Standing on Route 300 in the Town of Newburgh, New York, sits a one-story shopping center that opened as an enclosed mall.
It opened in 1980 with 390,000 square feet and roughly 55 stores. Sears, Caldor, and Howland's were the department stores. Caldor closed in 1999, and Bon-Ton took its space until 2018.
Sears closed on October 16, 2022. It was the last of the original anchors. Ten weeks later a casino opened in the old Bon-Ton box.
The indoor corridor is being cut into stores with their own outside doors. O'Reilly Auto Parts, Harbor Freight, and Planet Fitness have moved in. Around 149,000 square feet is still being marketed for lease.
Newburgh Mall took 11 years to get built
In October 1969, a plan for an enclosed shopping mall came before the Town of Newburgh Planning Board.
The site sat on the west side of Route 300, the road locals call Union Avenue, in Orange County, New York, near the junction of Interstates 84 and 87.
An early schedule had it opening by Easter 1975. Hearings and review ate the next five years.
The Kravco Company, a shopping-center developer tied to King of Prussia, ran the project.
By 1978 the blueprints were detailed enough that store names were penciled into individual spaces, and Union Avenue was set to be widened for the traffic the mall would bring.
In November 1978, the landlord partnership signed Caldor to an 84,000-square-foot store, more than a year before anyone could shop there.
Sears, Caldor, and Howland's opened it in 1980
Newburgh Mall opened in 1980: one level, 390,000 square feet, roughly 55 stores.
Sears held about 85,000 square feet at one end, Caldor 84,000 at the other, and Howland's a third department-store block.
The common areas were sealed concrete framed by a two-foot brick border.
The small-store list ran well past clothing.
Space Port ran an arcade, Cosimo's Pizza and Friendly Ice Cream fed people, and Highland National Bank and the Newburgh Dental Center gave shoppers a reason to drive out on days they weren't shopping.
Weis Markets ran a supermarket in its own building near Route 300. Retail in the area was moving toward the highway and away from the older downtown.
The leaking roof that ended up in bankruptcy court
In October 1984, four years after Caldor moved in, the roof over its store began leaking.
A roofing company inspected that November and recommended repairs plus a coating every four to six years.
The following May, the mall's owners declined to authorize the coating.
Leaks returned between 1989 and 1995. In 1995 the landlord and Caldor split a $29,000 repair. By that December the leaks were damaging merchandise.
By 1996 a full replacement was estimated above $400,000, and the two sides disagreed over who the lease made responsible.
The argument went to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, where Caldor was already in bankruptcy.
On February 4, 1997, the court ruled that the mall owed the repairs, replacement included, plus $33,500 for the damaged goods.
New stone floors, then two anchors gone in 1999
In mid-1998 the concrete floor came up and nearly 50,000 square feet of imported stone went down: a four-foot marble checkerboard, green limestone and black granite accents, three medallions set into the mall courts.
A crew of 24 union craftsmen finished it in nine weeks with the mall open around them, and the job took first place at the 1999 Celebration of Tile Awards.
Caldor announced that same year that all 145 of its stores would close by May.
Steinbach, which had taken over the Howland's block, closed in Newburgh that year too.
Bon-Ton moved into the Caldor space and Old Navy took the far end, turning a department-store anchor into one apparel store.
Two of the three stores the mall opened with were gone within a year of the new floors going in.
A quarter of it empty, then sold for $7.7 million
Route 300 kept building around it.
Home-improvement stores, supermarkets, and strip centers filled in north and south, each one letting a shopper park, buy the thing, and leave without walking a corridor.
Woodbury Common pulled shoppers toward the Thruway.
The format was the problem. A 390,000-square-foot mall needs enough occupied storefronts to make the corridor worth walking.
By 2009, it was losing at least $1 million a year.
By 2012, roughly a quarter of its small-store space was vacant. Old Navy left that January.
Foreclosure came in 2012, and in 2014 the mortgage holder, Wells Fargo, took the property at the sale on a $10 bid against what it was owed.
Three years later it sold for $7.7 million.
Bon-Ton began liquidating in April 2018 and was out by the end of August, leaving an empty department store at one end.
Sears left in October, a casino opened in December
Sears announced in late August 2022 that the Newburgh store was closing, and the last day was Sunday, October 16.
It had been there since 1980, the last of the three original anchors and the last full-line Sears in New York State.
Ten weeks later the opposite end of the mall opened for business.
Genting had come to the Town in February 2021 with a $32 million plan to lease about 90,000 square feet, most of it the empty Bon-Ton.
The company held New York authority for video lottery gaming in the county and needed a building with a large floor plate and parking already built.
Crews gutted the Bon-Ton interior and rebuilt it around a raised floor carrying the wiring for the machines. The budget climbed past $50 million.
Resorts World Hudson Valley opened on December 28, 2022 with 1,107 video lottery machines, roughly 250 full-time jobs, and a $3 million annual payment to the Town.
What's open at Newburgh Mall now
By late 2023, with the casino filling one end, the owner gave up on filling the rest one storefront at a time.
Restaurants and entertainment operators had been approached and hadn't signed. The chains that would come wanted their own doors and signs.
So sections of the corridor were cut into large units opening onto the parking lot: new storefronts, parapets, paint, sidewalks.
The 1980 shell stayed.
Office Depot closed at the end of January 2024.
Studio 845, a dance business, said publicly it was forced out as the spaces around it were prepared, and the Free Library's Town branch reopened at 181 South Plank Road in April 2024.
O'Reilly Auto Parts opened in part of the old Sears in 2024, Harbor Freight took another block, and Planet Fitness opened next to the casino on April 10, 2025.
Bath & Body Works, Champs Sports, Shoe Dept. Encore, and McDonald's are still trading.
As of August 2026 the property runs 385,000 square feet with 1,850 parking spaces, and 149,000 square feet is still for lease.
Sign drawings from 2024 called the place The Newburgh. Everything else still says Newburgh Mall.
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