Standing at Route 17 and East Ridgewood Avenue in Paramus, New Jersey, is a shopping center that no longer has an enclosed walkway.
Fashion Center opened on February 15, 1967, with Lord & Taylor at one end and B. Altman at the other. The enclosed walkway between them held 25 specialty shops. B. Altman closed in 1990.
The walkway went next. By the end of 2009, the public mall corridor had been closed off, and Lord & Taylor shut on February 27, 2021, after 54 years in the building.
Today Barnes & Noble, T.J. Maxx, Best Buy, and Applebee's are open. The old department-store floors still have no publicly named replacement anchor.
Fashion Center opened in February 1967
Fashion Center opened on February 15, 1967, on 33 acres of celery farmland at Route 17 and East Ridgewood Avenue in Paramus, New Jersey.
Lord & Taylor anchored one end at 135,000 square feet. B. Altman held the other at 176,000 square feet.
Between them ran an enclosed corridor 1,500 feet long, more than a quarter mile of walking from one department store to the other, with 25 specialty shops along the way.
The inside was built to look expensive: chandeliers, fountains, seating, and a curved stair that brought shoppers down from the rooftop parking deck.
Rogers-Peet, Ann Taylor, Georg Jensen, and a Schrafft's restaurant were among the mall's tenants.
Competition on all sides of Route 17
Fashion Center was late to its own market.
Garden State Plaza and Bergen Mall had both opened in 1957, minutes away, and Paramus Park arrived in 1974 with a wider layout.
A freestanding building went up in the parking field around 1970 for Best & Co., which liquidated before it could open under that name.
Britt's took the space, then a B. Altman home-furnishings operation.
And the center never got Sundays.
Bergen County still enforces New Jersey's blue laws, and Paramus adds its own closing rules on top, so Fashion Center has always sold on a six-day week against competitors elsewhere selling on seven.
The anchor emptied, then the mall did
B. Altman's parent company went into bankruptcy, and in November 1989 a federal court approved liquidation of six of its seven stores.
The Paramus store was gone by January 29, 1990.
Fashion Center had been designed around two department stores pulling shoppers along the full length of the corridor, and with one of them gone, half the walk lost its destination.
No department store took the space. In 1996 the empty building was cut up for large-format tenants, including Bed Bath & Beyond and T.J. Maxx.
Best Buy followed in 2003 and absorbed part of the old interior route. Lord & Taylor sealed its mall entrance in 2004.
The last public entrance closed in late 2008, and Fairway Market opened a 50,000-square-foot store on March 25, 2009, its first in New Jersey, in what was now a strip of big boxes sharing a lot.
Lord & Taylor stayed 54 years, then left
Lord & Taylor outlasted all of it: the loss of B. Altman, the subdivision of the south anchor, and the removal of the mall it had opened with.
In September 2011 the company tried something new in Paramus: the first stand-alone Lord & Taylor Home store in the chain, 23,000 square feet of furniture, rugs, bedding, and kitchen goods.
It closed in 2013. World Market took the space in 2016.
The parent company entered bankruptcy in 2020, and on August 27 the retailer announced it would liquidate every store it had.
Paramus stayed open through the wind-down and closed on February 27, 2021, after 54 years. Nothing full-line has replaced it.
Two grocers in the same box, both gone
Fairway filed for Chapter 11 in January 2020. Amazon bought the leases on the Paramus and Woodland Park stores for $1.5 million together.
Fairway kept selling in Paramus through the first weeks of the pandemic, then closed for good on May 15, 2020.
Amazon took more than two years to open the replacement.
Amazon Fresh opened at 30 East Ridgewood Avenue on July 21, 2022, the first in the state, running Just Walk Out checkout: sensors logged what you picked up and billed you on the way to the door.
Amazon announced on January 27, 2026, that it was shutting the Fresh and Go chains. The Paramus store's last day was February 1.
The Atrium lost two-thirds of its value
The old Altman building had its own owner and its own name.
Olshan Properties marketed it as the Atrium at Fashion Center after a renovation that added a three-story, 3,800-square-foot entrance and escalators between the second and third floors.
Crews building it hit contaminated soil, groundwater higher than expected, and asbestos.
Bed Bath & Beyond closed there in January 2023, three months before its parent filed for bankruptcy, and occupancy dropped to 71.4 percent.
The mortgage went to special servicing that same month.
A 2023 appraisal put the building at $13.5 million. It had been appraised at $40.4 million when the loan was issued.
Buy Buy Baby's upstairs store began winding down in late 2024, and talks with Ross and Grocery Outlet in early 2025 over the empty 48,000-square-foot ground floor produced no announced lease.
What's open at Fashion Center in 2026
One building in the parking field has run through six tenants since the chain it was built for liquidated. A bookstore has it now.
Barnes & Noble has been at 634 Route 17 since November 24, 2023, in the space that was Toys "R" Us until 2018 and Big Lots until 2023.
T.J. Maxx and Best Buy still hold the old Altman side, and Applebee's sits at 17 East Ridgewood Avenue.
The complex covers 500,000 square feet, marketed now as one property under Willner Realty & Development Corp. The Atrium's three floors, 180,000 square feet, are on offer with no anchor named.
On Sundays the blue laws close the stores, and Applebee's keeps serving.
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