The first thing you notice when you come in through the Bass Pro entrance is the cedar smell. It is part of the store's branding, and it stays with you even after you leave Bass Pro and step back into the rest of the mall.
There are brown tile floors, ceiling panels overhead, and a food court that is maybe one-third full on a weekday.
The mall is still in use. Purple Lancers Bingo meets there. There is a dog groomer, a secondhand toy shop, a karate school, and a food pantry operated by St. Alphonsus.
Mall-walking hours begin before the stores open, and a Centro bus stops near the cinema entrance. An indoor golf simulator was added there.
In 2025, the Finger Lakes SPCA used Unit AN3 as a temporary shelter for a few months while its building on York Street was being renovated.
Fingerlakes Mall, at 1579 Clark Street Road, opened in 1980. Pyramid Companies built it to serve the highway corridor between Rochester and Syracuse.
Bass Pro Shops has been the anchor store since 2004. Most of the other uses in the mall today developed later and were not part of the original plan.
Notable Milestones
October 4, 1978 - Pyramid Companies announced plans to build Fingerlakes Mall.
Late 1979 - Construction of Fingerlakes Mall was underway under Pyramid Companies.
April 9, 1980 - Fingerlakes Mall officially opened at 1579 Clark Street Road with JCPenney.
May 1, 1980 - Kmart opened at Fingerlakes Mall.
Mid-1980s - A movie theater opened at the mall under Hoyt's Cinemas.
April 1, 1981 - Chappell's opened at Fingerlakes Mall.
March 1, 1982 - Sears opened at Fingerlakes Mall.
June 1999 - First Union sold the mall to GP Properties, an affiliate of Jager Management, for $2.5 million.
October 1999 - Jager sold the mall to Gregory Greenfield Associates of Atlanta.
June 10, 2004 - Bass Pro Shops opened in the former Sears wing and adjoining mall space as the first Bass Pro location in New York state.
October 2006 - Gregory Greenfield sold the mall to Sam Abram, CEO of Siba Corporation, through Fingerlakes Mall Acquisition LLC, for $27 million.
September 2012 - The mall's four-screen theater closed under Rochester Theater Management.
April 14, 2014 - The theater reopened as Track Cinema under local family ownership.
January 2015 - Sears closed after announcing the shutdown in October 2014.
June 2020 - JCPenney announced its closure, ending the last original anchor from the mall's 1980 opening.
September 2022 - VACHI Fingerlakes, LLC bought the property for $3.6 million.
2022 - Bass Pro Shops' lease was extended through at least 2037.
2025 - The site was actively marketed as "Fingerlakes Mall Redevelopment" with a concept plan for major changes.
2025-2026 - The mall remains open with Bass Pro Shops, Track Cinema, local tenants, events, and community uses.
Fingerlakes Mall Opened in 1980
Pyramid Companies began building Fingerlakes Mall around 1978. The mall officially opened on April 9, 1980. At that point, about a dozen stores and ten restaurants were already open.
The mall's early anchor stores were JCPenney and Kmart. Chappell's, a regional department store chain based in Syracuse, joined later in 1981. Sears joined in 1982.
The mall had a movie theater early on, along with a roller-skating rink that operated for years.
The layout followed the usual Pyramid style from that period. It was a one-level mall with a large center court, a food court area, and parking for more than a thousand cars.
Cayuga County did not have another shopping center on that scale.
The location between Rochester and Syracuse gave the mall a trade area that reached beyond any one city, and for most of the 1980s, the four anchor stores remained in place.
Chappell's closed in November 1993, and Kmart closed in August 1995; both were gone well before the mall was reworked for Bass Pro.
By the late 1990s, the mall that Pyramid had opened with so much attention twenty years earlier sold for two and a half million dollars.
A $2.5 Million Mall, Flipped Within the Same Year
In June 1999, First Union sold Fingerlakes Mall to GP Properties, an affiliate of Jager Management, for $2.5 million.
Five months later, in October 1999, Jager sold the same property to Gregory Greenfield Associates of Atlanta. The building changed hands twice in the same year.
That $2.5 million sale price helps show where the mall stood at the time.
Pyramid had been built about twenty years earlier as a major retail center for the county. By 1999, it sold for a price more typical of a warehouse property.
Gregory Greenfield kept the mall for about seven years. In October 2006, the company sold it for $27 million to Sam Abram, the CEO of Siba Corporation, through Fingerlakes Mall Acquisition LLC.
That was more than ten times the 1999 sale price. Bass Pro had already been open in the building for two years by then.
Bass Pro Replaced the Original Sears Space
Getting Bass Pro Shops into the building meant moving Sears first. Sears shifted into the old Kmart box.
Bass Pro took over the original Sears wing and the adjoining mall space, 85,500 square feet in all. It opened on June 10, 2004, as the first Bass Pro location in New York state.
The people coming in for hunting, fishing, and camping gear were not the same shoppers who had come for department stores.
The area around Auburn is rural, and there was nothing similar within a reasonable drive. The store drew customers from a wide region.
The property was sold again in September 2022. One of the first announcements from the new management firm, Sutton Real Estate, was that Bass Pro's lease was secured through at least 2037.
The official mall website now calls the property "Home to Bass Pro Shops."
JCPenney Lasted Until 2020 - the Final Original Tenant
Sears stayed open until January 2015. The company announced the closure in October 2014.
Before that, Sears had already moved once, leaving the original Sears wing and relocating into the former Kmart space so Bass Pro could take over.
JCPenney remained. It stayed open until June 2020, when the company announced that the Fingerlakes Mall store would close as part of its bankruptcy-era reduction plan.
JCPenney had opened in April 1980, with the mall's other original anchor stores. Forty years later, it was the last of them still operating.
The 2017 Eastern Consolidated sale brochure gives the clearest picture of the building in the years between those two closures.
It listed about 405,000 rentable square feet, with roughly 122,700 square feet vacant. Most of that empty space was in the former Sears west wing.
Bass Pro and JCPenney were still listed as anchor stores. The asking price was $7 million.
The Theater Closed, Then Came Back Under Local Ownership
The mall got a movie theater in the mid-1980s, when Hoyt's Cinemas opened a location there. Over time, the theater changed operators several times.
Hoyt's became Milgram Theaters. Milgram became Cinema North. Cinema North later became Rochester Theater Management.
Rochester Theater Management ran the theater until September 2012, when it closed the four-screen cinema.
After that, the theater sat empty for about eighteen months. It was still inside the mall, but it was no longer showing movies or bringing people into that section of the building.
On April 14, 2014, the theater reopened as Track Cinema. It returned as a family-owned, locally operated business.
Over the next several years, Track Cinema became a regular part of the mall again. In 2021 and 2022, it was voted the best movie theater in the region.
The Redevelopment Concept Has Been Around for a While
The idea of redeveloping Fingerlakes Mall is not new. A 2017 Eastern Consolidated sale brochure presented the property as both a shopping center and a "redevelopment opportunity."
That was eight years ago. No construction started.
VACHI Fingerlakes bought the property in September 2022 for $3.6 million. Sutton Real Estate called the purchase "the start of another redevelopment cycle" and gave the site's development potential as 55.3 acres.
In October 2023, the owners applied to separate Bass Pro from the rest of the property. Under that plan, Bass Pro would sit on its own 2.9-acre parcel, while the rest of the mall property would remain on 41.3 acres.
The split was financial, not physical. Bass Pro was staying where it was.
By 2025, Cushman & Wakefield and Pyramid Brokerage were marketing the property under the name "Fingerlakes Mall Redevelopment."
Their flyer included a concept plan. Bass Pro stayed in the middle. New outparcels were added along Clark Street Road. A grocery or other large-format tenant sat at one end.
Residential or lodging space filled another corner. Parts of the existing building should be removed. Parking dropped from about 2,130 spaces to 1,840.
The location pitch stayed the same as it was in 1980, when Pyramid promoted the mall as being halfway between Rochester and Syracuse.
Reduced, But Operating
Fingerlakes Mall in Auburn, NY, is still operating, but in a much narrower way than it once did.
The building is still standing, still maintained, and still has a few solid draws. Bass Pro Shops brings in steady traffic. Track Cinema does too. Beyond that, a lot of the mall feels quiet.
The tenant mix now depends more on small local businesses and occasional events than on the kind of full retail lineup the mall was built around.
It is not abandoned. It is not thriving either. It feels like a reduced version of itself - still open, still functional, but clearly no longer working as a strong regional mall.
Fingerlakes Mall
Shopping mall in Aurelius, NY
Address: 1579 Clark Street Rd, Auburn, NY 13022
Opened: April 9, 1980
Developer: The Pyramid Company
Owner: Siba Management
Floor area: 410,000 square feetClosest cities:
Syracuse, NY
Rochester, NY
Ithaca, NY
Geneva, NY
Canandaigua, NY
Oswego, NY
Cortland, NY
