Eastland Mall Draws More Visitors Than Anywhere Else in Evansville, IN, With Tractors, Dentists and Three Department Stores

Eastland Mall is the enclosed mall at 800 North Green River Road on Evansville's East Side, open since August 1981. Most people here can picture the carousel next to the food court without being told where it sits.

It opened with JCPenney, Ben Snyder's and deJong's, and Lazarus made four department stores by August 1982.

Ben Snyder's became Hess's, closed in 1993 and was torn down. Famous-Barr built a new 180,000-square-foot store on the spot in 1996 and closed it 10 years later.

Dillard's took that building in March 2007. Lazarus became Macy's. deJong's got cut up into small shops. None of the three anchor buildings is empty today, which is unusual for a mall this old.

JCPenney has been open since the first day, straight through the chain's 2020 bankruptcy. Macerich has owned Eastland outright since the end of 2011.

One anchor position has carried four names since 1981. JCPenney has carried one.

Here's how the big boxes stayed full while the shops in between kept turning over.

Eastland Mall opens on Green River Road

Eastland Mall is an enclosed regional shopping mall at 800 North Green River Road in Evansville, Indiana, on the city's East Side, north of the Lloyd Expressway.

Work on the site dates to 1978. The doors opened in August 1981.

General Growth Properties built it, and built it big.

A single-level enclosed concourse, with wings running out to department stores that stood two floors tall.

No parking garage. Just a wide surface lot you crossed in whatever the weather was doing.

Three department stores opened with the mall. JCPenney, the national name.

Ben Snyder's, out of Louisville, familiar to anybody who shopped in Kentucky or southern Indiana. And deJong's, which was Evansville's own.

Lazarus came a year later, in August 1982.

The Columbus chain filled the fourth anchor position, and by then Eastland had four department stores under one roof.

It was sold as a regional destination rather than a neighborhood shopping center, in a city that already had an enclosed mall of its own.

What the new mall did to the old one

Green River Road was a shopping street before Eastland showed up. Lawndale Shopping Center came first.

Then Washington Square opened in 1963 as the first enclosed mall in Indiana, two miles south of where Eastland would go.

Being first stopped mattering in August 1981. Eastland was larger, it was newer, and it had more department stores.

Washington Square spent 1987 on an expansion and a remodel and never got its old position back.

It lost anchors and national tenants year after year, until Sears, the last one it had, closed in 2018.

Downtown Evansville lost shoppers across the same stretch of years.

What grew instead was the road.

Restaurants, hotels, big-box stores, car dealers and strip centers filled in along Green River Road and the Lloyd Expressway, and then the building kept pushing east toward Burkhardt Road, Cross Pointe and the Promenade.

Evansville is the shopping town for southwestern Indiana, northwestern Kentucky and southeastern Illinois.

After 1981, the middle of that market sat on the East Side.

The Louisville name that came down

The store that opened as Ben Snyder's in 1981 made it 12 years.

Hess's bought the chain in 1987.

The Evansville store changed its name in 1988, so people who had shopped Ben Snyder's since opening week were now walking into Hess's through the same entrance, in the same building.

Hess's then ran into money trouble of its own and shut the Eastland store in 1993.

That was the first empty anchor in the mall's history, and it stayed empty for three years.

May Department Stores took the site for its Famous-Barr division and kept half the building. Crews knocked the rest down.

What came out of the work was a two-level store of 180,000 square feet, and it opened in October 1996.

That is still the largest physical change ever made to the property.

The changes after it were smaller, and most happened inside walls that were already standing.

When the carousel showed up

The next change people actually noticed happened in the middle of the building.

In the late 1990s the food court was enlarged and an old-fashioned carousel went in beside it.

Mall management put its offices on the mezzanine above the tables.

The bigger food court became the gathering place for the whole mall.

The carousel became the thing everybody could describe without being asked, and it's still there in the same part of the building.

Ownership had changed just before the work started.

A partnership of Simon Property Group and Macerich bought Eastland in 1998, with Simon handling the day-to-day, and the common-area project followed.

The mall was now one property inside a portfolio spread across several states.

The eating kept spreading outdoors.

TGI Fridays opened on May 2, 2000, joining the sit-down restaurants that would end up ringing the parking field, the kind you can drive to without ever going through a mall door.

The department store names kept shifting

deJong's was the hometown store, and it's the one that never got replaced. After the company left, no other department store took the box.

By 2005 the space had been cut into smaller storefronts, which has since become a standard fix for an empty anchor.

Eastland did it three years before the 2008 recession sent a much bigger wave of retail failures through malls across the country.

At the other end of the building, a name changed without anybody moving out.

Federated Department Stores was folding its regional brands into one, so Lazarus became Lazarus-Macy's in 2003 and plain Macy's in early 2005.

Then Federated bought May Department Stores, and one company suddenly owned two full-size department stores inside the same Evansville mall.

One of them had to go, and it wasn't going to be Macy's. Famous-Barr closed on March 20, 2006, in a building that wasn't yet 10 years old.

Dillard's takes the empty box in 2007

The answer came fast.

Simon announced at the start of May 2006 that Dillard's would move into the Famous-Barr building, and agreed to buy the building from Federated as part of a seven-property deal it expected to close that July.

Dillard's had never operated a store in Evansville before.

The remodel ran the rest of that year and into the next.

New finishes, new fixtures, new signs and new departments, all of it going into a building barely a decade old, and all of it spread over two floors.

Contemporary notices put the grand opening on or around March 14, 2007.

From closing to reopening, the anchor sat empty for less than 12 months, in a stretch of years when an empty department store at another mall could sit dark for a decade.

The mall was back to three full department stores, and Dillard's has run that one without a break ever since.

What Eastland kept while others emptied out

Simon and Macerich broke up their joint venture at the end of 2011 and split the last 11 malls between them.

Eastland went to Macerich on December 31, 2011, and Macerich has owned and managed it outright since.

The numbers from those years show the squeeze.

Among shops of 10,000 square feet or less, Eastland rang up $401 per square foot in 2012 and $367 in 2016, a drop of $34 in four years while online shopping pulled buyers away from malls.

Occupancy slid from 95.7% at the end of 2006 to 93.4% in 2022.

The losses showed up outside the anchors, including the smaller inline stores along the wings.

The Limited closed at Eastland in January 2017 when the chain shut every location it had left.

Gymboree named the Eastland store in a round of closures the same year, then liquidated the rest of the Gymboree stores in 2019.

The anchors held. JCPenney went through bankruptcy in 2020 and closed stores across the country, and the Evansville store stayed open.

Who's still walking in on a Saturday?

Eastland turns 45 this August, and it's the busiest address in the region. In 2023 it was the most-visited destination in the Evansville area.

More than 50% of people coming into the region reached the East Side commercial district, and 15% of the region's visitors stopped at the mall.

The businesses inside employ more than 1,500 people a year.

More than 100 businesses fill the place. Some are what you'd expect: American Eagle, Foot Locker, Bath & Body Works, Build-A-Bear.

Others belong to a newer Eastland. Crunch Fitness. Aspen Dental. A collision repair shop. An arcade called At the Pier.

On October 29, 2025, Tesla set up a display in the common area in front of Rogers & Brooke Jewelers and began booking test drives.

River City Coffee & Goods, a downtown shop, opened a temporary mall store called River City Goods late in 2025, selling merchandise from Evansville and the states around it.

Its lease ran through March 2026. It was still listed at the mall this August.

Nothing on the books calls for tearing the place down or turning it into something else.

It runs 1.013 million square feet with all three department stores open, and enough out-of-towners walk through it that Explore Evansville has weighed putting a visitor center inside, to point them toward Mesker Park Zoo and the LST-325.