Village Mall in Danville, IL Outlived Target, JCPenney, Sears, and Carson's, and It's Still Open

Village Mall is the enclosed shopping center at 2917 North Vermilion Street in Danville, Illinois, just north of the Interstate 74 exit.

It opened on April 30, 1975 with 19 stores, a fountain in the middle of the concourse and 1,500 free parking spaces. Fifty-one years later, the enclosed part of it changed hands at an online auction.

That February 2026 sale stretched 16 minutes past its deadline, with the bid rising from $900,000 the day before to $1.25 million.

It was the second auction in under two years. The 2024 one had cut the property into three separate parcels, and the city of Danville bid and lost.

The building has outlived Ayr-Way, Target, JCPenney, Sears, Elder-Beerman, Carson's, Burlington, Steve & Barry's, Hobby Lobby, a six-screen theater and a grocery store that had been on that corner since 1973.

Ross and Pet Supplies Plus were still operating when County Market's temporary closure went permanent. Here's how one mall got taken apart piece by piece without ever closing for good.

Village Mall started with Ayr-Way in 1972

Before any of it, the corner held a grocery called Liberty Market, the old Liberty School, two houses and a drive-in, spread across 35 acres on North Vermilion Street just north of Interstate 74.

Ayr-Way opened there in 1972, the discount arm of L. S. Ayres out of Indianapolis. National Foods opened next to it in 1973.

So the site was already selling groceries and cheap sneakers before shoppers ever stepped into an enclosed concourse.

Village Mall is the enclosed shopping center at 2917 North Vermilion Street in Danville, Illinois, and this is how it got assembled: in pieces, one building at a time.

On September 14, 1973, SES Development Company of Danville laid out the rest of it. An enclosed concourse. Twenty-five smaller shops. A theater and a restaurant.

A 50,000-square-foot department store at the south end. Gene Stunkel ran SES. The anchor went to L. Meis of Terre Haute, a separate company from the Meis Bros. store Danville had known downtown.

Downtown already had a shopping center, Park-Mall. This one had climate control, an exit off the interstate, and a parking lot you didn't have to feed.

Opening day, April 30, 1975

Village Mall opened with 19 stores and more than 500 people working in it.

Builders used more than 500,000 bricks. Inside were dark brick walls, red-oak benches, skylights, and a fountain near the middle of the concourse.

Students from Liberty School supplied artwork for the spaces that weren't finished yet.

Hickory Farms sold 126 kinds of cheese under wagon-wheel lights. Dipper Dan had 40 flavors.

Tiffany's Bakery, a Toronto chain, sold cinnamon bread under Tiffany-style lamps. The Fly, a division of Kirlin's, stocked more than 5,000 pairs of pants.

The Sire Shop lined its walls with lumber pulled off old barns. Hillman's had the Hummel figurines; Kirlin's Hallmark had Holly Hobbie and Snoopy.

Ayr-Way ran about 70 departments and a snack bar called the Hungry Hut, lunch special daily.

Jolly Jester was the arcade. Big Sound Company sold stereo gear and car audio across two sales levels.

At Record Rack, the upstairs tape display ran on a conveyor that carried your 8-track down to the register. A glass blower had a display.

The Kerasotes cinema, the chain's fourth in town, seated just under 300 and had a big first weekend.

And 1,500 free parking spaces, which mattered, because downtown meant a meter or a municipal lot.

Four anchors and a farm show indoors

In 1978 the Vermilion County Farm Bureau held its first Mall Show inside the concourse. Meat-cutting demonstrations.

Farm equipment parked on the tile. Live animals in a shopping mall. The common areas had become event space too.

The big names kept arriving. Dayton Hudson bought Ayr-Way in 1980 and turned the Danville store into a Target inside the same 1972 building.

JCPenney opened in a new addition in 1985. Elder-Beerman bought L. Meis in 1989 and the sign at the south end changed again.

Then Sears left downtown. In 1990 it moved to the west side of the mall with a full store and an auto center, helped along by a city incentive.

Downtown Danville lost one more anchor; North Vermilion Street took it.

By the early 1990s the property had four large stores doing four different jobs. Target for discount.

JCPenney and Elder-Beerman for department goods. Sears for appliances, tools and a place to get your car worked on.

National Foods still handled groceries, and the theater and the small shops brought people in on nights when nobody needed a washing machine.

Target leaves, and the vacancies start

Target closed in 1997 on weak sales, at a point when the chain's newer store formats were getting bigger.

The 1972 building sat empty until Hobby Lobby took it by 1999, the same year the mall got a renovation.

JCPenney closed in 2001. That emptied a second big box.

Ownership kept reshaping the building for whoever would sign. A mall wing was renovated for Goody's in 2004.

Steve & Barry's took the old JCPenney in 2006. County Market replaced National Foods and expanded the grocery floor.

Then 2008 took three at once. Goody's, Hobby Lobby and Steve & Barry's all closed that year. Goody's and Steve & Barry's were caught in bankruptcies; Hobby Lobby closed its Danville store.

Three of the largest spaces in the complex went empty inside 12 months, with the recession already underway.

Pet Supplies Plus opened in part of the old Hobby Lobby in 2009. The big-box side of the mall increasingly worked through exterior entrances.

Waldenbooks closed in January 2010. The food court lost its last restaurant that year, leaving the old eating area with nothing to buy.

A Dallas owner refills the building

By 2011 the mall belonged to LNR Partners, which was holding it as a distressed asset.

In May, Tabani Group of Dallas bought it: 480,750 square feet on 41 acres, 64 percent leased, and no mortgage attached.

Then, for a few years, the building filled back up.

An independent bookstore called A Novel Idea took the 3,200-square-foot space Waldenbooks had left.

Dunham's Sports opened October 21, 2011 in the unused half of the old Target and Hobby Lobby box, with hunting gear, fitness equipment and golf clubs.

Elder-Beerman became Carson's that same year, a new banner over the same 1975 anchor.

Ross Dress for Less took the Goody's wing in 2012. Burlington took the old JCPenney in 2013. Occupancy went from 64 percent to 78 percent in two years.

Something had changed underneath, though. Ross and Burlington were off-price chains in big boxes with their own doors to the parking lot.

They didn't need the concourse, and they didn't need each other.

Sears, Carson's, and the cinema go dark

Sears set the Danville store for closure in September 2014 and shut it by the end of the year, 24 years after it came up from downtown.

Jo-Ann opened in another part of the mall in 2015.

The old Sears began to fill the next May, when Slumberland Furniture moved into part of it after the city council approved a 10-year sales-tax incentive; Shoe Sensation took another piece.

AMC renamed the theater AMC Classic Village Mall 6 in 2017. Classic was AMC's value-minded label for smaller theaters: lower prices, fewer premium amenities.

Bon-Ton set Carson's for closure on January 31, 2018. Liquidation ran 10 to 12 weeks and the store closed in April, ending 43 years of department stores at the south end.

The cinema closed for the pandemic in March 2020, reopened that September, and closed permanently on December 11, 2022.

Burlington left at the end of February 2024, emptying the old JCPenney building for the third time.

By then the city and the owner were barely speaking.

Jump Off, a family entertainment business inside the mall and one of the few things left that a parent would drive a kid to, was made to leave before its lease ran out in May.

Danville offered to pay for a study of what the property could become. The owner said no.

What's still open at Village Mall in 2026

The auction was set for May 13, 2024, and the property went up in three pieces. The occupied strip with County Market, Ross, Dunham's and Pet Supplies Plus opened at $1.75 million with a reserve.

The enclosed interior, the part holding the empty Carson's, the empty Burlington, the dark theater and the food court, opened at $1. So did a parking lot on the southwest side.

The interior sold for around $500,000. The occupied strip drew a top bid of $3.75 million and still missed its reserve. Danville bid and lost.

By late July a California investor had taken the mall building and the occupied strip.

The new owner talked about a dine-in theater with reclining seats, an indoor amusement park on the scale of Malibu Jack's, a sit-down restaurant, Five Below, and Ollie's.

Leases for Five Below and a theater were reported close. Nothing opened. Jo-Ann closed on April 28, 2025, and the interior went back on the market that fall.

It sold again on February 11, 2026. Four bidders registered, two actually bid, and a 16-minute extension pushed the price from $900,000 to $1.25 million. Nobody has said who bought it.

Dunham's closed in January. In June, storms got through a roof that hail had already worked over in March, and water came into County Market.

The grocer wanted a commitment that the roof would be replaced, didn't get one in time, and made the closure permanent in July, ending 53 years of a supermarket on that corner going back to National Foods in 1973.

Plenty is still open. Ross and Pet Supplies Plus, straight in from the parking lot.

Slumberland, which just had its best sales year since it opened in 2016. Shoe Sensation, Hibbett, and Citi Trends still work.

People park at Village Mall and walk into a store every day, while 287,400 square feet of the place behind those stores waits on an owner nobody in Danville can name.