Center City Mall opened in 2009 at 301 Main Street in downtown Paterson, New Jersey. It's a three-level shopping and entertainment building over its own parking garage.
The mall was the first phase of a redevelopment program valued at nearly $200 million. Apartments, offices, and a second parking garage were supposed to follow.
They never came. The 2008 crash was one reason the later phases stalled, and a 12,000-seat arena proposed in 2019 sought $40 million in state credits but never got built.
Fabian 8, Paterson's only movie theater, closed in March 2024 after 14 years. Today Marshalls, Burlington, Price Rite, and TD Bank are open, and Passaic County keeps an office inside. The theater is still dark.
Forty years of parking lots on Main Street
In September 1964, Paterson adopted the Central Business District 1-A Urban Renewal Plan for the blocks around Main Street.
Much of that area turned into surface parking, and it still was when the century ran out.
The city tried again in 2002 and asked for proposals, accepting one from Center City Partners LLC in 2003, then rewriting the plan in September 2004 around a mall and atrium at 301 Main Street, on a block bounded by Main, Ward, Smith, and Clark, across from the Passaic County courthouse complex.
Paterson, the Paterson Parking Authority, and Center City Partners signed the agreement on February 24, 2005.
It fixed the order: alternative parking first, then Center City's garage, then the mall and a second garage together, with apartments and offices later.
Center City's garage came first, at $25 million
The garage went in before anything stood above it.
Two levels under the block, roughly 640 spaces, ramps cut in from Smith and Ward streets after Paterson vacated part of the Smith Street right-of-way.
It cost about $25 million and was finished around 2007.
Then came the building above it: three levels, about 320,000 square feet of retail and entertainment space around an interior atrium, under an illuminated dome meant to mark the site.
The mall cost more than $100 million, the first piece of a program valued at nearly $200 million.
Construction ran into the 2008 financial crisis and kept going. A grand opening was advertised for February 2009.
The building was largely finished around June, and the stores arrived in pieces instead: Aroma Mia in July, Street Corner over the summer, Space Port with a grand opening set for November 20, then GNC and Kids' Place in December.
Fabian 8, Marshalls, and a thin crowd
Fabian 8 Cinema opened on the upper level on February 19, 2010, with eight screens and more than 1,100 seats.
The name came from the Fabian Theatre, the movie palace that opened on Church Street in 1925.
Paterson had gone years without a modern commercial theater, and now it had one on a mall's top floor.
Marshalls opened on March 17, 2011, and joined the Urban Enterprise Zone the next month, which let qualifying retailers charge 3.5 percent sales tax against a statewide 7 percent.
Space Port ran two levels of arcade games, mini-bowling, and basketball courts.
The building leased up fast, more than 85 percent by 2012, with 600 jobs projected at full occupancy.
Parts of it stayed quiet anyway through 2011, and some tenants were planning exits while others moved in.
Willowbrook, Garden State Plaza, and Bergen Town Center sat a short drive out of the city, where plenty of Paterson shoppers already went.
The apartments Center City never got
The second garage was never built.
Neither was the 10- to 12-story building with more than 200 apartments, nor the offices meant to put residents and workers within a walk of the stores.
That broke the garage deal.
The revenue split paid the developer two-thirds of the income from both garages above a $1.6 million annual threshold, never reached with one garage.
Center City Partners ended up paying about $800,000 a year in taxes on the garage while the Parking Authority ran it and collected the parking money.
In 2015 it was Paterson's largest assessed taxpayer, at $23,738,900.
So the mall filled space with tenants that brought their own customers.
IHOP opened in June 2015 on a $600,000 state redevelopment loan. Passaic County moved a home-energy office in during 2016.
Price Rite Marketplace opened a 33,000-square-foot supermarket on November 18, 2017, and created 88 jobs.
Grocery shoppers come back weekly. Paterson's 2017 redevelopment plan admitted the mall had never connected with the downtown around it.
A 12,000-seat arena and a $40 million ask
That same 2017 plan permitted a wider set of uses around the mall: arenas, hotels, brew pubs, medical offices, and hydroponic farming.
On May 10, 2019, the developer laid out what it would build with that permission.
A $100 million project: a 12,000-seat indoor arena big enough for a regulation soccer field, a hotel of up to 150 rooms above the mall, 600 more parking spaces beneath the arena, and a skyway into the mall's second floor.
The package offered Paterson about $1.5 million a year.
It needed about $40 million in state tax credits from a limited pool set aside for Paterson.
The mayor's administration directed that money elsewhere. The arena and hotel were never built.
Modell's left, Burlington moved in
In March 2020, state rules closed ordinary retail at the mall while Price Rite and TD Bank stayed open as essential.
Modell's Sporting Goods liquidated that year, and the Paterson store went with it. Burlington took the space by April 2022.
Fabian 8 reopened and never got its audience back. Attendance stayed down while operating costs rose.
In March 2024 the theater announced it would close, and it did at the end of the month, after 14 years. Paterson had no movie theater again.
The garage argument reached court in May 2021, when Center City Partners sued the Paterson Parking Authority.
A four-day trial the following spring produced an order to account for garage revenue since 2009.
In March 2024 the court rewrote the revenue split and ordered the Authority to pay the developer $499,000 over 24 months.
An appeals court vacated that part of the order in July 2025 and sent it back for more findings.
What's open at 301 Main Street now
In July 2025, the New Jersey Appellate Division vacated the part of that order that rewrote the formula and sent the question back to the trial court.
That July, Paterson announced a new operator for the old Fabian space.
Box Office Cinemas planned new releases and Bollywood titles. The fall 2025 target passed.
By June 2026 the operator said it was still waiting on air-conditioning repairs and broken windows before it could repaint and install a concession stand, and put the opening four to six months out.
Downstairs, the building works. Marshalls has been open since 2011, Burlington and Price Rite anchor the retail, and TD Bank runs a full branch.
On May 12, 2026, Passaic County extended its office lease month to month.
People come in for groceries, a bank, and a county office. The theater level stays dark.
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