In 1960, Montgomery County was still figuring out what it was going to be. The farmland was going fast.
New houses were going up on streets that hadn't existed a decade earlier, and the people moving into them were young, had cars, and needed somewhere to spend money. Wheaton Plaza was built for exactly that moment.
The partnership behind Wheaton Plaza came together in 1955. Its original partners were the Gudelsky brothers: Isadore, Harry, and Homer, along with Theodore N. Lerner, H. Max Ammerman, and Simon Sherman.
What they opened five years later on Veirs Mill Road was not a strip mall.
It was a $20 million complex, the first regional mall in the Washington area, and at the time of its opening, the sixth largest mall in the country.
Free parking, department store anchors, dozens of shops - all of it built for the family that drove there rather than walked or took the streetcar.
The mall drew shoppers from across the region from its first day. It was the county's first mall, and it was already capturing the spending power of a fast-growing county that kept adding new residents year after year.
Notable Milestones
1960 - Wheaton Plaza opens at 11160 Veirs Mill Road in Wheaton, MD.
1974 - The original partners agree to enclose and modernize the 79-acre mall.
1982 - The open-air center becomes an enclosed mall, with a translucent dome added.
1985 - The other partners file a $30 million lawsuit against Theodore Lerner over delays tied to a planned $15 million Hecht's project.
1986 - Lerner sells his 11 percent stake, the lawsuit ends, and The Hecht Co. announces a two-story, 180,000-square-foot store for the south end.
1987 - Wheaton Plaza reaches four anchors - Raleighs, Woodward & Lothrop, Montgomery Ward, and Hecht's - and grows to about 1.1 million square feet.
1997 - Westfield America buys Wheaton Plaza.
1999 - The mall is renamed Westfield Shoppingtown Wheaton.
2002 - Target opens in the former Montgomery Ward space.
2003 - A new Giant Food store opens as part of the mall's major redevelopment.
2005 - Macy's opens its two-story, 180,000-square-foot store after a major expansion and renovation.
2006 - Hecht's closes after the Federated-May merger.
2013 - Costco opens in the rebuilt former Hecht's wing, above Dick's Sporting Goods and Jo-Ann Fabrics and Crafts.
2025 - URW acquires the remaining 47 percent stake in the property and later pays off the mall's mortgage debt in December 2025.
How Wheaton Plaza Changed Silver Spring
One of the clearest signs of what Westfield Wheaton's earlier version did to the area was the effect on Silver Spring. For many years, Silver Spring had been the main shopping center in the Washington suburbs.
The area once had busy department stores, steady foot traffic, and the kind of commercial activity that develops near good transit.
But after Wheaton Plaza opened in 1960, things changed.
Silver Spring was an older downtown with transit roots, while Wheaton Plaza was designed much more explicitly around the car.
It offered free parking, a newer layout, and one place where a family could do a full day of shopping in one trip. Silver Spring's older shopping streets could not easily match that.
By the mid-1970s, people in the area were already saying that Silver Spring had started to go downhill around the 1960s.
Wheaton Plaza did more than add a mall. It moved the center of retail activity in Montgomery County.
It opened at 11160 Veirs Mill Road, and that is still its address today. More than 60 years of rebuilding, renaming, and expansion have taken place at that same location.
Community Landmark and a Family's Tragedy
For about the first fifteen years after it opened, Wheaton Plaza was woven into daily life in Montgomery County. Families went there on Saturday mornings.
Teenagers spent their afternoons there. People could get a week's errands done without driving to three different parts of the county.
It was not a landmark in any official sense. It was simply the dependable center of a suburb that was still taking shape.
That changed on March 25, 1975. That afternoon, sisters Sheila and Katherine Lyon, ages 12 and 10, walked from their home to Wheaton Plaza.
They were last seen just after 2 p.m. They never came home. Their disappearance became one of the most haunting unsolved cases in the Washington area.
In local memory, it remained tied to the mall where the girls spent their last afternoon. People who grew up in Montgomery County in the 1970s and 1980s knew the story.
They still know it. Renovations and rebranding never separated the name Wheaton Plaza from what happened that day.
Partnership Conflict Stalls the Mall for Years
By the early 1970s, Wheaton Plaza was facing stronger competition from newer suburban malls, beginning with Montgomery Mall.
White Flint and Lakeforest increased that competition later in the decade.
Each had enclosed, climate-controlled walkways that had become standard for suburban malls. Wheaton Plaza was still open-air.
In 1974, the original partners agreed to enclose the property and update it. The plan sat for years without moving forward. Theodore Lerner opposed the project.
By 1985, the other partners filed a $30 million lawsuit against him, accusing him of blocking the work, including a planned $15 million Hecht's store they expected would bring in major rental income.
Lerner held an 11 percent stake in the partnership formed in 1955.
The enclosure itself was completed, including a translucent dome that cost about $5 million, but the larger expansion remained stalled during the legal fight.
In 1986, Lerner sold his share, and the lawsuit ended. Within weeks, The Hecht Co. announced plans for a two-story, 180,000-square-foot store at the south end of the mall.
By late 1987, Wheaton Plaza had four anchor stores - Raleigh's, Woodward & Lothrop, Montgomery Ward, and Hecht's - and covered about 1.1 million square feet on 77 acres.
Westfield Buys In and Rebuilds the Mall
Raleigh's had closed by the end of 1992. In June 1997, Westfield America paid $184 million for Wheaton Plaza and Annapolis Mall.
The shopping center now belonged to one of the largest mall companies in the world. Rebranding came quickly - by 1999, it was Westfield Shoppingtown Wheaton.
The new owner had announced plans to invest $100 million in renovating the center, restoring it to four anchors, and bringing in a larger Giant supermarket.
The work that followed was the most dramatic physical change the property had seen since the 1980s.
Target opened in July 2002 in the old Montgomery Ward space - a 240,000-square-foot, two-story store that was at the time the largest Target in the chain.
Giant opened in October 2003, and Macy's arrived in spring 2005 in a new 180,000-square-foot two-story building, landing after roughly 15 years of county effort to attract that chain to the area.
The total cost of that redevelopment cycle - Target, Giant, Macy's, new specialty shops, common area upgrades, and an 800-space parking garage - was put at $131 million in some public documents and $149 million in later county records.
The county contributed $6 million toward the garage.
Costco Replaces Hecht's in a New-Style Wing
The Macy's arrival came with a side effect that took years to play out. Federated Department Stores, which owned Macy's, was in the process of merging with May Department Stores, the company that owned Hecht's.
When that deal closed in the mid-2000s, the Hecht's brand was phased out, and the Hecht's store at Westfield Wheaton closed in 2006.
The large south wing that had been built and rebuilt around Hecht's for two decades was now sitting empty.
The replacement arrived in 2013. The former Hecht's building was torn down and rebuilt as a two-level structure with Costco Wholesale on the upper floor and Dick's Sporting Goods and Jo-Ann Fabrics and Crafts below.
Panera Bread and Elevation Burger also opened in the same wing.
Costco's grand opening was April 10, 2013, with a 148,000-square-foot space projected to draw between 4,000 and 5,000 additional customers per day - enough to raise immediate concerns about street traffic nearby.
That project changed what Westfield Wheaton actually was. The enclosed-mall model was giving way to something harder to categorize - part traditional mall, part big-box complex.
By 2015, the full property had grown to 1,650,000 square feet of net rentable area, with over 210 tenants and a 96 percent occupancy rate.
Mortgage Default and New Faces at the Mall
The financial story that played out in 2025 was not what you'd expect from a mall. Westfield Wheaton carried a $234.6 million mortgage that matured on March 1, 2025.
Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield - which had consolidated full ownership in February by buying out its partner's remaining 47 percent stake - let the maturity date pass without repayment.
The loan went into special servicing.
By August 2025, an appraisal put the mall's value at $136 million, down 66 percent from the $402 million appraisal from a decade earlier, despite the property sitting at 97 percent leased.
URW repaid the mortgage in December 2025 at a $30 million discount, putting about $205 million in cash out the door.
New tenants kept arriving throughout the whole stretch. Five Guys opened in the Costco wing in November.
Burger King took over the food court spot that McDonald's had left in January.
Plans surfaced for a Round1 Bowling & Arcade in a 49,000-square-foot space - bowling, arcades, karaoke rooms, billiards, dining, and a bar - with no opening date announced yet.
A mall that opened as an open-air plaza in 1960 is still adding tenants and rebuilding pieces of itself more than 65 years later.
Westfield Wheaton
Shopping mall in Wheaton, MD
Address: 11160 Veirs Mill Rd, Wheaton, MD 20902
Opened: February 5, 1960
Developers: Isadore M. Gudelsky and Theodore N. Lerner
Owner: Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield
Floor area: 1,506,947 sq ftClosest cities:
Silver Spring, MD
Glenmont, MD
Kensington, MD
Rockville, MD
Bethesda, MD
North Bethesda, MD
