Lord & Taylor replaced Hahne's at Rockaway Townsquare in 1989 and held that corner for thirty-one years before the chain liquidated entirely in 2020. Sears closed the same year.
Losing two of four original anchors in a single calendar year is the kind of event that gets a mall placed in a certain category: the struggling ones, the ones people write obituaries for.
Rockaway Townsquare is a two-level enclosed mall south of Interstate 80 in Rockaway Township, New Jersey, open since 1977.
Its 2025 occupancy was 97.1 percent. Part of the old Sears is a Raymour & Flanigan furniture store; the rest gave hundreds of thousands of vaccinations. A DICK's House of Sport is listed as coming soon.
Steel Before the Stores
The first thing the builders put up wasn't a sign or a storefront.
It was a 26-foot painted steel sculpture by Rita Blitt, anchored in place at 301 Mount Hope Avenue in 1977 while the rest of Rockaway Townsquare was still being finished around it.
By August 1978, four more Blitt pieces had gone up, including a suspended work made from stainless steel and acrylic discs that caught light differently depending on where you stood.
A developer breaking ground on a suburban New Jersey shopping mall went out and commissioned monumental public art. That detail doesn't fit neatly into any story about the decline of American retail.
Rockaway Townsquare opened that same year on a large tract south of Interstate 80 in Rockaway Township, Morris County, on land that later accounts identify as including former wetland and landfill fill.
The developer was Copaken, White & Blitt, based in Kansas City.
The site sat at the Mount Hope Avenue exit in a way that made it natural for shoppers from three counties (Morris, Sussex, and Warren) to exit 80 and consider the trip reasonable rather than inconvenient.
The Four-Anchor World
The original department-store lineup was Bamberger's, Hahne's, JCPenney, and Sears. Four full-line stores at the ends of four wings.
In 1977, this was not a design experiment; it was the established formula. Department stores generated the foot traffic; inline tenants captured it.
The food, the jewelry, the shoes, the electronics: all of it owed its rent payments to the ability of four big stores to get people out of their cars.
Bamberger's became Macy's in the 1980s. Hahne's lasted until 1989, when it closed, and Lord & Taylor moved in, an upscale replacement for a store that had itself once been considered upscale.
JCPenney held. Sears held. For most of the 1990s, Rockaway Townsquare had a version of every department-store register: affordable, aspirational, classic, and New York-adjacent.
In February 1981, the mall cinema expanded from six to twelve screens, one of the earliest 12-screen multiplex configurations in the country.
The theater history eventually split across two locations and two eras before the AMC Rockaway 16 opened near Rockaway Town Plaza in 2006.
Food Court, Glass Elevator, Marble Floor
A food court arrived in 1991. A glass elevator was added at Center Court sometime in the 1990s. The mall got a cosmetic refresh in 1993.
None of this was unique to Rockaway Townsquare, since enclosed regional malls of that size were broadly chasing similar upgrades, but the food court changed how the building was used.
Dispersed eating became concentrated eating.
A place organized around buying things acquired a zone explicitly for sitting without buying anything, for meeting people, for killing time between when the bus dropped you off and when your parents were done shopping.
Simon Property Group acquired Rockaway Townsquare in 1998. In 2010, the property stood at 1,247,790 square feet and 96.3 percent occupancy, with all four anchor stores in place.
Nothing on paper suggested the next decade would take two of those four names off the building entirely.
The Big Renovation
In May 2007, Simon announced a major overhaul. Work began in phases in 2007 and ran through summer 2008.
The project touched the whole building: new flooring, new lighting, new handrails, new walkway carpet, new directional signage, new seating, and larger restrooms.
Center Court got a marble floor. The food court was rebuilt with new ceilings, new lighting, banquette seating, and landscaping.
Three east-side entrances were redesigned with architectural entry loggias and glass vestibules.
The parking fields along the east got new landscaping and new vehicle-entrance signs.
The renovation landed in the middle of a broader commercial expansion along the I-80 corridor.
Rockaway Towne Plaza had been developed next to the mall in 2005 and 2006, bringing DICK's Sporting Goods, PetSmart, Ulta, Panera Bread, Starbucks, Five Below, Pier 1 Imports, and a 16-screen AMC theater to the surrounding district.
By 2008, the stretch of Mount Hope Avenue approaching the mall had become one of the denser commercial nodes in northwestern New Jersey.
On August 25, 2009, a single-engine Cessna 172 made an emergency landing on a road near the JCPenney parking lot after reporting engine trouble.
Two occupants were taken to a hospital as a precaution. Nobody on the ground was injured.
The Anchors Come Down
The Cheesecake Factory opened at Suite 1013B in December 2017.
By then, Raymour & Flanigan had already arrived in space associated with Sears, a furniture retailer using a former department-store footprint, with its own lower-level exterior entrance and no interior mall connection.
The year 2020 took both remaining traditional anchors that weren't Macy's or JCPenney. Sears contracted and eventually closed during the years of chainwide reductions.
Lord & Taylor liquidated entirely, every store in the chain, including the one at Rockaway Townsquare that had replaced Hahne's in 1989 and held that corner for more than three decades.
The mall reopened on June 29, 2020, after New Jersey allowed indoor retail to resume under pandemic operating rules.
The Sears box sat vacant: enormous, with its own parking access and floor plates that could hold almost anything.
340,000 Doses
On January 8, 2021, the first floor of the former Sears became a COVID-19 vaccination mega-site.
Morris County, Atlantic Health System, and the State of New Jersey converted roughly 30,000 square feet of empty retail floor in under four weeks.
The site opened, serving healthcare workers and first responders with the Moderna vaccine, running at about 1,000 doses per week, with plans to scale.
It scaled fast. By March 16, 2021, the mega-site had administered its 100,000th dose and was running at up to 3,500 people per day.
On May 13, it opened to residents ages 12 to 15 as eligibility expanded. The operation closed on July 16, 2021, after issuing more than 340,000 vaccinations.
The former Sears floor plates, the surface parking, the I-80 exit, the regional familiarity that made the mall a useful meeting point for three counties: every geographic asset the mall had built over four decades worked the same way for a public health operation.
The building's usefulness turned out not to depend on what was being sold inside it.
Services, Entertainment, and a Coming Sign
P.F. Chang's opened in February 2022. In April 2023, My Salon Suite received approval for a 26-suite personal salon layout with common hallways, restrooms, and a washer/dryer room.
In May 2023, Xtreme Energy received approval for an indoor active-play facility of about 25,000 square feet on two levels, with facade changes, accessible parking modifications, and sidewalk work included.
Mystery Room added an escape-room option. Red Robin closed its Rockaway location in November 2025 when its lease ended.
The GameStop at 301 Mount Hope Avenue was among New Jersey locations scheduled to close in January 2026.
By the 2024 reporting year, the mall stood at 1,242,193 square feet and 97.5 percent occupancy, higher than 2010's 96.3 percent, despite two fewer traditional department-store anchors.
Current tenants include Apple, American Eagle, Bath & Body Works, Build-A-Bear Workshop, Foot Locker, Hot Topic, Pandora, Victoria's Secret Beauty, Hollister, Zumiez, Chipotle, Charleys, Popeyes, and more than 140 stores total.
DICK's House of Sport, a large-format experiential sporting-goods concept, is listed on Simon's official page as coming soon.
Walking both levels covers about 1.5 miles, according to the mall's walking guide.
There are stroller rentals, a play area between JCPenney and The Cheesecake Factory, Wi-Fi, and early-morning mall-walking access before stores open.
Lakeland Bus Lines connects the mall to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York. Rockaway Township's Dial-a-Ride service uses it as a recurring stop.
What the Township Is Planning for the Parking Lot
On June 16, 2025, Rockaway Township adopted a Housing Element and Fair Share Plan that placed the Rockaway Mall Area, a 222-acre site south of Interstate 80 encompassing the mall and surrounding properties, in a Regional Business Multifamily Overlay district.
The overlay permits multifamily residential on upper stories, retains commercial and retail uses at ground level, and caps total residential units at 500 with a 20 percent affordable set-aside producing 100 affordable units.
On December 30, 2025, Rockaway Township and Fair Share Housing Center signed a mediation agreement requiring a density increase.
On March 10, 2026, the township adopted Ordinance O-26-03, raising the maximum density from 2.2 to 2.9 dwelling units per acre and increasing the residential cap from 500 to 643 units.
The township's planning documents describe the site as suitable for infill on its extensive parking and pavement areas, with development possible while the mall continues operating.
The zoning is complete. The housing has not been built.
What's Left, What's Gone, What Remains
Bamberger's is Macy's. Hahne's became Lord & Taylor, and Lord & Taylor is gone.
Sears gave up part of its space to Raymour & Flanigan before the rest became a vaccination site, a furniture retailer moving in through its own exterior door.
The glass elevator at Center Court was part of a renovation that was itself eventually refreshed. Rita Blitt's painted steel sculpture has been documented at 301 Mount Hope Avenue since 1977.
Rockaway Townsquare is not a closed mall.
It is an operating property at 97.1 percent occupancy, with two traditional department-store anchors, a furniture store that enters from outside, an indoor recreation facility, destination restaurants, and a sporting-goods anchor arriving on an unannounced schedule.
The parking fields surrounding it are zoned for housing that hasn't been built. Both things are simultaneously true, neither canceling the other.
People still exit Interstate 80 at Mount Hope Avenue for the same reason they always did: enough is concentrated in one place that the trip makes sense.
The food court has been renovated more than once. The east-side entrances have glass vestibules now.
The mall kept going, which is either a mundane fact about commercial real estate or something worth noticing, depending on how long you've been driving past the exit.
