Chautauqua Mall is a one-level enclosed shopping mall at 318 East Fairmount Avenue in Lakewood, New York, just west of Jamestown.
The mall filled in during 1971, after Sears opened first in 1970, and it's still open. That alone puts it in rarer company than a lot of small-market malls its age.
The original anchors were Sears, JCPenney, Woolworth, and Quality Markets, a grocery store. You could buy a week of food and a washing machine under one roof.
Then the anchors started rotating. JCPenney left in 1986 and came back in 1997. Jamesway came and went.
Woolworth closed in 1993, Bon-Ton and Sears both closed in 2018, and the two-screen cinema lasted until 2023, when a leaky roof finally pushed it out.
The current owner paid $6 million for the place in 2022 and has since sold a chunk of the parking lot for restaurant pads; a Chipotle opened on one in December 2025.
Inside, it's JCPenney, Ollie's, Planet Fitness, and a tenant list that includes a church youth center.
The pattern for 55 years: when one kind of tenant stopped working, the mall took whoever came next. Here's how that went.
Chautauqua Mall opens with a supermarket inside
Chautauqua Mall opened in 1971 at 318 East Fairmount Avenue in Lakewood, New York, a village just west of Jamestown on Route 394.
It was a one-level enclosed shopping mall with four anchors: Sears, JCPenney, Woolworth, and Quality Markets.
The developer was Edward J. DeBartolo Sr., one of the busiest mall builders of the postwar years.
His formula was standard for the period: a climate-controlled concourse, anchor boxes around it, and a wide surface parking field facing the highway.
The anchor mix was the unusual part.
Quality Markets was a supermarket, so the county's new enclosed mall handled the weekly grocery run along with department-store shopping.
Sears and JCPenney brought the national names. Woolworth covered the five-and-dime trade.
Southern Chautauqua County, sitting between the larger Buffalo and Erie retail markets, finally had a full enclosed center of its own.
Two screens next to the stores
Chautauqua Mall Cinema I & II opened on May 26, 1971, a two-screen house run by General Cinema's Buffalo division and designed by William Riseman Associates.
Dipson Theatres operated it later.
The cinema gave the property a life after the stores pulled their gates down.
You could shop in the afternoon and catch a movie that night without moving your car.
It made the mall a leisure destination as well as a retail one, and it stayed in business through five decades of anchor turnover around it.
Sears had been in town since 1929
The mall's most rooted anchor came with history attached.
Sears entered the Jamestown market in 1929, in the former Gage Furniture Building at 100 East Second Street.
On August 23, 1949, it moved to a larger downtown store at West Second and Cherry streets.
The jump to Lakewood in the early 1970s followed the same route as the shoppers: out of downtown, onto the highway strip.
The mall's Sears became one of its longest-running anchors, carrying a local retail name four decades older than the building it moved into.
Penney's leaves, and the 100th Jamesway moves in
JCPenney left the mall in 1986. What happened next was a hometown story.
Jamesway, the discount chain born in the Jamestown area in the early 1960s, opened in the former JCPenney space on September 30, 1986.
It was the chain's 100th store, and it replaced the original Jamesway location nearby.
So the county's first Jamesway closed, and its successor landed in the county's biggest mall.
For a few years, a regional discounter with local roots filled the box a national department store had left behind.
1993 empties the middle of the mall
Jamesway closed its store at the mall in 1993, during the chain's restructuring. Woolworth closed the same year.
Quality Markets moved out of the enclosed mall during the 1990s, landing across the road in the Lakewood Village Center.
That left the property holding several large boxes with no obvious tenants for any of them.
The mall was 22 years old and facing its first real rebuilding problem, in a small market where replacement department-store anchors were not easy to line up.
The late-90s rebuild brings Penney's back
The answer took shape in 1997. JCPenney returned, taking part of the old Jamesway space 11 years after it left.
The former Woolworth box was expanded into a 60,000-square-foot Bon-Ton.
The rest of the Jamesway footprint later became OfficeMax.
Around the anchors, the concourse filled in with the chains that defined a late-90s shopping trip: Old Navy, Gap and GapKids, Spencer Gifts, Electronics Boutique, Hallmark.
A food court arrived too. This was the mall's strongest second act.
A 1971 lineup built around a dime store and a supermarket became a lineup built around department stores, office supplies, and national apparel, and it carried the property through the 2000s.
A food court on its third set of tenants
The food court had trouble from the start.
It closed in 1999 after its original vendors withdrew from the mall, then reopened later that year with Orange Julius, Hot Stuff Pizza, and Mean Gene's Burgers.
Those were gone by 2002. The court reopened again with local vendors and a Subway.
The space found its lasting use in 2017, when Planet Fitness moved into the old food court area.
A gym replaced the tables, and the interior food court era ended there.
Traded from Simon to a shakier hand
Ownership followed the industry's consolidation.
DeBartolo's company eventually became part of Simon Property Group, the largest mall owner in the country.
In Simon's 2013 portfolio, the property showed up at 427,600 square feet and 91% occupied, with Sears, JCPenney, Bon-Ton, OfficeMax, and the Dipson cinema as its major users.
On May 28, 2014, Simon spun off Washington Prime Group as an independent company holding 98 retail properties.
Chautauqua Mall went with the spinoff.
By 2019, Washington Prime wrote down the mall's value.
Projected cash flows no longer covered what the books said the property was worth, and the decline was on paper before the pandemic ever arrived.
2018 takes Bon-Ton and puts Sears on the clock
Bon-Ton's parent company entered liquidation in April 2018, and every remaining Bon-Ton store was scheduled to close by the end of August.
The Lakewood store went with the rest of the chain.
Sears held on a few months longer.
The Lakewood store was left off an August 2018 closure list, then landed on the wave Sears Holdings announced on October 15, 2018, after filing for bankruptcy.
The store, whose Jamestown lineage went back to 1929, was set to close as part of that round.
One of the mall's largest traffic generators shut down in 2018, and the other was put on a January 2019 clock.
No traditional department store stepped in to replace either one.
A pandemic, a bankruptcy, and a discount rebound
The next hits came fast. OfficeMax closed its Lakewood store in May 2020.
JCPenney went through a temporary pandemic closure; by early June, the Chautauqua Mall store had been spared from the chain's permanent closure list.
Washington Prime, the mall's owner, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on June 13, 2021.
The counterweight was Ollie's Bargain Outlet.
Confirmed for the former OfficeMax space in February 2021, it opened that October and drew big crowds to a box that had sat empty through the pandemic.
The same year, a large mural went up on the mall wall facing Fairmount Avenue, near JCPenney and the Taco Bell.
It put Burtis Bay, Chautauqua Institution, and Lakewood's clock tower on a wall that drivers on Route 394 pass every day.
Sold for $6 million, argued down ever since
In September 2022, the mall sold for $6 million to Chautauqua Mall Realty Holdings LLC of Great Neck, New York.
The mall website later listed Kohan Retail Investment Group as owner, and Summit Properties USA branding appeared on the mall's website and leasing materials by 2025.
The assessment fight ran alongside.
In 2020, the mall challenged a $9.3 million assessed value and asked for $5 million; it got $5.8 million.
After the pandemic, it asked for $1 million and mediated its way to $5 million for 2022.
In 2023, the Busti assessor set the value at $6 million, the exact sale price, and the mall argued that was still too high.
A State Supreme Court justice cut it to $4 million through 2026.
Then, on July 2, 2025, the owner filed again, asking to reduce a proposed $7.825 million assessment on the mall's three parcels to $800,000.
Reductions like that can shift tax pressure toward taxpayers in the town, the village, the county, and the Southwestern school district, unless budgets are cut.
The cinema's roof leaks, the parking lot fills up
The two-screen cinema closed on August 22, 2023, after Dipson cited a leaky roof, 52 years after its first show.
The mall's oldest non-retail draw ended after the roof problem caught up with it.
The parking lot moved in the other direction.
Olive Garden had opened out front on the former Firestone site in 2013.
A stand-alone Taco Bell followed in 2019.
In June 2024, Quattro Development proposed two more restaurant buildings, a Chipotle and a Popeyes, on underused parking in front of JCPenney, and Lakewood's zoning/planning board and trustees cleared it the same month.
In March 2025, the mall's owner sold that section of parking lot to Quattro for $750,000, and construction was underway by summer.
Chipotle opened at 314 East Fairmount Avenue in December 2025.
The strategy is visible from the road: keep the mall running, sell the pavement.
What's still open at Chautauqua Mall
JCPenney is the last traditional department store in the building, open 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. most weekdays. Ollie's runs in the old OfficeMax. Planet Fitness is another big non-retail draw.
The rest of the mix includes Bath & Body Works, Old Navy, maurices, Spencer's, and Kay Jewelers, alongside Buddy Brewster's Ale House, Sakura Buffet, Red Cross blood drives, and Church on the Rock Youth Center.
Joann was listed for closure in February 2025 during its chain's bankruptcy.
A late-2024 proposal floated to the county would have moved offices like the DMV and Probation into mall space.
By January 2025, the county executive told Lakewood's trustees there was no concrete plan, cost, or financing behind it.
A 1.44-acre pad on the 55-acre campus went up for ground lease in March 2026, pitched on 18,300 vehicles a day passing on Fairmount Avenue.
The doors still open at 11 most mornings, and the people who come now come for a workout, a bargain aisle, a blood drive, or dinner out front on land that used to be parking.
