The Mall of Monroe is an enclosed, one-level mall at 2121 North Monroe Street, in Frenchtown Charter Township just north of Monroe, Michigan. Cafaro companies built it and still run it.
It opened in 1988 as Frenchtown Square Mall, with JCPenney, Sears, and three other anchor stores on its concourse. By 2009 the owner was marketing it under the name it carries now. Every one of those five anchors had closed by 2018.
The original Elder-Beerman had become Carson's, while an Elder-Beerman home store in part of the former Phar-Mor space had become Carson's Home; both shut when their parent company, Bon-Ton, was liquidated.
The anchor list now runs to a cinema, a gym, a self-storage company, a car-service business, and a bar with virtual golf and axe throwing. There isn't a department store on it.
Five anchors and a cinema on North Monroe Street
The cinema was part of the mall from the start. When Frenchtown Square Mall opened in 1988, an eight-screen theater run by Hoyts was attached to it.
A food court filled part of the central common area, so the mall had films and meals in its first year along with its stores.
The Cafaro organization had begun work on the site in 1987.
What it built at 2121 North Monroe Street (M-125), in Frenchtown Charter Township just north of the City of Monroe, Michigan, was a conventional enclosed regional mall, and the same building is still open there under the name The Mall of Monroe.
In 1988 it was a single level of about 620,000 square feet, with an interior concourse running between five anchors.
JCPenney, Sears, Hills, and Elder-Beerman took four of the big stores.
The fifth went to Phar-Mor, and it was the drugstore chain's first location in Michigan.
Monroe County shoppers were already driving to Toledo, and the market was adding other large retail projects: Monroe Factory Shops, an outlet center elsewhere in the area, opened in the late 1980s.
Three anchors leave, and the mall gets a new name
Hills was the first of the five to close, in 1993, five years after the mall opened.
In July 1994 Target moved into the old Hills store and took all of it.
Shoe Dept. arrived in the mall that year as well, and Bath & Body Works came in 1997.
The Phar-Mor box went a different way. Phar-Mor closed in 1995, and its space was split between two retailers.
OfficeMax took one section, and its store had no entrance from the mall concourse.
Elder-Beerman, which already ran one of the original anchors, put a separate home-goods store into another section and had it open by December 1997.
JCPenney kept its store from the 1988 opening until 2004.
Steve & Barry's, a value-apparel chain, moved into the box in 2006 and was gone in 2008, when the whole chain collapsed.
Old Navy left the mall that year too, and Wear District moved into its store.
Around then, Cafaro announced an upgrade of the mall worth about $2 million, and by 2009 the building was being promoted as The Mall of Monroe instead of Frenchtown Square Mall.
Sears closes, and the cinema takes the food court
Regal, which had taken the cinema over from Hoyts, closed it on August 19, 2007, and Phoenix Theatres had it running again before the year was out.
Phoenix upgraded the theater in stages. By March 2014 its auditoriums had reclining seats.
Sears announced in late 2011 that it would close its Monroe store, and the store shut in 2012.
The box then went without a comparable department store for more than a decade.
Part of the old Phar-Mor box did fill: on April 15, 2014, Planet Fitness opened in about 24,000 square feet of the former OfficeMax section, with more than 100 cardio machines and a business that did not depend on people coming to the mall to shop.
The 2016 expansion took Phoenix from eight screens to 12 and replaced the mall's food court with new auditoriums.
One of them was Encore, a large-format room with more than 200 reclining seats, upgraded sound, 4K projection, and a 65-foot-wide screen.
To fit it, the roof over Encore rose from about 22 feet to 35 feet.
Mixed-use plans by 2017, no original anchor by 2018
From 2015 on, national chains left the smaller storefronts, among them Aéropostale, American Eagle, Christopher & Banks, and DEB Shops.
Family & Friends Funland, a children's amusement business, opened in the former Old Navy store late in 2015, and by 2017 former shops also held an arcade and fitness businesses.
By 2017, Cafaro companies were still running the property as the township prepared a new master plan.
Monroe Factory Shops was down to one retail tenant by then.
The township's 2017 master plan designated the property for mixed use while saying an operating mall remained desirable.
If the indoor mall failed, the township envisioned remaking the property as a township center with retail, offices, housing, public space, and streets connecting through the site.
The concept could keep the mall building, although the plan said redevelopment probably would not.
Both Elder-Beerman stores, the original anchor and the home store in the old Phar-Mor box, had taken the Carson's name when their parent company, Bon-Ton, changed its department-store banners, and both were closed in 2018 during the Bon-Ton liquidation.
Of the five anchors the mall had opened with, none was left.
In 2019 the former Carson's Home store became Monroe City Church.
Around the same time a CrossFit gym opened near the old Target, and by 2020 Leviathan, a prop and fabrication business, was working out of mall space.
Storage and car businesses in the anchor boxes
Target had closed in the old Hills store in early 2015.
In 2021 that building was sold separately from the rest of the mall to a buyer that planned an auto-parts business there, and Quality Auto Parts occupies it now.
By 2023 work was underway to turn the former Sears into CubeSmart.
About 78,000 square feet became climate-controlled self-storage with roughly 500 units, plus a small shop for moving and storage supplies.
After Steve & Barry's, the old JCPenney box held the Monroe Expo Center from 2013 into 2014 and then Pat Catan's, an arts-and-crafts store that moved over from another Monroe location and stayed until September 2019.
Ragnarok Supply and Motorworks followed in 2023, using the former Pat Catan's space for vehicle service and outdoor retail.
Smaller storefronts were combined and rebuilt as well.
Dirty Birdie was taking shape in February 2024, when 11 of the mall's 27 leasable units were vacant.
Its roughly 6,500-square-foot space combined the former Finish Line and Vanity stores.
When it opened that May, the restaurant and bar shared the space with five axe-throwing bays and six virtual-golf bays.
Monroe Jewelers arrived the same month.
Color Beauty Supply had grown by then from about 1,000 square feet to 8,000, and Katalina's Kitchen and WonderWorld Comics were already operating by 2023.
Shoe Dept. was the mall's longest-leasing tenant in 2024, and Bath & Body Works was still trading there.
Monroe Community Players had set up a studio theater in the mall by 2023, and ULEKstore filled another space with a classic pinball and arcade collection that now runs to 46 pinball machines.
By 2024 Phoenix was drawing more than 4,000 people on a weekend. The mall had 154 registered walkers in 2023.
In 2024, its free concourse-walking program was still running under the enrollment rule introduced in 2005.
Cafaro's list of anchors now names Phoenix Theatres, Ragnarok Motorworks, Planet Fitness, CubeSmart, and Dirty Birdie, and none of them is a department store.
The building also held community events in 2026: Celebration of Children returned in March, and a Skerbeck carnival used the property in June.
By October 2026 none of the offices or housing in the township's 2017 fallback had been built.
That month Phoenix Theatres was selling tickets, and Monroe Community Players was staging its 2026 season in the studio theater.
The enclosed mall is open.
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