Walk Fashion Square Mall today and you're in a 53-year-old enclosed mall on Bay Road in Saginaw Charter Township, Michigan.
It was opened in 1972, with two department stores still running and a corridor that's lost most of the rest.
It was built on former farmland by the Richard E. Jacobs Group as the area's regional mall.
The hometown names went first: Heavenrich's in the 1980s, Wiechmann's by 1992.
Then the restaurants, McDonald's and Garfield's both closing in 2009.
Then Sears in 2019, after 47 years.
Saginaw's Fashion Square Mall lost its hometown stores, then its biggest anchor, and now sells itself off in pieces
The former Sears property, about 175,000 square feet across the department store, auto center, and restaurant building, is listed as available.
So are a former TGI Fridays pad, a Bay Road lot, and a 6.3-acre corner.
Macy's and JCPenney hold the middle.
When the farmland mall opened with two anchors and grew to three
Fashion Square Mall opened on October 4, 1972, on farmland along Bay Road in Saginaw Charter Township, a few miles north of downtown Saginaw.
The Richard E. Jacobs Group, a Cleveland developer, put the mall on a former field of more than 70 acres, then filled the site with enclosed corridor, anchor boxes, and surface parking.
The plan was simple. Sears at one end, JCPenney at the other, a straight indoor concourse between them.
Both opened with the mall in 1972. Hudson's arrived in 1976 as the third major anchor.
JCPenney is still there in 2026.
The national anchors had local company.
Two Saginaw department stores anchored the mall's hometown connection: William C. Wiechmann Co. and Heavenrich's, both transplants from downtown Saginaw retail.
Wiechmann's history ran back to 1900, when Emma Koeber Wiechmann and William C. Wiechmann started the business.
By the time its Fashion Square branch opened in 1972, the company was a downtown department store on South Jefferson.
The new suburban branch and the old downtown store ran in parallel for a while.
The downtown stores that came along and faded out
The mall arrived right as enclosed shopping was pulling business out of downtown Saginaw and into the highway corridors.
Fashion Square gave national chains and local names a climate-controlled box near new housing and car traffic.
Downtown didn't empty out overnight, but the math caught up.
Wiechmann's closed its South Jefferson store in 1979 while keeping the mall branch.
The chain held on until 1992, then closed for good.
Heavenrich's left earlier, in the 1980s.
Its mall space eventually became Dunham's Sports, in the spot that had started as a local department store.
By the early 1990s the hometown department-store layer was gone, and Fashion Square leaned on national anchors and specialty chains.
Hudson's arrives in 1976 and the plan gets bigger
Four years in, the mall got its third anchor.
Hudson's, Detroit's best-known department store, opened on the east end in 1976.
The addition pulled the building out of its straight two-anchor shape and gave it a real east-end draw, no longer dependent on the Sears-to-JCPenney walk.
Hudson's kept its name into the early 2000s.
In 2001 it became Marshall Field's, part of a nameplate shuffle under Target Corporation's department-store division.
In 2006 Federated Department Stores converted Marshall Field's stores to Macy's, and the Saginaw store changed signs again.
Same building, three names across three decades.
Macy's still runs it in 2026, two floors at 4750 Fashion Square Mall, with women's, men's, home, beauty, furniture, mattresses, and the rest.
A food court, a $10 million face-lift, and mall events
Fashion Square added a food court in the early 1990s, the dining cluster that became standard equipment for enclosed malls in that decade.
CBL & Associates Properties, which had bought the mall from Jacobs around 2000 and 2001, spent $10 million on a mall-wide renovation in 2001.
The work added seating areas, family restrooms, and automatic doors, the kind of refresh owners did to keep aging malls current.
Fashion Square also used mall space for event programming.
By 2010, a weeklong blood drive was running inside the mall, with local radio stations and giveaways pulling people through the doors on days they weren't just shopping.
The restaurants and big-box tenants that turned over fast
Some of the larger non-anchor spaces churned hard in the 2000s.
Dunham's Sports moved out, and Steve & Barry's took the space in 2005.
Steve & Barry's closed in December 2008 after the chain went bankrupt and shrank fast.
The restaurants went next. McDonald's shut its food-court spot in January 2009.
Garfield's Restaurant & Pub closed in May 2009 after roughly six months in a space Ruby Tuesday had already vacated.
The TGI Fridays pad out on the edge would later join the same vacancy list.
Sephora, H&M, and the last good leasing run
The 2010s brought a few wins. JCPenney remodeled in 2010 and added a Sephora cosmetics area inside the store.
In 2011 the mall picked up Dressbarn, Maurices, and Willow Tree, with Willow Tree taking space tied to the old Ruby Tuesday and Garfield's area.
The biggest catch came in February 2016, when H&M announced a Fashion Square store of about 22,000 square feet for a fall opening.
It was the most visible national apparel signing of the late CBL years.
By the end of 2016, CBL was out the door.
The owner sells, and the price tells the story
CBL sold Fashion Square in July 2016 in a two-mall package that also included The Lakes Mall in Muskegon.
The pair went for $66.5 million, and the deal included the buyer taking on a $38.2 million loan tied to Fashion Square.
CBL booked a $32.1 million impairment charge on the sale, ending about 15 years of CBL control.
The buyer wasn't named publicly at the time.
Namdar Realty Group was attached to the mall in the years after CBL.
Then the loan went bad.
By September 2020 Namdar was trying to hand the mall back through a deed-in-lieu process, the mortgage more than 90 days delinquent.
Reports put the troubled mortgage between $33 million and $35 million.
The pandemic shutdowns piled on, but the mall itself was already in trouble before 2020, with Sears gone and the tenant roster thinning.
When Sears left after 47 years
Sears had been one of the two original anchors.
It opened with the mall in 1972 and stayed 47 years.
On August 6, 2019, the company put the Saginaw store on a list of 26 large-format Sears and Kmart locations slated to close.
The auto center went first.
Liquidation sales started in mid-August, and the main store at 4900 Fashion Square Mall closed by late October 2019.
That left two working anchors, JCPenney and Macy's, and a vacant department-store box with no replacement announced.
The empty Sears became its own problem.
It hadn't been folded into every later mall deal, so when the rest of the property changed hands, the box stayed separate.
It's still separate now.
Bought at auction for a fraction of the old price
The lender took the mall through foreclosure in 2021.
In August 2022 the property went to online auction, and Kohan Retail Investment Group bought it for about $10.8 million.
The sale was confirmed in late September 2022, days before the mall's 50th anniversary.
Set that $10.8 million next to the $66.5 million two-mall price from six years earlier and the slide is plain.
The auction covered the main mall but not the whole complex: the former Sears was still on its own, and at least one surviving anchor parcel was separate, too.
That ownership split is why a single property now generates a stack of separate real estate listings.
By 2026 Fashion Square sat in Summit Properties USA's portfolio, the leasing profile at 4865 Fashion Square Mall listing 42 acres, 530,300 square feet of total lettable area, 486,700 of it owner-controlled, and 1,955 parking spaces.
Older whole-mall descriptions had used 901,200 square feet.
The numbers describe different ownership scopes, not a building that physically shrank.
Even reduced, the mall is one of Saginaw Township's larger taxable properties.
For the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024, JG Saginaw LLC / Fashion Square Mall Realty Holding ranked as the township's second-largest principal property taxpayer, with $12,8 million in taxable assessed value, about 0.6 percent of the township total.
What's still inside and what closed last year
Fashion Square is still open in 2026.
JCPenney runs at 4600 Bay Road with curbside pickup, jewelry, mattresses, portraits, a salon, and in-home custom window services.
Macy's keeps two floors going at the east end.
They're the two department stores holding the enclosed mall together.
The inline mix is smaller and more local than the old directories.
The current roster includes Finish Line, Hot Topic, Shoe Dept.
Encore, Snipes, Victoria's Secret, Spencer Gifts, salons, beauty and massage services, and small local retailers.
Bath & Body Works closed on February 24, 2025.
The call came from above local management, and it surprised both the store's employees and the mall, which announced the closing on Facebook and said it was offering leasing options for the space.
It took out one of the better-known national chains still on the inline list.
The pieces being marketed one parcel at a time
The biggest open question is the former Sears at 4900 Fashion Square Mall, still listed as available by Transformco and commercial brokers.
Commercial listings into 2026 kept marketing it, describing a former Sears property of about 175,000 square feet on roughly 20 acres, big enough to reuse as retail, split up, or redevelop.
The edges are being marketed too.
The former TGI Fridays pad at 2775 Tittabawassee Road, with about 8,200 square feet of restaurant space, is listed as available.
A 0.8-acre Bay Road pad at 4700 Bay Road was listed for ground lease in March 2026.
In May 2026 a 6.3-acre corner parcel at 4511 Fashion Square Boulevard, sitting at Bay Road and Tittabawassee Road with commercial zoning and utilities, went up for ground lease or redevelopment.
So the present-day picture is a working mall with two anchors and a thinned-out corridor, ringed by parcels in lease listings.
The owner and brokers are marketing an empty department store, a former restaurant pad, a small road-frontage lot, and a large corner.
Through June 2026 there's no approved full-mall demolition, no adopted mall-wide master plan, and no public start for a mall-wide redevelopment.
Just a 53-year-old mall still open on Bay Road, and the slices of it being offered for sale or lease.
