Lakeview Square Mall is an enclosed shopping mall at 5775 Beckley Road on the south side of Battle Creek, Michigan.
It opened in August 1983 with JCPenney, Sears, and Hudson's, and it's still open today.
Longtime shoppers watched the Hudson's sign become Marshall Field's, then Macy's, without the store ever moving.
Then all three anchors closed between 2017 and 2019, and by 2020 the mall had no department stores at all.
It refused the usual mall ending. Horrocks Farm Market took over the JCPenney in 2023. The Macy's became 100,000 square feet of self-storage.
A skate park, an arcade-style amusement shop, and a boudoir photography studio took inline space. The Sears was still listed for sale at $1.5 million in June 2026.
The city plan says Brickyard Creek enters a culvert near Lakeview Square.
At the former Sears, the city now wants the creek brought back to the surface with a public park around it, at an estimated $50 million, if the money comes through.
The mall's construction required a state permit to relocate Brickyard Creek; state environmental money is now a proposed funding source for bringing part of it back.
Here's how Lakeview Square got from new mall to $50 million undoing.
Lakeview Square started with a creek fight
Before Lakeview Square Mall had a single wall, it had opposition.
The shopping center proposed for Beckley Road on the south side of Battle Creek needed a state permit to relocate Brickyard Creek.
Opponents said the project would permanently damage the creek's water quality, disrupt its trout population, and pile traffic onto already inadequate local roads.
Residents picked sides. Opponents went to court. Others wanted it built.
The fight pulled in state regulators, the courts, and the developer, Forbes/Cohen Properties, the firm of Sidney Forbes and Maurice Cohen.
The dispute didn't stop the project.
Three anchors and 2,800 parking spaces
Lakeview Square opened in August 1983 as a one-level enclosed mall with JCPenney, Sears, and Hudson's holding down the ends of its wings.
Sears came over from its old Battle Creek store on Capital Avenue.
Between the anchors sat 46 stores at 70 percent occupancy, names like Casual Corner, Waldenbooks, Camelot Music, Hanover Shoes, Imperial Sports, Ups & Downs, and Women's World.
The early years settled any question about demand.
The mall had 2,800 parking spaces for southwestern Michigan shoppers, and the early crowds made Lakeview Square the place Battle Creek went to shop.
Skylights over a buried creek
Inside, the mall was pure early 1980s: skylights, planting beds, wide enclosed corridors, interior courts, restaurant and service spaces tucked between the big stores.
Surface parking wrapped the whole building.
The corridors ran long enough that three trips around the interior, hallways and food court included, come to two miles, a figure the mall still publishes for its walkers.
Outside, the building sat near the thing its opponents had warned about.
Brickyard Creek enters a culvert near the mall.
Years later, the city plan would put Brickyard Creek back into the mall district's future, with green infrastructure meant to reduce flood risk.
A theater for the evening crowd
On November 17, 1995, GKC Lakeview Square Cinemas opened with seven screens, and the mall had a reason to draw people after the stores went dark.
The theater changed hands along with the industry: Carmike bought the GKC chain in 2005, NCG took over in January 2016, shut the place down for renovation, and reopened it that April 29.
Through every operator, the screens kept giving the property a night use.
One store, three names on the door
Hudson's anchored the mall for 18 years before the Detroit chain became Marshall Field's in 2001, then Macy's in 2006.
Same doors, third nameplate.
The corridor around the mall kept growing through those years.
By 2013, the Beckley Road area held 3 million square feet of retail, with 43,000 vehicles a day passing on I-94 and another 27,000 on M-66.
Target, Walmart, Sam's Club, Meijer, Kohl's, and Menards all traded nearby.
Whatever was happening to department stores nationally, the intersection kept its pull.
Foreclosure and a $9 million sale
Ownership turned messier than the tenant list.
General Growth Properties picked up Lakeview Square in a group of Michigan malls that also included Lansing Mall and Westwood Mall in Jackson.
By the early 2010s, the property had slid through distress and into foreclosure.
GK Development, a retail real estate company from Barrington, Illinois, bought the mall in 2013 for $9 million.
That price covered nearly 560,000 square feet with JCPenney, Macy's, Sears, and the theater all still open, plus a national roster that ran from Aeropostale and Bath & Body Works to Victoria's Secret, Finish Line, and Barnes & Noble.
The inline stores were still investing, too.
That May, Shoe Show rebranded as Shoe Dept. Encore and moved into a space nearly three times the size of its old one.
Three anchors gone in two years
The department stores fell in sequence.
Macy's put its Lakeview Square store on a closing list in January 2017; clearance sales started that same month, and the store was gone by spring.
JCPenney followed in March, adding the store to a nationwide list of 138 closures, one of seven in Michigan, with liquidation set to start in April.
Sears held out longest.
After the chain's Chapter 11 filing, the Lakeview Square store landed on a November 2018 closing list and closed on January 20, 2019.
All three original anchors were gone.
Zero department stores left
By 2020, the numbers were blunt: a 600,000-square-foot regional center with no department stores left.
The spaces refilled with uses no 1983 directory listed. Laser tag. A skate park. An escape room. An arcade.
Around them, a core of survivors kept their doors open: Barnes & Noble, Dunham's Sports, Buckle, Maurices, Men's Wearhouse, Claire's, Kay Jewelers, and Buffalo Wild Wings.
The building had stopped working as a department-store mall and started working as whatever could fill a room.
A farm market in the JCPenney box
The biggest fix came from a grocer.
In May 2021, Horrocks Farm Market confirmed it would leave its longtime Capital Avenue location and move into the former JCPenney.
The store soft-opened on March 28, 2023, and went to regular hours the next day.
The new Horrocks runs a third larger than the old store, close in size to the chain's Lansing location, with more room for meat, beer, wine, prepared foods, and a pizzeria.
A box built for clothing racks now sells produce.
Storage where Macy's was, Olive Garden out front
The Macy's box got a quieter second life.
Star Battle Creek LLC converted the space into 100,000 square feet of drive-through, climate-controlled self-storage, which Extra Space Storage now operates at 5725 Beckley Road.
The edges of the property stayed busier than the corridors.
Applebee's is still attached to the mall. Buffalo Wild Wings sits on the Beckley Road side near the old food-court area.
And in June 2025, Olive Garden opened on a 2.7-acre outparcel at 5727 Beckley Road: brand-new construction outside the mall while inline storefronts inside sat empty.
The city draws up a smaller mall
In February 2024, Battle Creek opened public input on a new vision for the Beckley Road corridor and the mall area, hiring Progressive AE for a $289,000 study paid with federal pandemic-relief money.
The process ran through open houses, online surveys, webinars, and neighborhood presentations, and one public session was scheduled for April 25, 2024, inside the mall's own central atrium.
The mall's future got debated in its center court.
The Lakeview District Plan was adopted as a master-plan amendment in April 2025.
Its concept for the property: keep the active tenants, give each its own exterior entrance, and demolish the least useful enclosed space, including interior corridors, the former Sears, and the northern section of the mall.
The north side would get a pedestrian walk, possible housing, and a possible hotel.
The south parking stays put for future development.
A $50 million park plan and a $1.5 million building
The former Sears at 5575 Beckley Road became the pressure point.
The 2026 Lakeview District Downtown Development Authority and tax-increment-financing plan lists a pending high-priority project there: pull Brickyard Creek out of its culvert and build a public park on the site.
Estimated cost, $50 million. Timeline, 2025 to 2035.
Funding would draw on bonds, state environmental money, grants, and DDA revenue, part of about $80 million in planned district projects.
All of it sat in pre-planning at approval, with no construction timelines confirmed.
Meanwhile, the building was on the market.
In June 2026, the former Sears was listed at $1.5 million: 100,400 square feet on 7.8 acres with 502 parking spaces.
Its zoning was B2. The city's plan sees a creek and a park there. The listing sells a department store.
What's open at Lakeview Square now
The mall still lets walkers in before retail hours, which run 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon to 5 on Sundays.
The theater came back, too. NCG closed the cinema in January 2026; GQT Movies reopened it on April 24, 2026, as GQT Lakeview 10.
The 2026 directory mixes chains, regional names, and locals: Horrocks, Barnes & Noble, Dunham Sports, Buckle, Shoe Dept. Encore, and Kay Jewelers alongside Battleground Skate Park, Funshop Extreme, Mikey's Play-All-Day Cafe, Stewie's Cajun Foods, a driving school, and a boudoir photography studio.
People come for groceries, movies, sneakers, and driver's ed.
What happens next comes down to money.
The district plan, the Sears listing, and private redevelopment interest all point at the same acres.
What gets funded first may decide what Lakeview Square becomes.
