross Dress for Less took 22,000 square feet.

Big Lots took 32,000 square feet and opened on July 17, 2014, with a grand-opening event the following week. Rue21 joined the interior.

A 9,600-square-foot outbuilding came down and a four-tenant building went up in its place, along with new storefronts, signs, parking and landscaping.

Every one of those new stores got its own front door on the parking lot, with loading space at the back.

That kept them independent of the enclosed part of the property.

It also removed the reason a shopper had to walk the corridor to reach an anchor, and the small stores inside were the ones that felt it.

2020 took both department stores

The property sold again in February 2018, for $8.2 million: 263,500 square feet on 24 acres, 92 percent occupied, six large stores counted as anchors.

By March 2019 Namdar Realty Group held it, and the mall's website carried Namdar's name.

Peebles was converted to Gordmans that same year. The name lasted a little over a year.

Stage Stores filed for bankruptcy in May 2020 and moved into liquidation.

The Mount Vernon Gordmans ran its closing sale from June 4 to September 27 and never reopened.

JCPenney filed too, and Mount Vernon landed on the first list of 154 stores marked for closure. The company confirmed it on June 4, 2020.

That store had opened with the building in 1974 and traded for 46 years. It was the last piece of the original lineup still standing.

By the end of that year the west side of the property was full and pointed at the parking lot, while the two department-store boxes attached to the enclosed corridor were dark.

Furniture, treadmills and closeouts

The JCPenney box didn't sit long.

On May 16, 2022, the Mount Vernon City Council voted unanimously to return half of one percentage point of the sales tax generated on the site for five years, and Bruegge and Co., a local company, opened an Ashley furniture store in the old JCPenney.

The showroom is 45,000 square feet.

Planet Fitness opened around January 2023 in the old Peebles and Gordmans space, 19,200 square feet with its own numbered entrance.

A gym fills mornings and evenings, hours a department store never did much with. Then Big Lots.

The chain filed for bankruptcy in September 2024 and put hundreds of leases up for sale, including the Mount Vernon one in January 2025.

The store closed early that year. By April the building was empty and an Ollie's Bargain Outlet banner was already hanging on the front.

Ollie's opened on October 1, 2025, in the same 32,000 square feet, selling roughly the same kind of merchandise to roughly the same shoppers.

What Times Square Mall is now

In August 2026 the building is open, still enclosed, still measured at 263,500 square feet.

Six large stores are leased: Hobby Lobby, Ross Dress for Less, Dunham's Sports, Ashley, Planet Fitness and Ollie's.

Between them they hold most of the leasable space, and four of them face the parking lot.

The corridor is the thin part.

Shoe Sensation, Hibbett Sports and Bath & Body Works are still inside, along with MJ Pro Nails, Laced N Grace, Kay Lowery and The Picket Fence.

The empty units run from 1,000 to 4,900 square feet. Claire's, GNC, Glik's and rue21 are off the plan.

No demolition, closure or redevelopment plan has been announced.

The owner is still leasing it, and city crews replaced a water main out there in April 2024 for $18,000.

Some of the traffic now has nothing to do with shopping.

South Central Transit uses the mall as a stop and transfer point on its Washington, Lincoln and Reagan routes, so riders without a car change buses there for downtown and for towns outside the city.

Indoor flea markets and seasonal markets take over stretches of the corridor. Those are the parts of the building the department stores used to fill.