The Crossroads opens on South Westnedge
The first crowd inside The Crossroads came a day early, in July 1980.
For Kalamazoo County's 150th anniversary, a benefit called Sentimental Journey filled the new concourses with live music, champagne, and hors d'oeuvres, with history exhibits about the county and the region and with displays put up by businesses from the area.
The Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo helped stage it and was to receive the money it raised. The doors opened to everyone on July 24, 1980, at 6650 South Westnedge Avenue in Portage, Michigan.
The Crossroads was an enclosed regional mall on two levels, the first of its kind in the state outside metropolitan Detroit, and Hudson's and JCPenney anchored a first stage of 520,000 square feet.
Celery had grown on that ground.
Construction started on the old fields in late 1977, roughly a mile below Interstate 94, with downtown Kalamazoo about five miles to the north, on a site picked with its highways in mind: I-94 above it and US-131 to the west were the two routes meant to bring the whole Kalamazoo-Portage market to one building.
Dayton Hudson Properties ran the project as managing partner of the development company, with Westcor also taking part, and by January 1980 it had a second stage on the calendar.
Sears arrives with the second stage
Sears opened on the mall's south end in September 1982.
The grand opening even came with a souvenir: dignitaries received a glass dish bearing a drawing of the new store.
Dayton Hudson Properties had scheduled the second stage in January 1980: another 220,000 square feet, due in 1982.
Sears was completed and opened that year.
The mall's traffic was already part of Portage's road planning before the first stage opened.
In August 1979 the transportation committee of the Kalamazoo County Chamber of Commerce asked that the Romence Road extension, east from South Westnedge, be made a priority, pointing to congestion already on the street and to the mall on its way.
The new road was expected to give shoppers a second east-west route and to ease the Westnedge and Milham intersection, and in January 1980 the developer counted a future Romence entrance as important to the second stage.
A public hearing in January 1981 changed the road itself.
After the comments and another review, its preferred route was redrawn before construction.
Mervyn's becomes the fourth anchor
On July 5, 1985, Japanese irises ringed the mall's center pool.
The Southwestern Michigan Iris Society held its 11th show there, five exhibitors set their blooms out around the water, and Ikebana arrangers gave demonstrations by the fountain.
The society returned in July 1988 for its 14th show, this time folded into a national convention of Japanese iris growers that drew 130 participants, and the flower arranging moved into the sunken area beside the fountain.
Another show was scheduled at the mall for July 1989.
Behind the mall, United Artists opened Movies at Crossroads 10 on December 11, 1987, ten screens in a building of their own outside the enclosed concourses.
The mall itself took on a fourth anchor in 1988, when a building went up for Mervyn's, and the store opened there in February 1989.
That gave The Crossroads four department stores: Hudson's, JCPenney, Sears, and Mervyn's.
A food court upstairs and every anchor filled
A double-decker carousel stood upstairs, in a food court of about 20,000 square feet that the mall gained in 2001.
Quick-service restaurants were gathered there in one place, and with the carousel among them the upper level became a family destination apart from the department stores.
A new owner paid for that room. In January 1999 General Growth Properties bought the whole mall for about $68 million.
In 2001 General Growth spent about $18 million renovating the entire building, and the food court came out of that work.
One of the original anchors took a new name the same year, when Hudson's became Marshall Field's.
Two anchors changed again in 2006, and neither building stood empty for long.
Mervyn's closed its Portage store in January, when the chain left Michigan, and Burlington moved into the building later that year on a lease that began in August.
In September 2006 Marshall Field's became Macy's, which left the mall with Macy's, JCPenney, Sears, and Burlington.
In Kalamazoo the enclosed competition went the other way.
Maple Hill Mall, open since 1971, closed and was torn down in the 2000s, and an open-air shopping center, Maple Hill Pavilion, was built on its site.
The Crossroads kept its stores: in 2013 nearly 99 percent of the mall was occupied, and in 2017 it held 97 retailers, Build-A-Bear Workshop, Pandora, Forever 21, and Zumiez among them.
Open-air centers grow along South Westnedge
South Westnedge Avenue had become Portage's main shopping street in the second half of the 20th century, and the commercial district around the mall stretched from Interstate 94 south to Centre Avenue and from US-131 east to Portage Road.
In the early 1990s Southland, another Portage shopping center, was turned from an enclosed mall into an open-air power center of large stores.
By 2013 the nearest other regional mall was Lakeview Square in Battle Creek, about 24 miles to the east.
RiverTown Crossings and Woodland Mall, both in the Grand Rapids area, were roughly 50 to 55 miles away. Closer to Portage, the number of power centers and big-box stores had grown.
The Crossroads stayed enclosed. In 2013 escalators joined its two levels, an elevator stood at center court, and the building had lounges with soft seating, a nursing room, accessible restrooms, and family restrooms.
In 2020 the mall covered about 770,000 square feet, more than any other shopping center in southwest Michigan, and commercial floor space along the corridor ran to several million square feet.
Sears and Burlington leave the mall
In March 2019 the double-decker carousel was taken out of the food court, leaving the upper level without the ride that had stood there for most of the decade, and no replacement was announced.
That August, Sears put its Portage store, open on the south end since 1982, on a list of closings across the country.
Liquidation sales were set to begin in mid-August, the auto center was to shut later that month, and the store itself had a late-October closing date.
Brookfield Properties had owned the mall since its 2018 purchase of General Growth Properties, and it was left with a two-level anchor building and no store in it.
In 2020 more than 90 retailers were trading in the mall, while the Sears building stood empty and was marketed for reuse.
Burlington left for the competition.
In September 2021 it announced that it would relocate to Maple Hill Pavilion, into the building Value City Furniture had used, on the old Maple Hill Mall site.
The move went through, and a second anchor building at The Crossroads had no tenant.
The mall sold in January 2022 for about $25 million.
The buyers, Kohan Retail Investment Group among them, held the property through a parent company called Kohan Summit Crossroads Realty Holding LLC.
General Growth Properties had paid about $68 million for it in 1999.
Portage plans homes around the mall
By 2023 the City of Portage was counting many empty spaces inside the mall, along with a surplus of commercial floor space on South Westnedge and property values at the mall and around it that had fallen over the previous decade.
The city answered with a Crossroads Area Transition Plan in 2024, and in August 2024 the Planning Commission voted eight to zero to adopt a new master plan for Portage.
The master plan named the mall an opportunity site.
It called for stores to stay along South Westnedge, with housing beside them, while the mall became one master-planned district linked to the neighborhoods on its west side and to trails and open space to the south and east.
The plan guided zoning and approved no project.
The new zoning came in pieces. In April 2025 the city expected the complete code by May 2026.
Its first module, covering residential districts, was approved in June 2026 and took effect that August.
Zap Zone XL fills the Sears building
In January 2025 plans were announced to turn the empty Sears into Zap Zone XL, an entertainment center across both of its floors.
The opening was first expected in mid-2025.
It slipped to a February 9, 2026 target and then to February 16, the day Zap Zone XL opened with laser tag, mini-golf, skating, an arcade, and food service among its attractions, more than six years after Sears left.
The Crossroads is open. JCPenney and Macy's trade from the two buildings the mall opened with, and national chains and local shops do business along both levels of corridors.
The theater United Artists opened behind the mall is now Celebration Cinema Crossroads, with 15 screens and an IMAX auditorium.
Upstairs, the food court doubles as a public hall, and the city has booked it for a community resources expo with booths on housing, food, transportation, and legal help.
The mall belongs to Crossroads Mall Realty Holding LLC, and Summit Properties USA lists it in its retail portfolio.
No demolition or redevelopment of the mall has been approved, and the second part of the city's zoning rewrite, which would allow housing on underused parking lots and commercial land around the mall, is still in draft.
Walkers are let in an hour before the stores open, in a mall that had four department stores by 1989.
The building Sears opened in 1982 now holds go-karts and bowling lanes, and the one built for Mervyn's stands empty.
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