Every Anchor College Mall Opened With Is Gone, but the Bloomington, IN Mall Is Still Busy

College Mall is the enclosed shopping center at 2894 E. Third Street on Bloomington's east side, a few minutes from the Indiana University campus.

Melvin Simon & Associates opened it in 1965 with Sears, Wasson's and a Danner's 5 & 10.

For 16 years it was the upstart. Then, in one year, it won. JCPenney left downtown Bloomington for a 130,000-square-foot mall store in April 1981.

William H. Block moved into Wasson's old mall store that August, after giving up its College Shop at Indiana and Kirkwood. L. S. Ayres built a two-level store in 1982.

Every one of those buildings is now gone or empty. JCPenney's was demolished for Target, which opened in 2004.

Block's, by then Lazarus, was demolished for Dick's Sporting Goods.

Sears came down in 2016 for an outdoor strip called The Boulevard and a grocery store that Whole Foods never opened.

Ayres, by then Macy's, closed in 2021 and is still closed.

Sixty years of history here is one long habit of knocking down what the mall had just finished filling.

College Mall opened in 1965. By 1966 it had 33 stores

Sears opened first.

In March 1965 a 95,000-square-foot store started selling on the far east edge of Bloomington, Indiana, at 2894 E. Third Street, inside a new enclosed mall that was only beginning to fill.

That order matters. A 1960s mall ran on anchors: big department stores that got cheap terms because they brought the crowd everyone else lived off.

Sign the anchors and the small shops sign themselves.

H. P. Wasson & Company, an Indianapolis department-store chain, opened its 35,000-square-foot store that August, and Danner's 5 & 10 took 18,000 square feet.

The whole building ran 250,000 square feet, one level, and by 1966 it held 33 shops.

Melvin Simon & Associates built it.

The firm had been putting up Indiana shopping centers since 1960, including Southgate Plaza across town, and this was one of the first fully enclosed malls it developed.

Bloomington still shopped downtown, where William H. Block and JCPenney had operated for years and Indiana University kept the sidewalks busy.

The mall's pitch was free parking, no weather. For its first few years, downtown still held on.

The cinema that opened with "Oliver!"

Four years in, the mall added 63,000 square feet, and part of it wasn't retail at all.

General Cinema opened the College Mall Cinema on November 21, 1969, two screens showing "Oliver!"

and "The Gypsy Moths." MCL Cafeteria arrived around the same time and stayed 35 years.

L. S. Ayres arrived too, though not with a department store.

It opened a Sycamore Shop, the chain's small format. Ayres stayed small in Bloomington for 13 years.

Wasson's used the expansion to grow from 35,000 to 59,000 square feet, and Danner's gave up its space.

The theater grew to four screens by the early 1980s, went to Kerasotes in 1988 and was showing discount tickets by 2000.

William H. Block hedged. In 1972 the chain opened a small store inside the mall while keeping its College Shop downtown at Indiana and Kirkwood.

For nine years it paid rent in both places.

How downtown lost its department stores

At the end of the 1970s Simon went east again, and the addition was bigger than the original mall: 360,000 square feet, taking the property to 750,000.

Wasson's didn't make it that far.

Goldblatt's had bought the chain in 1967, was losing money by 1980 and put the Bloomington store on the closing list that September.

It shut in January 1981, while crews were building a few hundred feet away.

Then downtown emptied out in a single year. JCPenney opened a 130,000-square-foot store at the mall in April 1981 and closed its downtown location.

Block remodeled the old Wasson's box into a full 60,000-square-foot department store, opened in August 1981, and gave up the College Shop for good.

L. S. Ayres finished the set in August 1982 with a two-level, 80,000-square-foot store.

Four anchors: Sears, JCPenney, Block and Ayres. If you wanted a winter coat or a mattress in Monroe County, you drove to East Third Street.

The last change of the decade was only a sign, when Federated bought Block's from its parent company and the store reopened as Lazarus in the fall of 1987.

New floors in 1996, empty anchors by 2003

That lineup held for 14 years while the floors wore out.

In 1996 the owner spent $4.2 million on new ceramic flooring, new ceilings and rebuilt entrances, then held a grand reopening on November 22 and 23.

The mall measured 689,000 square feet.

The company writing the checks had changed shape.

Simon went public in December 1993, merged with DeBartolo Realty in 1996 and took the Simon Property Group name back in 1998.

The mall was never sold to an outside buyer, so Simon stayed through every demolition that followed.

And the demolitions were coming.

In January 2001, JCPenney picked four underperforming Indiana stores to close, Bloomington among them, and the store shut on April 28 after 20 years.

Nobody took the building. The 130,000-square-foot, two-level box sat empty into 2003.

Lazarus went next, with its closing announced in January 2003 and the store gone by April.

Its building sat empty nearly two years. By the end of 2003 the mall had 705,800 square feet with 83.5 percent occupied.

Target moved in and the movie screens went dark

JCPenney's building came down and Target took the site.

Target was already in Bloomington, in an 86,000-square-foot store nearby that had opened as an Ayr-Way in 1969.

It moved into the mall itself: one level, 125,000 square feet, half again as big, with a pharmacy, one-hour photo, a bigger grocery and frozen section, a Pizza Hut and a Starbucks.

The grand reopening was March 2, 2004, and more than a third of the staff were IU students.

The 1969-70 additions disappeared in the same few weeks.

MCL Cafeteria left in March 2004 for Liberty Drive on the west side, and the cinema closed that April.

Their combined space reopened on April 6, 2005 as a 50,000-square-foot Dick's Sporting Goods.

The old Lazarus building was demolished and a TGI Friday's opened on the spot on November 14, 2005, freestanding, with no door into the mall.

Its customers parked, ate and drove home without passing a storefront. Red Robin took the building in 2016.

In September 2006, L. S. Ayres became Macy's, a corporate name change inside the same two-level building.

The Sears end came down for a grocery store

The last thing the mall built while Sears was open was a place to eat: a 12,000-square-foot food court at that end, seating for 376, filled by July 2008 with restaurants pulled in from around the building.

Six years later the Sears end itself was on the table.

Whole Foods Market was planned for the property in August 2014, and by February 2015 the plan named the site.

The city approved it unanimously that April, once a raised crossing was added so shoppers wouldn't cross drive-through lanes on foot.

Sears announced its closing on March 17, 2016, after 51 years.

Liquidation started March 25 and the store closed in June, the last original anchor to go.

Then the building came down and that whole side was rebuilt facing the wrong way, on purpose.

The Boulevard opened in stages in 2017 with Ulta and smaller shops fronting the parking lot, so people could shop there without entering the mall.

The new grocery building went up beside it and sat empty.

365 by Whole Foods missed its August 2017 opening, still had an unfinished interior that December and never opened at all.

Fresh Thyme took the space on August 9, 2018.

Macy's closed and took the east end with it

Bed Bath & Beyond closed one of its two Bloomington stores in 2020. Months later the bigger one went.

On January 5, 2021, Macy's put College Mall on a closure list.

The clearance sale began that month, the store closed in March, and the two-level building L. S. Ayres opened in 1982 was empty.

The rest of the mall was emptier too. At the end of 2015, 96 percent of the mall's shop space was leased.

At the end of 2022 it was 81.6 percent, and the property had shrunk from 636,600 square feet to 610,200 as pieces came down.

A closed anchor also changes how the rest of the wing works.

Nobody comes in that door, so nobody walks past the shops beside it, and stores at that end get thinner traffic than the ones near Target.

Simon kept spending anyway, signing fitness studios and local tenants into empty storefronts and paying for another round of work on the mall's shared spaces.

What College Mall is now

Dave & Buster's opened January 27, 2025 in the old Bed Bath & Beyond box at 731 S. College Mall Road: more than 25,000 square feet of restaurant, bar and arcade, and the company's third Indiana location.

A multimillion-dollar project had already redone the flooring, lighting and restrooms.

The leased share climbed back without a traditional department store in the building: 86 percent at the end of 2023, 89.8 percent in 2024, 94.9 percent at the end of 2025.

The mall totaled 577,500 square feet. That percentage covers mall-store space and excludes anchors, majors, freestanding stores and outlots.

What filled the space is more local than the anchor lineup the mall was signing in 1982.

Exotic Snack Guys, selling imported chips and drinks, was moving $1,500 to $2,000 a day by May 2025.

Things With Strings and More, an instrument shop and repair counter opened after Bloomington's Melody Music closed, held its grand opening that October.

The Arts Alliance Center sells local art out of a former Victoria's Secret.

My Sister's Closet, a nonprofit whose College Avenue lease was ending, had opened a bridal boutique by July 14, 2026 in a storefront the mall rented it cheap.

People still come, for reasons the 1965 building never planned for: a class at one of three fitness studios, an hour in the arcade, the activity center for older adults by the east entrance.

The two-level Macy's is closed, with no replacement announced.