Standing on Queens Boulevard in Elmhurst, in Queens, New York, sits Queens Place Mall, a round concrete building with its parking decks wrapped around the outside of the stores.
The building opened in 1965 as a Macy's. Macy's moved one block over to Queens Center in 1995, and in 2001 the building got two more floors on top and a new name, Queens Place.
Now its big stores are leaving for a center down the boulevard. Best Buy went first. Target has signed a lease at the same center, so Queens Place is set to lose its biggest store too.
Target is still open every day from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m., with its move expected in 2028. The lender started foreclosure on the building in August 2025.
The corner Macy's couldn't buy
Mary Sendek owned a small house at Queens Boulevard and 55th Avenue, on the irregular block Macy's was assembling for a new Elmhurst store.
She and her husband had bought the property in 1922.
When R.H. Macy & Co. announced the project in 1964, it controlled nearly all the rest of the block, much of it open or lightly built.
Her corner was the piece Macy's couldn't get.
The company offered as much as $200,000, more than five times the property's value, and even tried to buy only part of the lot. Sendek said no.
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's circular scheme was already in place, so Sendek didn't change the circle as much as the corner.
The building had to pull back from her property, leaving the notch. The elaborate entrance planned there disappeared too.
In its place, Macy's used simpler street-level doors around the perimeter.
A department store wrapped in its own garage
Macy's was trying to put suburban-style parking on a city block. Going underground was out because of the high water table.
SOM tested five schemes, and only the circular plan folded the garage into the store itself.
The building now called Queens Place stands at 88-01 Queens Boulevard in Elmhurst, Queens, New York.
It opened on October 11, 1965, as a Macy's department store and remains a multi-tenant retail center in the same round structure.
The original Macy's had three sales floors at the center of a cylinder about 426 feet across.
Five levels of parking circled the sales floors, with more parking on the roof, putting well over 1,000 cars close to the store entrances.
From the street, the garage read as part of the architecture.
Narrow openings in the concrete outer wall brought light and air into the parking decks, while sandblasting left the surface coarse and pale.
At sidewalk level, display windows and mosaic tile walls faced pedestrians, and the lowest sales floor opened directly to the street.
Sendek stayed in her house next door. She lived there until 1980, and after that her heirs sold the lot.
The house came down, and a small two-story commercial building went up on the corner.
Queens Center opens one block away
For its first eight years, the round Macy's had no enclosed mall next to it.
In 1973 Queens Center opened one block southeast, anchored by Abraham & Straus and Ohrbach's, with many stores under one roof.
By the 1990s, Federated Department Stores controlled both Macy's and Abraham & Straus.
In 1995 Federated retired the A&S name and turned the Queens Center store into a Macy's.
The Elmhurst Macy's moved in there, one block from the building it had filled for 30 years.
Federated put another of its chains, Stern's, into the round building. Stern's kept it a department store until around 2000, when it left.
Federated later shut the whole Stern's chain down, and the circle on Queens Boulevard went up for sale.
Queens Place gets two more floors
Forest City Ratner bought the building from Federated in May 2001.
It chose to reuse the concrete shell and the parking rings rather than take them down, and it added two floors on top.
The original 1965 drawings had left room for exactly that kind of growth.
So the three-floor department store became a five-level retail center called Queens Place.
The building had been about 330,000 square feet when Macy's opened it. After the conversion it was 455,000.
The new space went to big stores stacked one over another, the way the old sales floors had been.
Target, Best Buy, Macy's Furniture, and DSW took the largest spaces, and smaller shops and restaurants filled the rest.
Target took the top two of the five floors.
The Macy's name came back inside, first on the furniture store.
Then in 2015 Macy's launched an off-price chain called Backstage, and on September 2 of that year one of its first pilot stores opened at Queens Place.
The four big tenants from 2001 stayed together for 21 years.
Lidl downstairs, Best Buy down the boulevard
DSW went first, closing in 2022. Lidl leased its 35,000 square feet and opened on January 24, 2024, and the grocery store took the entire lower level.
Where shoes had been, groceries were on sale from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day.
Best Buy went next, to a center a few blocks away.
By May 2025 it had moved into the old Toys "R" Us space at Rego Center, on the same short stretch of Queens Boulevard and Junction Boulevard.
That January, Macy's had also put the Queens Place Backstage on a list of 66 stores it was closing, with a closing sale set to start in February.
The store kept operating, and it was still open in September 2026.
The building itself had carried a $100 million loan since April 2018. In August 2025, with the interest unpaid, the lender started foreclosure.
By the end of that year, two of the four big stores from 2001 were gone.
Target signs a lease at Rego Center
In June 2026 Target signed a 15-year lease for 135,000 square feet at Rego Center, the same complex that had already taken Best Buy.
The new store is half the size of the selling space Macy's opened with in 1965. The move from Queens Place is expected in 2028, and no replacement for the Target space has been named.
Until then, the Queens Place Target is open 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day, with a CVS pharmacy and a Starbucks inside. Lidl still runs the lower level.
Macy's Furniture and Mattress Gallery sells furniture, mattresses, and rugs on the first floor, and Macy's Backstage keeps the same hours, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Sunday.
The lender began foreclosure proceedings against Queens Place in August 2025. The case is still active in the New York Supreme Court, and no sale has been announced.
The 1965 concrete cylinder is still standing with its parking rings, and shoppers who park on them can still walk into a Target that stays open until 11 p.m.
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