The Mall at Short Hills is an enclosed luxury shopping mall at 1200 Morris Turnpike in Millburn, New Jersey, west of Newark and 23 miles from Midtown Manhattan.
It began as a single B. Altman department store in Short Hills in 1956.
An open-air center grew around it in 1961, billed in one ad as the "Fifth Avenue of the suburbs."
Bloomingdale's landed in 1967. A $100 million project put a roof on it by 1980.
Then the 1990s build-out brought Saks, Neiman Marcus, and Nordstrom. Saks closed in 2016.
Its box got cut into a bookstore and a coworking floor, while furniture tenants, Eataly, and a Vacheron Constantin boutique arrived around the mall.
Four anchors stand now where five did.
The store grew into a mall, and the mall kept reinventing the hole each lost tenant left.
A B. Altman store, alone in Short Hills
Before there was a mall, there was one store in Short Hills, and the memory of a restaurant that fire had taken.
The restaurant was The Brook, an upscale spot that ran through the 1930s and 1940s on land the Wallace family had owned for decades.
Fire took it in 1947.
The Wallace home went up in the early 1900s on the same family land that would later hold the mall, an office center, a country club, and the Poets section of Short Hills.
Then the insurers moved in.
In 1949, Prudential bought a large tract that swept in the future mall site and part of Canoe Brook Country Club.
Soon the retail logic was simple: follow the money out of the old downtowns and into the suburbs, where the wealthy households were going.
B. Altman & Company opened a Short Hills branch on the site in 1956, near where the Wallace mansion had stood.
It had 130,000 square feet, later grew by another 50,000.
The branch closed Altman's East Orange store and gave the site its first real reason to drive over.
One department store on a quiet site. The question was what to build around it.
The Fifth Avenue of the suburbs
In 1961, an open-air shopping center opened around B. Altman.
No roof over the walkways, just storefronts you reached from the outdoors and a parking lot built for cars.
A 1962 ad called it the "Fifth Avenue of the suburbs," and the tenant list backed up the boast.
F.A.O. Schwarz for toys. Brentano's for books.
Bonwit Teller, Peck & Peck, Stouffer's Restaurant, a jeweler, a furrier, even a U.S. Post Office on the way.
New York names in a New Jersey parking lot.
This was the market the center was chasing: upper-income shoppers in Short Hills and the surrounding Essex, Morris, and Union County suburbs, the kind who wanted Manhattan names closer to home.
The center had the names. What it didn't have yet was size.
Bloomingdale's lands in 1967
Bloomingdale's opened on September 15, 1967, and it was big: more than 240,000 square feet, with a whole floor given over to furniture and decorative accessories.
That single store was bigger than B. Altman had been at the start.
It pulled the property up a class and tied it harder to New York retail.
For more than a decade, the open-air format held.
Shoppers crossed outdoor walkways between Altman, Bonwit Teller, and the new Bloomingdale's.
By the end of the 1970s, that layout was starting to feel dated.
The fix was a roof.
Two years and $100 million to put a roof on
The enclosure ran from 1978 to 1980.
Two years, $100 million, and the open-air center came out the other side as a covered mall: 1.16 million square feet of leasable space and three anchors under one climate-controlled roof.
New tenants arrived to fill it. Godiva Chocolatier. The Limited. Gap. A jeweler called Black, Starr & Frost.
The format that still defines the place was set here.
Two retail levels, department stores around the rim, specialty shops down the interior corridors, parking on the surface and in structures.
A year after the roof went on, a fourth anchor moved in.
Abraham & Straus, then the name on the door changed
Abraham & Straus opened in 1981. Another New York department-store name, another anchor for the newly enclosed mall.
It didn't keep the name for long.
During the 1990s shakeout that swallowed regional department stores across the country, Abraham & Straus became Macy's.
Same building, new sign, and Macy's has anchored that corner ever since.
The bigger move was already being drawn up.
The mall had four anchors and room to add more.
The luxury build-out: Saks, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom
The expansion that made Short Hills a luxury destination began in 1993 and came in two phases.
Phase one finished in November 1994 and brought Saks Fifth Avenue in 100,000 square feet.
Bloomingdale's got renovated.
Phase two finished in August 1995 and added two more: Neiman Marcus in 129,000 square feet on one side, Nordstrom in 172,000 square feet on the other.
With them came the boutiques.
Tiffany & Co., Crate & Barrel, DKNY, a run of fashion and home tenants that matched the new department stores.
Five anchors now: Bloomingdale's, Macy's, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Saks.
That lineup put the property in a tier almost no other New Jersey mall reached, and it held for two decades.
Two decades, and then four.
Saks goes dark in 2016
In September 2016, Saks Fifth Avenue closed its The Mall at Short Hills store.
The space ran 107,000 square feet, and for the first time since the build-out, the mall was down to four department-store anchors.
A vacant box that size is a problem at most malls.
Here it became a question of what to put in it that wasn't another department store.
The answer turned out to be almost everything but.
A bookstore, a coworking floor, and a home store fill the box
The owners carved the old Saks area into smaller large-format spaces and filled them with tenants a 1995 mall planner would not have recognized.
Indigo opened its first United States store there in October 2018, a 30,000-square-foot bookstore with children's departments, home and gift areas, wellness goods, and a planned cafe pouring La Colombe coffee.
The opening created more than 120 jobs.
Industrious signed on in 2019 with its first New Jersey location, turning roughly 29,000 square feet of former Saks space into offices and coworking on Level 3 near Bloomingdale's.
Conference rooms, phone rooms, a coffee and craft bar, all built above tenants that stayed open during construction.
Crate & Barrel relocated into the reworked area too.
Office workers and book browsers, in the bones of a dead luxury anchor.
The reuse worked, so it kept going.
Simon takes the keys
The ownership changed hands behind the scenes more than once.
Prudential developed it; Taubman shaped it after 1974, through the enclosure and the 1990s expansion.
Then Simon Property Group moved on the whole Taubman operation.
In February 2020, it agreed to buy 80% of The Taubman Realty Group.
The deal got reworked in November 2020 after a court fight over the original terms, and it closed on December 29, 2020.
The Taubman family kept a minority stake.
Simon wasn't done.
After later picking up another 8%, it acquired the remaining 12% in late 2025, finishing the takeover of the operating group behind Short Hills.
The number that shows the stakes came a few years earlier.
A billion-dollar mortgage on a mall
In 2015, three insurers, MetLife, New York Life, and Pacific Life, put up a $1 billion mortgage on the property.
Twelve years, fixed at 3.48%, due October 1, 2027.
It replaced a $540 million loan from 2005.
The debt nearly doubled, and the collateral was the enclosed mall, with all five anchors still standing at the time, Saks included.
A billion dollars borrowed against one shopping center tells you what kind of shopping center this is.
By 2019, the property had grown to 1.44 million square feet of total leasable space, with mall tenant space alone at 607,000 square feet.
What that space holds now has shifted again.
Eataly, watches, and a furniture gallery on the way
A food market replaced a food court.
Eataly opened in November 2024 as its first New Jersey location, 17,000 square feet with a 230-seat restaurant and bar, counters, cafes, wine retail, and a specialty market, dropped into space a food-court restaurant had used until that January.
The new tenants kept arriving. Loewe took the upper level in 2025.
Vacheron Constantin opened a watch boutique on the lower level near Neiman Marcus in early 2026.
Rhone, Reformation, and a Miami all-day cafe called Pura Vida filled in around them, the last one its 50th U.S. store.
Then in early 2026, RH filed plans for a gallery expansion tied to vacant mall space, with its own exterior entrance cut into the wall.
The latest big tenant to want a door straight to the parking lot, the way Eataly already got its signage on the facade facing John F. Kennedy Parkway.
What stands on the hill now
The Mall at Short Hills is still an active enclosed mall at 1200 Morris Turnpike in Millburn, with four department-store anchors: Bloomingdale's, Macy's, Neiman Marcus, and Nordstrom.
More than 150 stores and restaurants run inside it, and more than 50 of those brands exist nowhere else in New Jersey.
Apple, Tiffany, The Cheesecake Factory, Legal Sea Foods, a coworking floor, a bookstore, an Italian market, a watch boutique.
Valet runs outside Neiman Marcus. Chargers sit out front for the electric cars.
Seventy years after B. Altman opened alone at Short Hills, the mall is still drawing the same kind of upper-income shoppers from three counties.
The store names changed, the roof went on, the box that Saks left got cut into pieces.
People keep driving over anyway.
