The Orchards Mall is an enclosed shopping mall just outside Benton Harbor, in Benton Township, Michigan.
For most of its life, it worked the way these places did: department stores at the ends, smaller shops between them, a food court in the middle, and a parking lot wrapped around the whole thing.
Two things set its later years apart. The building is now marketed for sale as essentially worthless, its value resting in the land beneath it.
And thousands of gulls moved into the grounds, a problem complicated by the fact that the birds are federally protected. It is, in short, a 600,000-square-foot building that the market would rather see gone than reused.
The Orchards Mall's Sunken Floor and Brown-Tiled 1979 Debut
At the JCPenney end of the building, the floor dropped into a sunken common area where the mall staged its seasonal Santa visits.
The tile was shiny brown, the seating was orange fabric, and the rest of the interior carried the brown and orange palette of the late 1970s.
The Orchards Mall opened on October 24, 1979, a single-level enclosed center in Benton Charter Township just outside Benton Harbor, with Sears at one end and JCPenney at the other.
Large surface parking wrapped the building on all sides. A food court ran from the early years, which made the place a spot to eat and gather rather than only shop.
Walgreens held one of the largest non-department spaces, and York Steak House was among the best-known of the early restaurants.
The Orchards Mall Began as Pipestone Mall, Minus Its Anchor
The center carried a different name before a single store opened. In 1974, the Meyer C. Weiner Company proposed a shopping center called Pipestone Mall, set along the Pipestone Road corridor near Interstate 94.
Hudson's came up as a possible anchor in March 1976, then dropped out of the plan, and Westcor acquired the land that August.
An early Kmart-anchored strip center and other retail were already forming the corridor the mall would join.
By 1977, Sears and JCPenney were confirmed, and talks for a third department store were underway, but the mall opened with two anchors instead of three.
The third would not arrive for thirteen years.
Both Sears and JCPenney had run stores in downtown Benton Harbor before the move, and pulling them out to a township site followed the national pattern of department stores leaving downtown for parking lots and highway ramps.
Inside the Orchards Mall: Chess King, Camelot Music, KB Toys
Between the anchors ran the chain-store directory of the era. Gap, County Seat, Chess King, Casual Corner, Lerner New York, and The Buckle sold clothes.
Kinney Shoes, Baker Shoes, Thom McAn, Famous Footwear, and Foot Locker sold shoes.
Camelot Music and Record Town sold records, Spencer's and KB Toys and Banner Books and RadioShack covered the rest, and Fox Jewelers and Gordon's sold rings.
Hallmark and Carlton Cards handled cards. The food court and snack counters added The Original Cookie Company, Sherman Ice Cream, Hickory Farms, Subway, and the Great Steak and Potato Company.
Walgreens left for a larger off-mall location in the early to mid-1990s, and its drugstore space sat empty for years afterward.
KB Toys, one of the original-era chains, closed in 2004.
The 1992 Renovation That Ended the Orange Era
Elder-Beerman opened in 1992 as the third department store, and the work around it became the mall's strongest reinvestment.
The brown and orange finishes came out. A lighter scheme of white, mauve, and teal went in.
The sunken event area near JCPenney was filled to a level floor, the orange fabric seating was hauled out and replaced with new benches, palm trees were added, and the food court got new tables and chairs.
The addition turned a two-anchor property into a full three-anchor regional mall, the most complete lineup the center would ever carry.
With a brighter interior, the mall matched the look of early-1990s regional centers and held a real share of Berrien County retail.
Owners in Quick Succession: General Growth to Kohan
General Growth Properties took over management in 1999.
Around 2000, several stores opened or were remodeled, including Bath & Body Works and Finish Line, and the township approved a tax reduction tied to the property.
General Growth sold to Sequoia Investments of Eureka, California, in 2002, and tenant churn was already showing.
Kohan Retail Investment Group of Great Neck, New York, bought the mall from Sequoia in December 2014 and folded it into a portfolio of struggling centers.
By 2015, the building held 29 operating stores out of 63 retail spaces, an occupancy rate of 46 percent.
Management floated renovation ideas, more local tenants, and even removing part of the common-area roof, but none of them held.
The Anchors Fall: Sears 2009, Carson's 2018, JCPenney 2019
Sears closed its full-line store on September 18, 2009, and its box stood empty for years. Overflow Church bought the Sears building in 2012.
A smaller Sears Hometown later opened in a former FYE space and closed in July 2017, never a true replacement for the original.
Elder-Beerman had become Carson's in 2011 under the Bon-Ton family, and Carson's closed in April 2018 after Bon-Ton announced 42 closures.
That left JCPenney as the only traditional anchor. JCPenney announced its own closing in March 2019 as one of 24 stores in a national round, and the Benton Township store closed at 5 p.m.
on July 5, 2019. After that afternoon, the mall had no department-store anchor and no original anchor left.
Shut-Off Water, Unpaid Taxes, and Thousands of Gulls
In early 2018, on-site management promised to patch the parking-lot potholes, add events, and fill empty storefronts.
The interior still held a U.S. Post Office branch, Doctor ZZZZ'Z Mattress Center, Dave Carlock's Funkin' Rock School, and Art Sol alongside JCPenney, Carson's, JOANN Fabrics, and Bath & Body Works.
That June, the water was cut off over unpaid bills, and the building's occupancy was briefly revoked, though JCPenney stayed open through it.
The property went to an online auction the same year with a $2.5 million reserve that the bidding cleared, and delinquent tax and utility matters delayed the closing until Durga LLC completed the purchase late in the year.
The last national names then peeled away.
Bath & Body Works moved to Fairplain Plaza in August 2020, and JOANN Fabrics, which had finally filled the old Walgreens space, opened a new nearby store in July 2022 and emptied its mall location.
Inside, the remaining tenants worked around roof leaks, mold, and unreliable heating and cooling across large dark stretches of the building.
Outside, the property drew thousands of ring-billed gulls. By 2022, the birds had colonized the site, and gull carcasses around the building became a public concern.
Because ring-billed gulls are federally protected, control was limited.
Federal approval allowed culling 200 eggs and chicks, and decoys and spinners were tried.
The gulls returned to attention in 2024, when state wildlife testing was used to check the cause, and county health officials found no H5N1 avian flu in the area that year.
The taxes ran behind for years. On December 29, 2023, the owner paid more than $350,000 to cover delinquent bills through 2022 and stop foreclosure on those years.
The 2023 taxes were paid in late March 2026, just before foreclosure would have advanced. The 2024 and 2025 bills, $198,000 and $197,000, stayed unpaid.
The township issued condemnation correspondence for the building on August 12, 2025, and an October 10, 2025, appeal hearing was adjourned so both sides could work toward a remediation plan.
A $7.5 Million Listing for a Building Worth Almost Nothing
By 2023, two redevelopment concepts had reached township officials.
One was an estimated $40 million overhaul that would shrink the retail footprint, add apartments and single-family housing, and build a convention center.
The other was a storage and logistics use. Both pointed to the same fact: the enclosed mall was far too large for the retail left in the market.
Zoning blocked the housing idea, since the township did not want to rezone its largest commercial district for a residential plan, and no site plan was ever submitted.
The U.S. Postal Service finalized its decision on March 25, 2025, to move its retail service off the property because of ongoing maintenance problems.
On April 23, 2026, the property was listed for sale at $7.5 million: 600,000 square feet of building on a 63.8-acre site split into ten parcels, with the building assessed at $1.7 million.
Earlier descriptions had put the enclosed structure anywhere from 528,000 to more than 625,000 square feet.
The existing improvements carried limited contributory value, so the land and what could be built on it mattered more than the building standing there.
In response, the township supervisor pressed for any owner to work with the housing department to bring the building up to code, while leaving room for proposals that fit the zoning.
What Is Gone and What Still Fills the Pipestone Corridor
A few operations outlasted the anchors. Doctor ZZZZ'Z Mattress Center opened in 2004 and kept its lights on as the building emptied around it.
Born Champions Boxing Center trained in another corner, and Open Box Outlet moved into the former JOANN Fabrics space in November 2022 to sell furniture and liquidation goods.
By September 2022, only a handful of operations were left inside a largely vacant building. By 2025, it stood boarded, graffitied, and littered, and by 2026, it was on the market as an abandoned mall.
The retail did not leave Benton Township. It left the building.
Meijer opened just outside the mall in 1980, Lowe's nearby in 1994, and the corridor now holds HomeGoods, Tractor Supply, Hobby Lobby, Starbucks, and Chick-fil-A.
People still shop Pipestone Road every day. They do it in the freestanding stores and strip centers around an enclosed shell that the market now values mainly as ground.
The sunken floor that once held the Santa visits was leveled in the 1992 renovation. The building raised over that era is the part nobody can decide what to do with.
