Two buildings are still standing on the former Chesterfield Mall site. One belonged to Macy's; the other to Dillard's. All the other parts, such as the hallways, specialty stores, food court, and theater, were taken down between October 2024 and spring 2025.
Chesterfield Mall opened in 1976 as one of the dominant regional shopping centers in west St. Louis County and held that position for most of its run.
The two surviving structures are not preserved as memorials. They are planned for reuse: a modernized Dillard's, retail space, and project offices. The development around them is called Downtown Chesterfield.
How a mall that once had four department stores ends up replaced by a street grid, a central park, and the shells of two of those same stores is a specific kind of story, and the details matter.
Chesterfield Mall Opens With Stix, Sears, and a Garden Room
The Stix, Baer & Fuller store that anchored the west end of the new mall included a sit-down restaurant called the Garden Room.
Department-store restaurants of that era gave shoppers a reason to stay, a built-in pause between floors and between stores.
Stix occupied 198,000 square feet and carried the full weight of a St. Louis department-store name transplanted to a suburb roughly twenty miles from downtown.
Chesterfield Mall opened on September 1, 1976, developed by the Richard E. Jacobs Group, a Cleveland-based company that also built Jamestown Mall in north St. Louis County.
The property was a two-level enclosed shopping center with Sears and Stix as twin anchors, specialty shops along the interior corridors, and thousands of surface parking spaces for drivers arriving from Interstate 64 and Clarkson Road.
West St. Louis County was gaining population steadily through the 1970s, and Chesterfield was emerging as a commercial center for the suburbs expanding west of the city.
Chesterfield Mall Adds a Cinema and Three More Anchors
In 1978, a four-screen cinema opened in a separate building near Stix, making the mall an evening destination as well as a daytime shopping center.
The cinema operated until 2000.
Famous-Barr arrived as a third anchor on the east end in 1983. Famous-Barr was one of the most familiar names in St. Louis retail.
In 1984, Dillard's acquired the Stix, Baer & Fuller chain and converted the Chesterfield store.
The Stix name was gone; so was the Garden Room. Dillard's was a national chain based in Little Rock.
Famous-Barr opened a new anchor building adjacent to its earlier location in 1995, and JCPenney moved into the older Famous-Barr space.
A renovation refreshed the mall's interior in 1996. By then, Chesterfield Mall had four department-store anchors, the cinema, and 150 stores.
The mall drew from affluent western suburbs and a regional trade area that stretched well beyond Chesterfield.
Westfield Buys the Mall, Then Rewrites One End of It
Westfield, an Australian mall company, acquired Chesterfield Mall in 2002 and renamed it Westfield Shoppingtown Chesterfield.
The Shoppingtown branding was applied across Westfield's U.S. holdings and later dropped.
JCPenney closed in 2005.
Westfield demolished the former anchor building and rebuilt that section not as a new department store but as a different mix: smaller shops, a food court, restaurant spaces, Borders, The Cheesecake Factory, and a 14-screen AMC Megaplex.
The Cheesecake Factory opened on February 27, 2006, in a 9,600-square-foot restaurant with 260 seats.
The AMC, on the east end, took on the evening-entertainment role that the four-screen cinema near Stix had once held on the west end.
A department-store anchor had been replaced by a food court and a movie theater. That replacement was not a turnaround.
CBL & Associates Properties acquired the mall from Westfield in 2007, assuming a $140 million loan secured by the property as part of a larger transaction involving four St. Louis-area malls with a gross value of $1.03 billion.
CBL's Ownership and the Outlet Centers That Arrived Next Door
When Northwest Plaza, a major north-county enclosed mall, closed in 2010, Chesterfield Mall became the largest enclosed shopping mall in the St. Louis metropolitan area by retail floor area, surpassing remaining centers such as West County Center, South County Center, Mid Rivers Mall, and St. Clair Square.
Chesterfield Mall's 1.3 million square feet had been an asset when anchor stores and mid-market chains were expanding; by the mid-2010s, the same footage had become hard to keep occupied.
Two outlet centers opened in Chesterfield Valley in August 2013. Taubman Prestige Outlets opened on August 2, and St. Louis Premium Outlets opened on August 22.
Both were within a few miles of the mall and drew from the same trade area.
Retailers that once would have committed to enclosed-mall leases had new alternatives in the same city.
CBL's financial position deteriorated through the mid-2010s. By the third quarter of 2016, Chesterfield Mall had entered receivership pending foreclosure. Management transferred to Madison Marquette.
Foreclosure was finalized in June 2017, and C-III Capital Partners held the property briefly before Hull Property Group bought it in 2018 for $13 million.
The original 2007 loan secured by the property had been $140 million, a non-recourse loan specifically secured by Chesterfield Mall that predated a broad collapse in enclosed-mall valuations.
Four Anchors Gone: Flooding, Closures, and Macy's Exit
In September 2016, a water main break flooded the Dillard's store. Dillard's closed for what was initially described as temporary repairs.
It never reopened. The building sat vacant on the mall's west end while Dillard's kept its property interests.
By late 2017, AMC had downgraded the theater to AMC Classic. American Girl closed in February 2018.
Sears announced in May 2018 that its Chesterfield Mall location would close in a national round of closures; the store shut on September 2, 2018.
The Staenberg Group had been assembling land for a redevelopment project, and the former Sears property became part of that effort in spring 2018.
Famous-Barr had become Macy's when the May Department Stores nameplate left St. Louis retailing.
The Chesterfield Macy's occupied 200,000 square feet and was the mall's last operating full-line department store after Sears closed.
In September 2022, Macy's began liquidation sales. The store closed on November 11, 2022, and Macy's shifted to a 32,000-square-foot Market by Macy's at nearby Chesterfield Commons.
For the first time since opening in 1976, the enclosed mall had no department-store anchor.
Sports in the Corridors: Chesterfield Mall's Final Years
With the anchors gone, vacant sections of the building were repurposed for badminton and pickleball.
The floor space that had once connected shoppers to Sears, Dillard's, and Macy's now served recreational leagues, even as the larger fight over the site's future moved into the courts and the city council.
The city of Chesterfield approved a public subsidy worth more than $300 million in December 2022, over the objections of the Parkway and Rockwood school districts, which warned the plan could cost them tens or hundreds of millions in lost revenue over time.
A state review later found no fraud but concluded the justification for the subsidy was poorly constructed and that the redevelopment may not have needed public money to proceed.
Dillard's filed a legal challenge in December 2022. AMC Classic Chesterfield 14 closed permanently in May 2023.
Dillard's and the city settled in June 2024, preserving the former Dillard's building and keeping Dillard's in the redevelopment plan.
V-Stock, which had replaced Borders in the east wing, closed on July 28, 2024. The Cheesecake Factory closed on August 18, 2024.
The entire enclosed mall closed permanently on August 31, 2024. The mall had operated for forty-eight years.
October 2024: Chesterfield Mall Comes Down
Demolition began on October 15, 2024. Crews moved across the 96-acre property through fall and winter, clearing the enclosed mall section by section.
By December 2024, major portions had been reduced to scrap and debris, while recognizable pieces of the former AMC theater area and the Cheesecake Factory section were still visible.
Demolition continued into 2025. By April, the enclosed mall had been cleared except for the former Macy's and Dillard's buildings, which were left standing for reuse.
The former Dillard's building is planned for modernization and a return of the Dillard's store around August 2027.
The former Macy's building is planned for retail reuse and other project functions. Those two structures are the only undemolished pieces of the original mall.
Downtown Chesterfield: What's Being Built on 96 Acres
Downtown Chesterfield, the name The Staenberg Group gave the replacement project, is planned as a mixed-use district rather than another enclosed mall.
The plan calls for up to 4.5 million square feet of development on the former mall site: up to 2,363 residential units, ground-floor retail, restaurants, hotel uses, a renovated Macy's building, a modernized Dillard's, a 3.31-acre central park, public plazas, sidewalks, bike paths, and a new internal street network.
The new design reverses the inward-facing logic of the original mall by replacing its enclosed corridors with a street grid and ground-floor storefronts that open outward.
The project is described at $2 billion for the former mall site; the broader regional area, including adjacent projects, has been described in the $3 billion range.
Site grading and utility work began in late 2025. The infrastructure phase is expected to run through summer 2027, with vertical construction to follow. The first Downtown Chesterfield residents are targeted for 2029.
In May 2026, the Chesterfield City Council approved expansion of the project's Special Business District on a tie-breaking vote; the district is authorized to levy up to 85 cents per $100 of assessed value, though it was not yet collecting taxes.
What Chesterfield had in 1976 was a two-level enclosed mall with a Sears on one end and a Stix with a Garden Room on the other, and a cinema two years behind it.
What replaces it is a street grid with a park at the center and housing above retail where the corridors used to run.
The two former department-store buildings still standing are the only physical connection between what the site was and what it is becoming.
