Westdale Mall sits on the southwest side of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, off Edgewood Road SW. It opened in 1979 as the city's first enclosed mall, a two-level center planned around four department-store anchors and parking for 5,500 cars.
Then it came apart. Montgomery Ward closed in 2001, Von Maur in 2007, Younkers in 2018. By 2013, most of the inside was empty, and new owners decided the enclosed format was finished.
So they demolished it. In 2014, crews tore out roughly 550,000 square feet of mall structure and rebuilt the survivors, JCPenney among them, as standalone stores.
The result is Westdale Town Center, an open-air strip of shops, restaurants, hotels, and apartments. The odd part: knocking the mall down is what kept the address alive. Here's how it got there.
Seven years from announcement to opening
The mall took a long time to arrive.
Plans went public on March 29, 1972: a 560,000-square-foot center on 66 acres with two or three anchors and room for 30 to 50 shops.
Midwest Development of Cedar Rapids and Dial Realty of Omaha had it first. Later that year, The Hahn Company, run by Ernest W. Hahn, bought the property.
Then came the fight. In 1974, Hahn asked the city to rezone another 21 acres from residential to commercial so the mall could be built bigger.
A group called Taxpayers for Sensible Planning pushed back, arguing a bigger mall would hurt stores already in town.
The City Council approved the rezoning on May 22, 1974, by a 4-1 vote.
Approval didn't mean shovels. The 1974 recession held up work until May 1976.
Then a seven-week electricians' strike pushed the opening back again. Seven years passed between the first plan and the first customer.
Full within two years
Westdale Mall opened on October 4, 1979.
Montgomery Ward and JCPenney were the first anchors, and both had moved out from downtown Cedar Rapids, part of the slow pull of department stores away from the old center of the city.
Lindale Plaza on the northeast side predated Westdale as a shopping center and became the enclosed Lindale Mall only after Westdale opened.
Younkers and Petersen Harned Von Maur followed in 1980.
Von Maur's 100,000-square-foot store was a late substitution: Brandeis, an Omaha chain, had signed on as an anchor and then backed out before opening.
The mall filled fast.
By early 1981, it had 114 stores and sat at 93% occupancy, pulling shoppers from across eastern Iowa, including Davenport and Waterloo, cities that already had malls of their own.
Out front were an Econofoods grocery and a four-screen theater, so a trip to Westdale could mean the enclosed stores, the supermarket, and a movie on one lot.
A case that outlasted the building
Westdale also holds a darker place in local memory.
On December 19, 1979, weeks after the mall opened, 18-year-old Michelle Martinko was attacked in the parking lot after a visit to Westdale.
The case stayed unsolved for decades. An arrest came in 2018, and a man was convicted in February 2020, more than 40 years after that December night.
For a lot of Cedar Rapids residents, the mall and the case are linked, the long wait for an answer tied to a place they all knew.
The anchors leave, one by one
The good years didn't hold. Montgomery Ward closed in March 2001 when the chain shut down nationwide, and its big box sat empty for more than four years.
Steve & Barry's moved into the old Ward space in November 2005 and lasted three years before its own bankruptcy closed it in November 2008.
Von Maur left on January 31, 2007. By that March, more than half the mall's stores had closed.
The building behind the storefronts was aging, and ownership kept changing hands.
Westdale went into receivership in late 2006 after a part-owner fell behind on the mortgage, then sold at a sheriff's sale in July 2007.
The former Ward box had a separate owner, which made any single rescue plan harder to pull off.
By 2010, only JCPenney and Younkers were still open as anchors. Two of the four were gone.
A flood gave the empty mall a job
Then the river came. In June 2008, Cedar Rapids flooded badly, and Westdale's empty spaces suddenly had a use.
The city and Linn County moved offices in. The American Red Cross, FEMA, and the Small Business Administration ran disaster-recovery centers at Westdale.
In February 2009, the public library opened a temporary branch called The Bridge in the mall's former Osco Drug space, while the flooded downtown library worked out its future.
Linn County turned down an $18.5 million offer to buy Westdale outright in January 2009, then leased the former Steve & Barry's space for its offices instead.
The county stayed until June 2012. For a few years, a half-empty shopping mall became part office block, part recovery center, and part library.
The owners decided to tear it down
By the start of 2013, Westdale was still mostly hollow, with 70% of the inline stores empty and the property worn down by deferred upkeep.
A local investor group, A. Shapiro LLC, bought the mall effective January 1, 2013, and Frew Development Group took over as the lead on what came next.
What came next was demolition. In May 2013, Frew showed renderings for a $90 million redevelopment of the 72-acre site.
Cedar Rapids backed the plan with public money: a $5 million grant and guarantees on $11.5 million in loans.
Interior demolition began in the old Von Maur first in 2013. In January 2014, crews started on the former Ward and Steve & Barry's building.
By the end of March 2014, the enclosed mall closed for good, with JCPenney, Younkers, the vacant Von Maur box, and a lone salon the only pieces left.
Then the middle came out.
About 550,000 square feet of enclosed mall was demolished, exterior walls were built onto the anchors that stayed, and 32 pad sites were laid out across the site.
Westdale Town Center takes shape
The rebuild swapped an indoor mall for an outdoor one.
Instead of a roofed concourse, the new center used exterior storefronts, freestanding anchors, and pad buildings for restaurants and banks.
The first new building was fully leased by December 2015, filled by AT&T, Noodles & Company, Wingstop, Chipotle, Great Clips, and a nail salon.
The survivors got reworked.
JCPenney was cut loose from the old mall structure, given new walls and entrances, and finished as a 136,000-square-foot standalone store in June 2016; its old tire and battery building came down in the process.
Burlington built a new 40,000-square-foot store, announced in 2016.
Ross took part of the former Von Maur building in 2017 after the old department store was converted for new tenants, and PetSmart went up as a new 20,000-square-foot store the same year.
Younkers held on until 2018, then closed when Bon-Ton shut its chains.
U-Haul bought the 1979 building in 2019 and turned it into a moving and storage center, which is what it still is.
By late 2017, the rebuilt property already carried the equivalent of more than 500 full-time jobs and a projected value above $60 million, beating targets the development deal had set for 2022.
Fully leased, and up for sale
Westdale Town Center now runs as an open-air district, and by 2026 it was full.
The retail piece was put up for sale on April 24, 2026, marketed as 100% leased on a 25.8-acre parcel.
The enclosed mall once measured 854,000 square feet. The retail center that replaced it has 334,500 square feet of leasable area.
The newest tenants are the kind that signal a center that works. Five Below opened in October 2025.
Ulta Beauty opened early in 2026 in a 9,400-square-foot space between Michaels and JCPenney.
A standalone Chipotle with a drive-up pickup lane, the first Chipotlane in the Corridor, opened in late 2025.
The anchor that started it all is still standing. JCPenney, open since the first day in 1979, extended its lease through October 2029.
Burlington, PetSmart, Ross, Michaels, Maurices, and a row of restaurants fill out the rest, and the old Younkers box rents trucks.
The mall itself is gone. The corner JCPenney still opens every morning, and people still pull into its lot.
