Iowa River Landing turns an industrial park into shops
On October 8, 2012, UI Health Care opened a five-story clinic on former light-industrial ground where Interstate 80 meets First Avenue in Coralville, Iowa.
The clinic was one of the first big openings in Iowa River Landing, a 180-acre district the city had been redeveloping for shopping, dining, and entertainment.
A hotel and conference center already stood on the land before 2012, and city plans from the winter of 2011 and 2012 named the clinic, a Von Maur store, and a new hotel as the next pieces.
Von Maur came the next summer. On July 27, 2013, it opened a department store of about 80,000 square feet, in the same year Homewood Suites opened in the district.
Shops and restaurants took the ground floors of mixed-use buildings set along public streets, with parking at the curb and public plazas.
Offices, homes, the hotel, and the clinic sat in the same blocks, spread across connected streets with no single roof over the district.
Coralville's own addition was an arena. Coralville started work on Xtream Arena in May 2018 and cut the ribbon on September 17, 2020.
The 5,100-seat arena and the GreenState Family Fieldhouse beside it added sports and entertainment to the same streets as the shops.
In January 2026 lululemon, in the district since 2017, announced that it would move to a store more than double the size of its present one.
Trader Joe's, Anthropologie, and Von Maur are among the other names on the streets, which also hold hotels, residences, and museums.
Iowa River Landing now covers over 330,000 square feet of shops, offices, homes, and entertainment space.
The District at Prairie Trail puts its stores on the street
Before Ankeny had shopping streets at Prairie Trail, the ground was an Iowa State University research farm.
In 2005 the city moved to acquire about 1,031 acres of it and chose DRA Properties as master developer for a planned community called Prairie Trail.
Inside it, construction on The District at Prairie Trail, a shopping and dining district of about 60 acres in Ankeny, Iowa, began in 2012, and Jethro's Lakeside BBQ opened that summer as its first restaurant.
The plan put the stores at the sidewalk and the big parking lots behind them.
Short passages led from the rear lots through the blocks to the storefronts, and angled spaces lined the streets.
Around the park, two- and three-story buildings stacked offices over some of the shops and restaurants.
The blocks filled one building at a time.
The Vintage Main building followed Jethro's, and by 2015 it held offices, a fitness business, and a restaurant.
In January 2015 work started on District II, a 55,000-square-foot building for offices and shops.
By February 2022 The District counted 425,000 square feet of space, 291,000 of it retail and 134,000 of it offices.
Today more than 20 restaurants, bars, and coffee shops trade in the blocks around the park, among them 30 Hop, Grimaldi's, and Toyo Ramen, while local boutiques and service shops fill other storefronts.
Jethro's, the first restaurant to open there, in 2012, is still one of them.
Westdale Town Center replaces its enclosed mall
In 2014, demolition crews at Westdale Mall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, started where Montgomery Ward had been.
The enclosed mall had opened in 1979 and had seen many of its smaller stores empty out by the start of 2013, when an investor group bought its 72 acres and Frew Development Group signed on to run them under a long-term lease.
Frew's master plan that May called for most of the enclosed mall to come out.
At a ceremonial groundbreaking on September 12, 2014, Frew put the redevelopment on a schedule of about two and a half years, aiming for a grand opening in 2016.
Demolition meanwhile stripped the enclosed corridor away from JCPenney, Younkers, and the old Von Maur building.
New walls sealed the old connections while a ring road and development sites took shape around the property.
By December 2015 most of the old mall was gone and the first new building, 12,000 square feet, was fully leased to six tenants, Chipotle and Wingstop among them.
Burlington's arrival was announced in April 2016, in a 40,000-square-foot building of its own.
The 2016 date passed with the site still filling in: a Tru by Hilton opened in February 2018, and by 2019 several spaces drawn for other uses had gone to U-Haul, a VA outpatient clinic, and housing.
Frew became the sole owner in 2020. The redevelopment ultimately left three separate anchor buildings among 32 development sites.
More than 600,000 square feet of the old mall had been removed.
In May 2026, with the site's assessed value past $100 million, Frew was exploring a sale while readying its newest building for Bath & Body Works and other retailers.
JCPenney and Burlington anchor what Westdale is now: an open-air center of stand-alone stores, hotels, and apartments on its own ring road.
Outlets of Des Moines opens on schedule
By August 2016, two months into full construction, crews in Altoona, Iowa, in eastern Polk County, were pouring foundations and raising steel for nine buildings on a site south of Bass Pro Shops.
The buildings were Outlets of Des Moines, a planned open-air outlet center of 300,000 square feet.
New England Development had started full construction that June, with Ryan Companies managing the work, and the developer still had October 2017 on the calendar for the opening.
Big retail plans for that part of the county went back many years before that summer, and the earlier proposals never became buildings.
This one took its place inside The Shoppes at Prairie Crossing, a 175-acre development of stores, hotels, and homes near Interstate 80 and U.S. 65 that was already growing.
The outlet center's own address became 801 Bass Pro Drive NW.
The date held.
On October 20, 2017, the center opened to shoppers, with Nike Factory Store, Under Armour, Vera Bradley, and Le Creuset among the first tenants, a mix that ran from athletic wear to cookware.
It opened at the full size planned in 2016, as an outlet center and nothing else, its storefronts facing the open air, and more tenants were expected to follow.
Coach Outlet and Polo Ralph Lauren are among the stores now, and this month Ann Taylor Factory Store and Kate Spade Outlet are among those running sales.
The center still trades as open-air outlets on the same ground, and all four of those opening-day tenants sell there too.
Corridor Plaza goes up lot by lot on the Crossroads site
Crossroads Mall in Fort Dodge, Iowa, had its last day on September 6, 2022.
Shoe Sensation and Hacienda Vieja, among the last businesses inside, moved to other addresses in town.
ATI Group had bought the mall in February 2020, when it was about 30 percent occupied, with a plan to clear it for Corridor Plaza, a mixed-use development with retail at its center.
Iowa approved up to $17 million in reinvestment-district support for the project in April 2022.
The plan had four parts: new retail where the mall stood, an indoor and outdoor event space, more retail on lots around it, and a hotel with an entertainment venue.
A small strip center planned around Teriyaki Madness and Clean Laundry was the first part built, and more retail followed on separate lots as new roads went in.
The event space came on October 1, 2025, when the Pavilion at Corridor Plaza opened with a restaurant, three retail spaces, and courts: five each for basketball and volleyball, three for pickleball.
In July 2026, after a contract on the Pavilion property was forfeited, the City of Fort Dodge went to court to recover possession of it.
On the rebuilt ground, maurices sells from 2824 Third Ave South.
The strip center and the Pavilion are built, and the Pavilion's plaza is nearly done.
The hotel is expected in 2028, and two lots meant for more retail are still waiting for buildings.
In 2012, two of these five sites still held enclosed malls.
Today all five have stores open, and on both of the old mall sites new buildings are still being added.
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