Mondawmin Mall in West Baltimore, Maryland has lost its biggest store twice. The mall opened in 1956 as Mondawmin Center and was enclosed in 1963. Its largest building was a three-level Sears.
The Sears closed in 1973, and the mall went 35 years without a store anywhere near that size. The one that finally filled the gap was Target, which opened in 2008 as the first in Baltimore City.
Target closed in 2018. The mall had been rebuilt around that store, so its closing left the biggest building on the site empty. It sits apart from the mall now, under another owner.
The mall is still open and leasing space, with Shoppers as its grocery store. A gym fills the box a discount clothing store left, and the Metro station next door still brings in the daily traffic.
Mondawmin opens on the Brown estate
Mondawmin opened in October 1956 on 46 acres of the old Alexander Brown family estate, with Maryland's governor there to cut the ribbon.
The center was open to the weather. Forty-seven stores looked onto landscaped courts, with upper and lower walkways, fountains and piped music.
Parking for thousands of cars spread around the buildings and onto decks.
Downtown was only three miles away, but the Rouse development group meant Mondawmin to serve far more than its immediate neighborhood.
Its reach was advertised in travel time: most Baltimore residents were said to be within 25 minutes.
Sears occupied the largest, three-level building, while dress and shoe stores, jewelers, a bookstore, and a toy shop filled the courts around it.
The center carried everyday business from its first day, too. Penn Fruit and Food Fair ran two supermarkets.
Two banks, Sun Ray Drug, a shoe repair shop, and Silber's Bakery sat on the same courts as the jewelers, so a center built for the big regional shopping trip handled the weekly one as well.
Sears leaves its three-level store
In 1963 the open courts were enclosed, turning the stacked promenades into a climate-controlled interior.
By the time Security Square Mall opened west of the city in 1972, Mondawmin already had years of competition from Westview Center, opened in 1958, and Reisterstown Road Plaza, opened in 1962.
Sears left Mondawmin in 1973.
Sears had left three floors to reuse instead of one store to refill. Metro Plaza divided that space among smaller shops and offices.
Pollack-Blum Furniture opened there in 1974, and the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration took space in the former anchor too, putting state business inside the old Sears.
Tenant losses spread beyond Sears.
Near the end of the 1970s, 17 percent of the mall stood vacant, while the older building itself had become part of the problem.
A subway station beside the mall
Rouse was back in charge by 1981, years after selling Mondawmin to investors in the 1960s.
Work continued into the middle of the decade, changing the floors and seating, adding skylights and landscaping, and resurfacing the exterior.
In 1983 the Baltimore Metro opened a station right beside the mall, and bus routes converged on it.
Social Security and expanded MVA offices nearby gave people another reason to come.
Most of those people came from close by.
In 1983 more than 60 percent of Mondawmin's shoppers lived in three ZIP codes, at a center once promoted as a 25-minute trip for most of the city.
More than 14 percent of their shopping trips there were made on foot.
By 1986 the mall and Metro Plaza together were 97 percent leased, and some of that space still went to errands.
The mall's telephone-company office lasted 28 years.
When Bell Atlantic closed it in 1995, Baltimore had only one other place left for paying a phone bill in person.
Baltimore City's first Target
The next rebuild started with a dispute over space.
Shoppers Food Warehouse wanted a supermarket at Mondawmin in 2003, but its plan ran into space used by the Motor Vehicle Administration, which was considering whether to stay.
One of Shoppers' paid consultants was also a state senator.
He convened transportation and budget officials in his Senate office over the project without disclosing that relationship.
A legislative ethics committee later found violations in his paid work for Shoppers.
The MVA stayed put, and the supermarket plan shifted to a new building beside the mall.
In December 2006, Baltimore authorized up to $15 million in city bonds for roads, demolition, utilities, and parking around a rebuild by General Growth Properties, which had bought The Rouse Company in 2004.
Construction wrapped around an operating mall.
Crews remade the exterior and common areas, laying new floors, installing new railings, and replacing the escalators.
Shoppers opened in 2007, and A.J. Wright took a new junior-anchor box.
Target arrived in summer 2008 with more than 250 new hires, about 95 percent of them Baltimore residents.
The 127,000-square-foot store was the chain's first inside Baltimore City.
It put a department-store-scale anchor back at Mondawmin for the first time since Sears closed 35 years earlier, in a building about two-thirds the size of the old Sears.
Target closes before its 10th anniversary
Around Target, the smaller spaces turned over first. A.J. Wright's whole chain shut down in 2011, and Marshalls took its box that year.
The MVA left in 2011 too, moving to Hilltop Shopping Center, and its old building at Mondawmin was torn down.
A 25,000-square-foot Ross Dress for Less opened on the site in March 2014, beside a dollar store that is a Family Dollar today.
On November 7, 2017, Target put the Mondawmin store on a list of locations it would close.
About 134 people worked there, roughly half the number hired when it opened nine years earlier.
The store closed on February 3, 2018, and the building the whole rebuild had been planned around stood empty.
Less than a year later, in January 2019, Marshalls left the junior-anchor box.
Planet Fitness signed a lease on it the same year, and the store that had sold discount clothes became a gym.
The Target box becomes The Village at Mondawmin
The Target building stayed empty for more than four years.
In March 2022, Whiting-Turner's chief executive and his wife bought it and the land around it, about 8.3 acres, for $1 million.
Baltimore had authorized up to $15 million in bonds for the rebuild that put the store there.
Before settling what the building would hold, the new owners' team consulted the Greater Mondawmin Coordinating Council.
Construction moved ahead in late 2022, and the old Target facade came off.
The building itself was kept, renamed The Village at Mondawmin, and leased to health, office, and community tenants.
CareFirst opened a workspace there in 2024, and TouchPoint Baltimore moved into its new space in March 2025.
The University of Maryland's community health hub is still being built out, though health programming already runs there.
A state grant in July 2026 went to its CT imaging. The Village sits next to the mall under separate ownership.
Mondawmin Mall in 2026
Mondawmin Mall, which opened in 1956 as Mondawmin Center and took its current name when it was enclosed in 1963, is a three-level enclosed shopping mall at 2401 Liberty Heights Avenue in West Baltimore, Maryland.
It's still open and still leasing, with more than 70 retailers in more than 300,000 square feet of retail.
Shoppers is still the grocery store, and Planet Fitness is still in the box Marshalls left.
Levels 1 and 2 are mostly shoes, clothes, and food, from Foot Locker and DTLR to Popeyes.
The concourse and Level 3 carry more of the offices, and the mall has 67,000 square feet of them.
Baltimore's child support office, WIC, health and behavioral-health providers, and the Greater Mondawmin Coordinating Council work out of the building, alongside a U.S. Post Office, Capital One, and a Chase branch that opened in December 2022 with financial-health and small-business programs.
Mondawmin started giving floor space to errands like these in the old Sears after 1973.
The Metro station next door still brings in daily traffic, and parking is free.
On weekdays the doors open to mall walkers at 10 a.m., an hour before the stores.
Independent Publisher Notice
BestAttractions is an independent editorial publisher. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of any location, business, property owner, manager, government agency, or organization described in this article.
Comments posted on this page are not forwarded to, reviewed by, or acted upon by any entity mentioned in the article.
For official inquiries, complaints, applications, bookings, or other requests, please contact the relevant entity directly through its official website or other verified channels.