Annapolis Mall in Annapolis, MD Is Down to One Department Store

Macy's is the only department store still trading at Annapolis Mall, a single-level enclosed mall in Parole, at the edge of Annapolis, Maryland.

The mall opened in 1980 at about 600,000 square feet. Later expansions took it to roughly 1.5 million.

The other department stores went between 1990 and 2025. Nordstrom's turn came in July 2020.

The old Nordstrom is a sporting-goods store with a climbing wall in it now. The old JCPenney is closed off from the shopping corridors and still being divided up. Its final tenants aren't set.

The store that was already there

A Montgomery Ward stood by itself on the Parole tract for seven years before anyone built a mall around it.

Half a mile away, Parole Plaza had been open since 1962.

Sears anchored it from May 16 of that year, in a 73,000-square-foot store with 43 sales departments, and more than two dozen other businesses filled the rest of the open plaza at Forest Drive and Solomons Island Road.

May Centers put its enclosed center on the Ward site. Hecht's opened its department store in November 1979, several months ahead of everything else.

On August 14, 1980, Annapolis Mall opened as Anne Arundel County's first fully enclosed regional shopping center, at about 600,000 square feet.

Skylights ran above the corridors, fountains sat in the interior, and there was room for 80 smaller stores. Nearly 50 were trading that first week.

Garfinckel's opened with the mall and used Annapolis for its first store outside its established Washington base.

Three years later, the enclosed center added a fourth department store.

JCPenney opened on July 27, 1983, in a new format the chain was testing: soft lighting, mirrored posts, a Halston department, and staff trained to advise customers on color.

Parole Plaza was still running, though its lineup had changed.

Woodward & Lothrop takes on Annapolis Mall

Garfinckel's closed in 1990 after the chain entered bankruptcy, and the anchor at the end of the mall went dark.

The owners answered with Nordstrom.

The store was announced in 1991 for an expected 1993 opening, and it came attached to an addition of about 258,000 square feet.

An informal concept plan went to Anne Arundel County that October, a formal one in December, and the county approved it on April 6, 1992.

Woodward & Lothrop, trading half a mile away at Parole Plaza, tried to stop it.

The retailer argued that the project broke the rules of the Parole Town Center Growth Management Area, the ones covering green area, stormwater management, wetland buffers, and traffic control.

The County Board of Appeals threw the appeal out on July 8, 1992, holding that a competitor down the road had no standing to bring it.

Woodward & Lothrop appealed to the Circuit Court for Anne Arundel County, filed a federal suit on July 30, and spent the rest of 1992 challenging grading permits, water quality, environmental compliance, and building permits.

The federal case ended on February 17, 1993.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland held that Woodward & Lothrop had no constitutionally protected property interest in stopping another landowner from building, and it left the local land-use questions to the state and county forums already holding them.

The 258,000 square feet got built.

What 258,000 square feet bought

Nordstrom opened in 1994 in a two-level store of 162,000 square feet, and the work around it brought in another two dozen retailers, Ann Taylor, Banana Republic, and Eddie Bauer among them.

The sales figures moved within two years. Annapolis Mall took about $280 per square foot in 1994 and $371 in 1996.

All of that growth went sideways, because the shopping level stayed single.

By 1997, the walk from one end to the other ran about 1,000 yards, six-tenths of a mile, past 151 specialty merchants.

A lighthouse stood in the food court. Sailboats and other marine imagery ran through the interior decoration and the mall's promotion in those years.

Lord & Taylor added 120,000 square feet in 1998, plus the specialty space built around it.

Sears crosses the half-mile

Montgomery Ward closed in 2001 and left the mall a vacant anchor, the same building the enclosed center had been built around.

Sears filled it in March 2002.

The store came out of Parole Plaza, where it had traded since 1962 and had become the last business still operating there.

That emptied the old plaza.

The site was cleared, and in 2008 it reopened as Annapolis Towne Centre, a mixed-use complex with Target, Whole Foods, offices, housing, and restaurants.

The mall had spent the year before that enlarging itself.

Hecht's took the Macy's name in September 2006 after Federated bought The May Department Stores Company, and construction was already under way.

The expansion opened on November 1, 2007, with about 240,000 square feet of new or reworked retail space and roughly 60 new stores and restaurants.

It brought the complex to roughly 1.5 million square feet.

So the district had two large properties again, half a mile apart, in two different formats.

Five boxes go empty

Lord & Taylor closed in April 2018 and left a 120,000-square-foot hole to start the decade with.

Sears announced in February 2020 that its Annapolis Mall store and auto center would close.

The plan covered 125,000 square feet and about 200 jobs, with a mid-April closing date.

In March the mall shut most of its operations for the pandemic while the Sears liquidation was still running.

Nordstrom never reopened to customers, and its permanent closing date came on July 15, 2020.

Forever 21, in the old Garfinckel's space, closed on April 29, 2025.

JCPenney was scheduled to go that spring, stopped its liquidation in April on a short lease extension, and closed on August 17, 2025 when no long-term agreement came.

The layoff notice listed 65 workers.

The mall covered JCPenney's interior entrance with drywall and turned the floor in front of it into a seating area.

That left major vacancies in five former department-store spaces and Macy's as the only traditional department store still trading.

A high school inside Annapolis Mall

Annapolis Mall sits at 2002 Annapolis Mall Road in Parole, outside the city limits of Annapolis, Maryland, whatever the postal address says.

It opened in 1980, carried the name Westfield Annapolis for most of two decades, and dropped it in 2024.

Today it is an enclosed regional shopping mall of roughly 1.5 million square feet.

Macerich bought it on April 30, 2026 for $260 million, and paid another $12 million for the vacant 13.1 acres where Sears had been.

Macerich hasn't announced what goes there.

The empty anchors went to uses a 1980 mall had no category for. The Container Store took part of the lower level of Lord & Taylor in 2021.

A county library branch opened inside the mall in 2018 and has expanded twice since.

Dick's House of Sport opened in the former Nordstrom in August 2026, with a climbing wall, golf bays, and multi-sport cages.

Above The Container Store, 49,200 square feet of the old Lord & Taylor became a public charter high school with learning studios, a science lab, an art studio, and a cafeteria.

New Village Academy took its founding class of 180 students on August 25, 2026.

Maryland had already written the mall its own exception to the county rule against new alcohol licenses within 1,000 feet of a school, effective July 1, 2025, so new restaurants could still get licenses.

The county rewrote the district around all of it.

On October 16, 2023, the County Council replaced the 1994 Parole plan with a framework that permits housing, offices, hotels, and civic uses across the town center.

A Tesla dealership is scheduled for November 2026 and Dave & Buster's for 2027.