Castleton Square Mall is an enclosed regional mall in northeast Indianapolis, Indiana, open since September 13, 1972.
It's the largest mall in the state, and it has been since the day it opened.
Its original anchor lineup was Sears, JCPenney, Lazarus, and Woolworth.
Woolworth closed in 1982 and Sears in 2018.
Lazarus turned into Macy's along the way.
Only JCPenney still hangs its own name over the door.
Kroger, Kohl's, Montgomery Ward, L.S. Ayres, Galyan's, and Borders all came and went, too.
The mall kept refilling.
Von Maur took the old Montgomery Ward, Dick's took Galyan's, and the demolished L.S. Ayres became an open-air wing with a 14-screen AMC.
Hobby Lobby has opened on the old 20-acre Sears parcel, and Primark is signed to follow.
A 2025 filing put the place at 99 percent leased.
The names on the doors have turned over for more than 50 years, and the building is still nearly full.
Here's how the largest mall in Indiana kept replacing itself.
A developer's plan to ring Indianapolis with malls
Edward J. DeBartolo had a method.
He opened Lafayette Square on the northwest side of Indianapolis in 1968, then set out to circle the city with two more enclosed malls.
Castleton Square was the second, drawn up for the northeast side of Indianapolis, Indiana, where Sears' research found the suburbs filling in with new customers.
The plans went public in January 1971.
DeBartolo's company partnered with Homart Development Company, the Sears subsidiary that built malls around new Sears stores.
Together, they laid out a Y-shaped enclosed center just outside Interstate 465, three department stores at the tips, parking for 7,050 cars.
It would open as the largest mall in Indiana, and it has held that title ever since.
The third anchor changed names before the doors opened
The first plan named three department stores: Sears, JCPenney, and Rike Kumler Co., a Dayton chain.
By late 1971 that third name was gone.
Federated Department Stores swapped in Lazarus, its Columbus-based banner, before a single shopper walked in.
Around the anchors went the rest of a 1970s mall.
The anchors sat at the tips, with a Kroger supermarket, an F.W. Woolworth variety store, and a three-screen General Cinema filling the everyday slots between them, plus inline shops like Robert Hall Clothes, Hickory Farms, Kinney Shoes, Zales, Waldenbooks, and Orange Julius.
Standard issue for the decade, built at full size.
Castleton Square's opening day, 1972
Mayor Richard Lugar led the ribbon-cutting on September 13, 1972.
Inside, the center court held a fountain 20 feet wide under chandeliers.
The concourses ran past 22 planters of live tropical plants, 102 circular benches, skylights, and terrazzo floors.
For a building wrapped in asphalt, the inside felt carefully finished.
It opened in pieces. Sears had already opened in August.
By that first Christmas, before the rest of the anchors were even finished, 59 stores were running.
Sears first, then a year of anchors
The lineup filled in over 12 months. JCPenney opened in January 1973. Woolworth in March.
Lazarus came last, in August 1973, the chain's first store in Indiana, 311,900 square feet across three levels with a restaurant looking down on the center court.
Each anchor pulled a different shopper. Sears sold appliances, tools, apparel, and auto service.
JCPenney added a second national name. Lazarus carried the Federated brand into the state for the first time.
Woolworth handled variety goods, and Kroger handled groceries, the two daily errand draws that later mostly disappeared from enclosed malls.
The grocery went, then the variety store
The everyday names left early.
Kroger moved out in 1979 for a bigger store farther down 82nd Street, and its space got chopped up for more shops.
Woolworth held on until April 1982, then closed because it wasn't making money.
That holiday season, local car dealers parked inventory in the empty Woolworth and ran it as a showroom.
In 1983, Kohl's used the same space to enter the Indianapolis market for the first time.
The mall reworked itself the same year: new planters, new benches, new lighting, taller ceilings in the department stores, and a performance stage where the center-court fountain had been.
Six anchors by 1990
For one stretch, Castleton Square ran six department stores at once.
L.S. Ayres opened a 150,000-square-foot prototype on the south side in August 1990, aimed at shoppers coming in from Anderson and Muncie, and it skipped furniture on purpose because the Castleton strip was already thick with furniture stores.
Montgomery Ward followed late that year with a 108,000-square-foot store off the JCPenney wing, its first purpose-built mall location in the city.
The pull spilled outside the walls.
Best Buy opened next door on October 30, 1992, a national box that opened beside the mall, where big-box retailers increasingly preferred to be.
When Montgomery Ward went bankrupt
The crowded anchor list thinned fast at the end of the decade.
Kohl's left in early 1997 for a larger store out in Geist.
Montgomery Ward filed for bankruptcy in 1997, then announced it would close its Castleton Square store.
Simon wanted Lord & Taylor in the empty Ward box.
Von Maur got it instead, buying the space and opening in June 1998.
Simon tore down the old Kohl's and built a new wing in its place, anchored by Galyan's and a food court.
The food court opened by the end of 1998 with 15 restaurants, a fountain, a children's play area, and garden decor.
A first-of-its-kind Galyan's becomes Dick's
Galyan's opened in that 1998 wing as the company's first store inside a mall, nearly twice the size of its other Indianapolis stores.
It grew again in 2003, adding 20,000 square feet across both floors.
A year later Dick's Sporting Goods bought Galyan's, converted the Castleton Square store to its own name, and closed a nearby Dick's that no longer made sense.
How Macy's absorbed Lazarus and Ayres
The 2000s erased two anchor names through one corporate chain reaction.
Federated turned Lazarus into Lazarus-Macy's in 2003, then plain Macy's.
In 2005 it bought May Department Stores, the parent of L.S. Ayres.
Where a single mall held both a former Lazarus flying the Macy's flag and an L.S. Ayres, only one survived.
Castleton Square lost Ayres in mid-2006.
Tearing down a department store for an open-air wing
The empty Ayres was demolished.
In its place, in 2007, came an open-air lifestyle wing, the first section that acted more like an outdoor street than an enclosed corridor.
It opened with Borders Books & Music, a 14-screen AMC, H&M, Johnny Rockets, Stir Crazy, and Cold Stone Creamery.
Borders closed in 2011.
Forever 21 took over the bookstore in 2012 and expanded it to 25,500 square feet, while H&M grew by 4,300 square feet next door.
The losses kept getting backfilled.
The original anchor with its own 20 acres
Sears was the last original anchor to leave, aside from JCPenney, and in 2018 it went.
Woolworth had gone in 1982, Lazarus had turned into Macy's, and JCPenney was still running.
Sears Holdings first put the Castleton Square store and its 20-acre parcel up for online auction in April.
By May 31 the same store was on a list of 63 Sears and Kmart locations marked to close.
Liquidation started in June, and the store closed that year.
It was the last full-line Sears in Indianapolis.
The complication was ownership.
Sears held its own 20-acre parcel, separate from the mall, so the two-level box of 217,300 square feet became a separate problem the mall's owner couldn't simply lease out.
Evacuations, a burst main, and a lockdown
On May 28, 2010, a water main break near Borders shut part of the property; 110 of 130 stores reopened by late morning, while the lifestyle area stayed dark for cleanup.
During the 2020 reopening, half the mall ran under safety rules while Macy's, JCPenney, Victoria's Secret, and Gap stayed closed, and the food court seating sat empty.
The harder stretch was a run of incidents involving firearms.
Police and local reports described a June 2020 shooting inside the mall in which a 23-year-old man did not survive, followed by another shooting in July 2021.
More followed: a January 2023 parking-lot shooting that court documents described as starting after two people walked up to a look-alike car, and in which a 16-year-old did not survive.
Shooting inside the mall that February put the mall into lockdown, and shots were fired inside during holiday shopping on December 23, 2024, forcing an evacuation.
A police substation is now part of how the place runs.
What the old Sears holds now
For years the empty Sears was the mall's biggest open question, all 20 acres of it sitting between Interstate 69 and Interstate 465, where a combined 300,000 vehicles pass every day.
The categories floated for reuse ran from retail to housing to a hotel, but the separate ownership made everything harder.
The answer arrived in pieces. Primark signed for the same building in 2024.
Hobby Lobby opened inside the former Sears in 2025.
By 2026, Primark was listed as "Coming Soon." One department store became two large-format tenants, with as much as 49,900 square feet in the box still on the market.
Castleton Square today
Castleton Square is still open and is still the largest shopping center in Indiana, with more than 130 specialty stores.
Macy's holds the old Lazarus building, three floors of it.
Von Maur sits where Montgomery Ward did.
Dick's runs the former Galyan's by the food court, which still anchors the north side between them.
JCPenney has been open since 1973.
One lap around every concourse comes to a mile.
By early 2025, the mall had been refreshed again, and a 2025 filing put the property at 99 percent leased, unusual for an enclosed mall of its age.
The draw still reaches up into Carmel, Fishers, and Noblesville, people coming in for a movie at the AMC, a Chick-fil-A in the food court, a stop at H&M, or the new Hobby Lobby in the building Sears left behind.
