In 1972 Newman's left the downtown Joplin building it had used since 1910 and reopened in a new mall on Range Line Road. By 2000 Northpark Mall had six anchors.
In 2009 Vintage Stock moved into part of the old Montgomery Ward building. Inside, customers could play video games or coin-operated arcade machines, and the store had a stage for concerts.
Then the anchors went dark one by one. Sears locked its doors at noon in February 2020, and both Macy's stores closed in 2021.
In August 2026 the 14-screen cinema next to the mall ran its final showings. In October a planning firm hired by the city put its first ideas for more than 150 acres around Northpark in front of the council.
Newman's leaves Main Street for Range Line
Newman's had sold from the same building at 602 S. Main Street in downtown Joplin since 1910.
In 1972 the hometown department store left it behind and reopened inside Northpark Mall, a new shopping center at 101 N. Range Line Road, near Third Street on the east side of Joplin, Missouri.
It did not move alone.
Two national chains, Montgomery Ward and JCPenney, took the other department-store spaces, and the mall started life with three of them under one roof.
Ward's was trading early.
By June 1972 the chain was already doing business at 208 Northpark Mall, so part of the new center was open for business by early that summer.
The road outside changed with the mall.
During Northpark's rise and in the years that followed, Range Line grew into the city's main retail corridor, a long run of big stores, restaurants, and hotels that shoppers reached by car.
The campus of Missouri Southern State University lay to the northeast, on the far side of that corridor.
Famous-Barr and Venture build an east wing
Before Northpark could grow east, the ground under it had to be checked.
Twice in May 1986, engineers examined the undermined ground beneath two planned stores, a Venture and a Famous-Barr, so the expansion could be designed around the old mine ground below them before construction began.
The east wing was finished in 1987. It brought both chains in as anchors and gave the mall a food court.
The store that had come out from Main Street did not keep its name much longer: late in the 1980s, Heer's took over the Newman's store.
More big boxes arrived after that.
Sears joined the lineup, Famous-Barr opened a second store for home goods, and the Venture building took Shopko's name.
By 2000 Northpark counted six anchors, Famous-Barr, the Famous-Barr Home Store, JCPenney, Sears, Shopko, and Montgomery Ward, spread across a little more than a million square feet.
It had opened with three.
Montgomery Ward's building splits in two
By 2007 two of those six anchor buildings stood empty: the one Montgomery Ward had used and the one Shopko had used.
Northpark had a new owner by then.
CBL bought the mall in November 2004 for $79.1 million and finished a renovation in 2006, the same year both Famous-Barr stores became Macy's.
From then on the mall had two Macy's, a main store and a home store, in separate buildings.
CBL rebuilt 90,700 square feet of the old Ward's building as two stores and opened them in October 2007, a TJ Maxx and a Steve & Barry's.
Steve & Barry's did not last.
By October 2009 its space belonged to Vintage Stock, a game, movie, and music chain that had started in Joplin in 1980.
The new store took more than 40,000 square feet and added 26 jobs.
Inside, the entertainment ran from a concert stage and quarter-fed arcade machines to eight video game stations, a large projection display, and couches.
The Shopko building had found no new use.
Classes in the Shopko box, then Dunham's
That use came out of a disaster.
On May 22, 2011, a tornado destroyed Joplin High School along with more than half of the space where the district held its classes, and the district turned to the long-empty Shopko building at Northpark as one of its stopgap campuses.
Crews built a school inside the retail shell from June through August and finished the work in 55 business days.
On August 17, 2011, 87 days after the tornado, the mall campus opened for 11th and 12th graders, with room for 1,200 students.
Portable walls divided the old sales floor into six learning communities of about 200 students each.
There was a school store with a coffee bar, laptop work areas, and plenty of power outlets.
The kitchen and the science labs could not go inside in the time available, so they went into modular buildings outside.
By the end of 2012, Joplin High School counted among the mall's anchors, beside JCPenney, both Macy's stores, Sears, TJ Maxx, Vintage Stock, the Hollywood movie theater, and a new Jo-Ann Fabrics whose lease had begun that August.
The last day of classes at the mall came on May 30, 2014.
Students moved to a new high school that fall, and by July 2015 crews were taking the school's fittings out so the box could hold a store again.
Dunham's Sports opened there with a ribbon cutting at 9 a.m. on Friday, November 11, 2016.
The first 100 adults got T-shirts that day, caps on Saturday, and gift cards on Sunday, one of them worth $500.
A sales tax rebuilds the parking lot
In June 2014, at the owners' request, Joplin created its first community improvement district around the mall, with a 1 percent sales tax on purchases inside it to pay for about $10 million in work.
The old parking lot was torn out and rebuilt.
New lights went up, landscaping went in, and part of a walking trail was built to meet the trail coming from Missouri Southern.
The extra cent on the dollar applied everywhere inside the district, from the department stores to lunch.
Photographs of local veterans lined the north wing's Hall of Honor.
The food court, meanwhile, had more than a dozen counters, including Chick-fil-A, Burger King, and Orange Julius.
By 2024 the district had enough to cover what it still owed. The owners asked the city to end it in June 2024.
At the hearing in July, no one spoke for the request and no one spoke against it, and the council moved it forward 8-0.
By October 2024 the tax was gone. The lot, the lights, and the trail to campus stayed.
Sears and both Macy's stores close
The mall was still adding names late in the decade.
H&M opened in November 2017, and at the end of 2018 the larger stores ran from Dunham's and H&M to JCPenney, both Macy's stores, and Sears.
Sears went first. The chain put the Joplin store on a national closing list in November 2019 and set the last day for February 16, 2020.
It never made it that far.
With little merchandise left and markdowns reaching 75 percent, the store shut at noon on Sunday, February 2, two weeks early.
Sears owned that building itself, so the empty box did not belong to the mall's owner.
Macy's followed.
In January 2021 the company named Joplin among a national round of closings, and the liquidation sales started before the month was out.
Both Macy's buildings closed during 2021.
Jo-Ann Fabrics lasted until 2025.
In February of that year, after the chain decided to wind down all its stores, the Joplin store joined the closing list.
The chain's last stores were scheduled to close by May 31, 2025, and by the end of that year the Joplin store was gone.
The Macy's building becomes Joplin Expo
Joplin had been without a convention and trade center since its old one closed in 2018.
In February 2025 plans for Joplin Expo put the new event center in the main Macy's building at the southeast corner of the mall.
Organizers were aiming for midsummer and already had August bookings.
On August 2, 2025, JoMoCon took over the former store from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Its program mixed a Smash Bros. Melee bracket and live-action role play with costumes, live shows, tabletop and video games, plus more than 85 vendors.
By February 2026 Exponent Ventures owned 9.46 acres at the southeast corner, including the former Macy's building and its parking.
Inside, about 40,000 square feet went to trade shows, another 10,000 to a ballroom, and another section to shops.
Four entrances served the building, including one from the mall. That month it hosted the Joplin Home Show.
In May 2026 Unique Boutiques cut the ribbon on its grand opening in the shops section.
The cinema closes and the city studies the site
Regal Northstar, the 14-screen movie theater beside the mall, showed its last films on August 20, 2026, with no new use announced for the building.
The city is weighing what the whole area around the mall could become.
In June 2026 the council voted 9-0 to hire a planning firm, Place Foundry, for up to $217,500 to study the land around Missouri Southern and the mall.
On October 19, 2026, the firm showed the council three directions for more than 150 acres: more stores and commercial space, homes or a campus village, or an entertainment and event district, each with better walking links between the university and the mall over the Turkey Creek trail.
None of them has been approved.
For shoppers, the mall is open.
CBL owns and runs it, JCPenney, Dunham's, TJ Maxx, and H&M are among its stores, and Chick-fil-A serves in the food court.
Inside the old main Macy's, Unique Boutiques sells goods from about 130 vendors from Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma.
At the end of 2025, about three-quarters of the space for smaller shops was leased, down from 86 percent at the end of 2018, and neither the Sears building nor the second Macy's had a new tenant.
For the 2025 holidays Santa was scheduled at Center Court from mid-November to Christmas Eve, with a Dear Santa mailbox and pet photos on Mondays.
In 2000 the mall had six anchors across a little more than a million square feet.
The old main Macy's now books trade shows and ballroom events. Of the six, one still sells.
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