After 40 years with one owner, Salmon Run Mall in Watertown, NY is on the market, with 86 percent of it occupied

On February 26, 2026, Watertown found out that the Pyramid Companies had put Salmon Run Mall on the market. No asking price. Just 673,000 square feet, 85 acres, and 86.2 percent of it occupied.

Salmon Run is the enclosed regional mall in the Town of Watertown, New York, sitting off Route 3 near Interstate 81.

It draws from Fort Drum, three rural counties and eastern Ontario, and the nearest mall like it is more than 65 miles away.

It opened with Sears moving in from downtown. Steinbach, Chappell's, Montgomery Ward and The Bon-Ton came and went.

Sears itself closed in early 2019, and Hobby Lobby took 54,800 square feet of its box while Billy Beez took another 18,500 with slides and bumper cars.

The mall paid more than $200,000 in Jefferson County property taxes in 2025 and supports 850 jobs, and the listing was on county officials' radar within a week of going public.

Here's how the building got from its first Christmas to that for-sale sign.

Salmon Run Mall opens, half empty

The Pyramid Companies held the construction ceremony on May 6, 1985, on 85 acres of open ground west of the Watertown city line.

Work ran 16 months. On September 14, 1986, the doors opened.

Salmon Run Mall is a one-story enclosed shopping mall in the Town of Watertown, Jefferson County, New York, sitting between Route 3 and Interstate 81 a few minutes west of downtown.

The mailing address says Watertown.

The land is in the town, not the city, which is why the site's zoning and planning have gone through town boards ever since.

Inside, the floor was white and pink marble. Small trees stood in the concourse under the skylights.

There were wood benches and a kinetic sculpture with hundreds of moving parts. An eight-screen cinema ran that first year.

Sears closed its downtown Watertown store and moved out to the mall as a main anchor. Klein's All-Sports left Public Square and followed.

Casual Corner, Kinney Shoes, Radio Shack, Kay Bee Toys, Chess King and Wicks N Sticks filled in along the corridor, and the food court sold Bavarian pretzels and Original Cookie next to Arby's and Long John Silver.

Half the building was still empty when the first Christmas season arrived.

12,000 people came on Black Friday

On November 28, 1986, 12,000 shoppers came through the mall, a crowd close to what opening day had drawn.

Merchants counted customers from Massena and Ogdensburg, from towns across the North Country, and from Canada.

Fort Drum sat eight miles up the road and supplied soldiers and their families the rest of the year.

Sears managers figured November would finish 40 percent above the store's final November downtown.

A week later, requests for space in the mall doubled.

Watertown's shopping had been on Public Square, Arsenal Street and Court Street for generations.

Salmon Run put most of the same categories under one roof beside the interstate, with parking for everybody.

Downtown still had a busy Christmas that year. But the direction was set. Walmart came west.

So did Target and Kohl's, along with the hotels, plazas and restaurants that turned the Route 3 strip into the region's main shopping district.

The anchors that kept swapping names

Howland, the regional department store locals already knew, took the Steinbach name in March 1987 and moved into the mall later that year.

O'Toole's opened in 1988. Chappell's opened in 1989. The empty stretches left over from opening day filled in.

Then the names started falling over. Chappell's went into bankruptcy in the early 1990s.

The Bon-Ton arranged its entry into Watertown in 1992 and took that same box in 1993, where it stayed 25 years.

Montgomery Ward arrived in 1993 and made the building bigger.

Steinbach shut its Salmon Run store in 1999 when the chain pulled out of the market, and Dick's Sporting Goods eventually took the space.

Ward failed nationally around 2000, and Burlington opened in its box in 2001.

Not one of those boxes came down. Each new store moved into the walls the last one had left, and JCPenney kept its own through all of it.

Not everyone had been happy about how the mall got approved in the first place.

In July 1988, Town Supervisor Ralph Dickinson wrote to Donald Sager, an opponent of another Pyramid mall, about the developer's dealings with local government during Salmon Run's approval and construction.

Pyramid's general partner, Gary Dower, sued over that letter in federal court.

On December 15, 1988, the court threw out the federal claims, dismissed the state claims against Dickinson and the town without prejudice, and left Sager's alone.

The ruling covered the pleadings. It didn't decide whether the accusations were true.

Nine big stores, and a warning about Syracuse

Walk in around 2015 and nine large stores held the perimeter: Sears, The Bon-Ton, Burlington, Dick's Sporting Goods, JCPenney, Best Buy, Christmas Tree Shops, Gander Mountain and the Regal Stadium 12.

In between them ran Hollister, American Eagle, Victoria's Secret, Hot Topic, Justice, Bath & Body Works, PacSun and Maurices.

One thing had changed by then. On May 31, 2012, the whole property went tobacco-free, inside the building and out across the parking lot.

In 2014 the Town of Watertown adopted a comprehensive plan that called Salmon Run a major North Country retail center with a Canadian customer base, then named the two pressures on it: internet shopping, and Destiny USA, the enormous mall 70 miles down Interstate 81 in Syracuse.

That was written four years before anything visibly went wrong. In 2019 the mall counted 75 businesses, 850 jobs and 6 million visits a year.

It gave space to 111 nonprofit groups and hosted 28 community events.

Two department stores emptied within a year

The Bon-Ton's parent company liquidated in 2018, and the Watertown store closed with the chain.

That November, Sears named Salmon Run in another national round of closings, and the store shut in early 2019.

Gander Outdoors, already through one bankruptcy under its old name, left as well.

Two department stores and a big outdoor retailer emptied out inside about a year and a half.

Pyramid moved fast on paper.

In the fall of 2018, town boards approved a variance and a two-lot subdivision that cut the former Bon-Ton building and 3.8 acres of its parking out of the mall footprint so the piece could be sold or leased on its own.

In July 2019, concept maps for the empty Sears and Bon-Ton spaces showed a bowling alley, a trampoline park, axe throwing and a Golden Corral.

The maps were preliminary. Hobby Lobby, Planet Fitness and Billy Beez were the tenants that signed.

Spirit Halloween took 10,000 square feet at the front of the old Bon-Ton for the season.

Then March 19, 2020 arrived and New York closed the enclosed interior.

Stores with their own outside doors, JCPenney and Best Buy among them, reopened before the concourse.

The concourse reopened July 10 after nearly four months.

Hobby Lobby opened July 31 in 54,800 square feet of what had been Sears. Regal stayed closed until May 7, 2021.

The stores that left without leaving town

Billy Beez opened by March 2023 in another part of the old Sears space: 18,500 square feet of slides, climbing structures, bumper cars, arcade games, a ballistics arena and party rooms.

That same year Christmas Tree Shops liquidated nationwide and its Watertown store went with it.

Then came the harder ones.

Dick's Sporting Goods closed at the mall earlier that week, after 20 years, and opened a newly built store at Towne Center on Route 3 on April 17, 2024.

Burlington signed a 10-year lease for 30,500 square feet at Price Chopper Plaza and opened there on November 1, 2024, ending 23 years in the former Montgomery Ward box.

Burlington cited weaker traffic inside the mall and better visibility from the road at the new site.

Both companies stayed in Watertown. They stopped being mall stores and moved less than a mile into the retail corridor the mall itself had created.

What filled the big spaces afterward rarely looked like a traditional mall shop.

Ashley opened a furniture store on August 16, 2025, after six months of interior work on a space that had been an unfinished shell.

Bob Johnson Auto Group put a car showroom in a large space on the north side. A 25,000-square-foot airsoft course opened in part of the old Bon-Ton.

The small tenants went local too: Slappin' Cheesesteaks, Little Eve Desserts, Blanche and Oliver's Pet Grooming, Reczko's Touch of Country.

Salmon Run Mall goes up for sale

On February 26, 2026, Watertown learned that Pyramid had listed Salmon Run through JLL, after almost 40 years under one owner.

The offering covers everything: 673,000 square feet of leasable space, all 85 acres, 86.2 percent of it occupied. There is no asking price.

Jefferson County development officials were talking about it publicly by March 5. Their arithmetic is easy to follow.

The mall paid more than $200,000 in county property taxes in 2025 and $170,000 to the Watertown City School District, and it still supports 850 jobs.

Someone raised the old Penn Can Mall near Syracuse, which became a row of car dealerships.

Nothing like that has been chosen here, and no demolition or rezoning application exists in the public record.

The mall is open in the meantime, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday, 11 to 6 on Sunday.

JCPenney has been there since the early years and is still on the south side.

Birthday parties run at Billy Beez, and there's an arcade, a pottery painting shop, an escape room and a comic store.

In 2024 the mall gave space to 80 nonprofit groups and worked with them on 25 events.

Parts of the directory map are blank. As of this August, no buyer has been named.