Drivers coming off Interstate 87 at Exit 37 in Plattsburgh, NY once had two Champlain Centres to pick from, one on each side of the road.
A shuttle ran between them so the car could stay put. From Ontario, a whole day of it cost $20. One of the two malls came down, and a Price Chopper and a Lowe's took its place.
The other kept its shoppers coming through a long run of empty anchors. A department store went dark and came back selling sporting goods. A Sears was split between two chains.
Today the mall is for sale, and the company that built it is not the one selling. So why would anyone sell a mall that was still taking in new tenants?
A second mall instead of a bigger one
On July 1, 1987, JCPenney opened in a new shopping mall in Plattsburgh, having left an older mall a short distance away.
Pyramid, the developer, had built both.
The older one had opened in 1975 with JCPenney, Montgomery Ward, and Kmart among its major stores, and by the 1980s it had little room left to grow, so Pyramid put up a larger center close by instead of enlarging the first.
The new building opened that day as Champlain Centre North, an enclosed, one-level mall in the Town of Plattsburgh, New York, west of Interstate 87 near Exit 37.
Four large stores opened it, and one of them had crossed over from the old mall.
JCPenney traded alongside Sears, Hills, and Steinbach, with a Hoyts cinema as well, a bigger lineup than the 1975 mall had ever held.
The older mall stayed open after its JCPenney left.
Two Champlain Centres, then one
Pyramid kept the old mall running and gave it its new neighbor's name.
The 1975 building became Champlain Centre South, was renovated to suit North, and was marketed together with it as a single shopping trip.
That October, a day trip from Ontario to Plattsburgh's shopping centers, North among them, was advertised at $20.
In 1988 the pair offered 140 shops and seven department stores between them.
Drivers leaving Interstate 87 at Exit 37 found South on one side of the road and North on the other, and a shuttle ran between the two so shoppers could leave their cars where they were.
The arrangement did not last. With JCPenney already gone north, specialty tenants followed it, and Montgomery Ward closed in the 1990s.
The enclosed South mall was almost entirely torn down, and by the early 2000s its land held a big-box center with a Price Chopper and a Lowe's.
North was left as the only enclosed mall of the pair, and "North" was dropped from its everyday name, leaving simply Champlain Centre.
Sporting goods in a department store
Service Merchandise was the last of the first big stores to arrive, opening that November, after the rest of the mall. In 1999 it closed.
Steinbach, one of the five anchors from opening day, closed the same year, and two of the mall's largest spaces stood dark at the same time.
Pyramid refilled them with a change of category.
Sporting goods went into the department store: Dick's Sporting Goods opened in the old Steinbach space in 2003.
The former Service Merchandise store went to Gander Mountain in 2004-05.
By the middle of the decade both boxes that had closed in 1999 were trading again, under two names the mall had not carried when it opened, and neither of them was a department store.
Target on the Ames site
The Hills store changed its name before it went dark. Ames bought the Hills chain in 1998, and the anchor at the mall became an Ames in 1999.
In 2002 Ames liquidated, and the Plattsburgh store closed with the rest of the chain.
Of the large spaces the mall lost around the turn of the century, this one changed the building most.
The Ames area was rebuilt for Target, which opened in October 2008 and brought about 200 jobs with it.
The project also changed who owned what.
Target's store was connected to the mall, but it stood on a parcel of its own, owned apart from the rest of the center.
Sears and the assessment fight
Sears had been an anchor since opening day, and by the middle of the 2010s its store took up nearly a fifth of the mall's leasable space.
The Town of Plattsburgh raised the mall's assessment to $49.4 million for 2015 and kept it there for 2016, and the owner went to court to challenge the increase.
While the case was pending, Sears announced in April 2016 that the Plattsburgh store was on its closing list.
A liquidation sale was set for the end of that month, and the store shut before the year was out.
The courts ruled after the store was gone. A trial court cut both assessments in May 2017.
It found a mall with falling sales, rising vacancies, and one large anchor expected to close, and that anchor was Sears.
In October 2018 the appeals court set the 2015 value at $28 million and the 2016 value at $25 million, against the Town's $49.4 million for each year.
One Sears, two stores
The empty Sears was divided between two big-box chains. Hobby Lobby opened in one part of it in 2017.
Kohl's opened beside it in a second section, and its grand opening on October 5, 2019, gave the chain its first North Country store and its 50th in the state of New York.
Where one department store had traded since 1987, two retailers selling different things shared the box.
The old Service Merchandise box had a rougher run over the same years. Gander Mountain left the space in 2017 during the chain's bankruptcy.
The location returned as Gander Outdoors in August 2018, but that revival ended in October 2019, the same month Kohl's opened in the old Sears.
Four months with the doors shut
In mid-March 2020, New York's pandemic rules closed the inside of the mall.
Stores with their own outside entrances could reopen as the state's phases allowed, while the shops along the corridors stayed shut.
By late June the building held about 51 stores, where more than 900 people worked, and roughly 500 of them were in stores with no outside door of their own.
They could not go back until the interior did.
That happened on July 10, 2020, nearly four months after the closing, under state rules that called for better air filtration in malls.
The mall reopened emptier. Occupancy had stood at 83 percent at the end of 2019, and in the third quarter of 2020 it was 73 percent.
Pyramid's mortgage on the mall ran into payment trouble that year, and its terms were reworked.
In November 2020 Ollie's Bargain Outlet opened in the space Gander Outdoors had left.
A failing loan and a new tenant
Best Buy had opened in 2006, in a space that once held an appliance store.
In April 2021 the mortgage was flagged again, this time as close to default, and in October of that year Best Buy closed for good.
The property had been valued at $61 million when the loan was made. In May 2022 it was valued at $17.6 million.
The old Best Buy space found a tenant anyway.
In September 2023 Ross Dress for Less was announced for it, and that October Ross opened a 20,000-square-foot store there, at the end of the mall beside Target.
The mall was adding a national chain while the loan beneath it failed.
In April 2024 the property passed to the lender, and Pacific Retail Capital Partners took over management that same month, ending nearly 37 years in which Pyramid had run Champlain Centre.
Nearly full and for sale
Pacific Retail kept signing tenants, and local businesses opened beside the national chains.
Critters Hotspot, a local retailer, arrived in October 2025, and Stir Fry 88 opened in the food court in July 2026.
In September 2025 a mural called Metamorphosis was finished across two outside walls of the mall's Butterfly Pollinator Garden, with images of Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks and one section of butterfly wings painted as a wall for photos.
The mall belongs to the lender that took it when Pyramid's loan failed, and the lender is selling it.
The sale covers the mall and leaves out the Target store on its own parcel. Pacific Retail runs the center while it is on the market.
JCPenney, an anchor since opening day, trades beside Dick's, Hobby Lobby, Kohl's, Ollie's, and the eight-screen cinema, now run by Regal, with a tenant in every one of the big-store spaces the lender is offering.
New leases reached the Town's agenda too: in July 2026 its Planning Board reviewed a loading dock, a storefront entrance, and a sidewalk for a new tenant.
The Town's 2024 application for state downtown funding proposed a concept of roughly $100 million for the mall, with a hotel, recreation and green space, a dog park, and walking and cycling routes around the building, and a 2025 regional plan listed housing and an indoor recreation center among possible later phases.
None of it has been built.
In 2020 the corridors stayed shut for nearly four months, and about 500 people who worked inside could not get back to their stores.
Today the corridors are open, and about nine in ten of the mall's spaces are leased.
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