The Shops at Ithaca Mall is a one-level enclosed mall at 40 Catherwood Road in the Village of Lansing, just north of Ithaca, New York.
It opened in 1976 as Pyramid Mall Ithaca, built by The Pyramid Companies out on the Route 13 corridor.
For 30 years it ran on department stores: J.W. Rhodes, JCPenney, Montgomery Ward, Hills, and a Sears added in 1989.
Every one of them is gone now. Penney's split into three big boxes in 2002. Sears went dark in 2014, Bon-Ton in 2018.
Then the reuse got strange.
Cayuga Health bought the old Bon-Ton and Sears space for $8.5 million in 2022 and opened medical offices there in 2024.
The old Dick's/Ulta/DSW end, and the Best Buy space, have been approved for a CubeSmart-managed storage conversion, with Best Buy still operating in its piece for now.
Target, Regal, Michaels, and Best Buy still hold the lights on. Spencer Gifts, an original 1976 tenant, left in January 2026.
When the mall steering committee picked a side
In March 1974, the Ithaca Mall Steering Committee stood up in front of the Common Council and told them to approve a project meant to keep shopping downtown.
The Pyramid Companies still wanted to build an enclosed mall in Lansing, north of Ithaca, off the highway.
City officials were nervous.
Downtown had its own plans: the Rothschild's-Caldwell complex, the pedestrian Ithaca Commons taking shape.
The argument was simple and old.
Should regional shopping happen inside the city, on a walkable downtown street, or out by Route 13 where the parking was free, and the cars came easy?
The steering committee backed downtown. Two years later, the highway opened anyway.
Four anchors and a parking field
Pyramid Mall Ithaca opened in 1976 at 40 Catherwood Road, a one-level enclosed mall ringed by surface parking, plugged straight into the Route 13 and North Triphammer corridor.
Four department stores held the corners.
J.W. Rhodes gave it a local department-store name.
JCPenney and Montgomery Ward brought the national draws everyone knew.
Hills filled the discount slot.
The format was the standard suburban deal of the era: long interior concourse, food court, big boxes at the ends, acres of asphalt outside the doors.
It worked. For a while, the question of where Ithaca shopped had a clear answer, and the answer was Lansing.
The names started sliding
Department-store names don't stay put. Rhodes became Bon-Ton. Hills became Ames. The signs changed; the boxes stayed.
In 1989, the mall did something malls did when they were still confident: it grew.
Sears opened as a fifth anchor, replacing the catalog-store presence Sears had kept elsewhere in the Triphammer retail area.
Five department stores now, all under one roof.
That was the high-water mark. Nobody knew it yet.
Penney's leaves, and the box gets cut in three
JCPenney closed in May 2001.
A dark department-store box is a slow problem, the kind that drags a mall down by the corner.
Pyramid didn't wait for it.
They split the space three ways. Best Buy took a piece.
Borders Books & Music took a piece. Dick's Sporting Goods took the third.
One traditional anchor became three category-killers, each pulling its own crowd.
In 2002, the Montgomery Ward end came down.
Most of that building was removed or reworked, and Target rose in its place: 126,000 sq ft on 10.4 acres, built new in 2002.
Target's still there. It's now the single most reliable reason anyone drives to the property.
The new name arrived with a movie screen
By 2007, Pyramid wanted a reset. The old Ames space on the far side got demolished and rebuilt for a cinema.
Regal Ithaca Mall Stadium 14 opened on July 20, 2007: 14 screens, 2,600 seats, stadium seating, replacing the tired Pyramid Mall 10 that Regal had picked up from Hoyts in 2003.
The theater came with a new name for the whole property.
Pyramid Mall Ithaca became The Shops at Ithaca Mall.
Management framed it as a fresh phase, with Target, Best Buy, Borders, Dick's, and Regal all pitched as reasons to stop driving out of Tompkins County for a movie or a flat-screen.
There was a bigger dream attached, too.
The lifestyle center that never got built
In November 2007, mall reps brought a much louder idea to the Village of Lansing Planning Board.
Three new buildings. Boutique shops of 3,000 to 5,000 sq ft.
Outdoor walkways, landscaped public space, a long building facing Route 13 with two more across an open plaza.
And on top of two of those buildings, roughly 40 apartments.
They even floated a green roof, until someone pointed out the existing mall roof couldn't carry the weight of soil and plants.
So that got shelved, and the old theater space was eyed for a plainer indoor reuse instead.
The whole indoor-outdoor plan never got built.
It's the version of the mall that almost happened, because what actually happened next was the opposite of expansion.
The chains start folding
Borders collapsed nationally in 2011, and the Ithaca store went with it.
The space cycled through Ultimate Athletics, then Ulta and DSW.
Sears closed in 2014. Fifth anchor gone.
Bon-Ton entered its chainwide liquidation in 2018, and the Ithaca store closed with it, ending the 42-year lineage that started as J.W. Rhodes in the original four.
The local name, the national name, the corner itself, all of it dark.
Then Dick's left the mall entirely for the old Tops plaza inside the city of Ithaca, taking its crowd to an outdoor big-box strip.
Ulta and DSW closed too. That end of the mall was emptying out faster than anyone could fill it.
New owners, and a plan to cut the mall into pieces
By 2017, the property had changed hands.
Namdar Realty Group and Mason Asset Management took over ownership and management, operating through PMI Newco LLC.
A $14 million acquisition loan was sourced that year.
The new owners had a different strategy than building boutiques.
They wanted to subdivide.
Carve the single mall and its parking into separate parcels so anchor spaces could be sold off or separately owned, the way Target and BJ's already controlled their own ground.
The Village Planning Board spent 2020 and 2021 grinding through it.
Parcels for Regal, for Michaels, for the Best Buy side, for a hotel lot behind the Clarion.
The board worried less about retail than about plumbing: who maintains the roads, the walkways, the shared drains if the property splits into a dozen owners who don't talk to each other?
The flood that wouldn't go away
That worry had a date attached. July 2017.
A heavy rain sent water across the eastern parking lot, swamping dozens of parked cars, reaching nearby Shannon Park and a residential area.
Target and Michaels closed early. Shoppers got stranded in the lot.
The flood became the ghost haunting the subdivision meetings after.
The board adopted final plat approval in March 2021 and amended it that August.
The approval loaded the owner with a maintenance list that reads like a punishment.
Annual roof-drain cleaning. Annual snaking of the stormwater mains. Biannual culvert cleaning.
Removal of rocks lodged in a 42-inch pipe under the mall, then a replaced grate. A cleared swale. And a flash-flood emergency plan.
The Village even reserved the right to do the work itself and bill the owner through the tax levy if they didn't.
A hospital buys the dead anchors
In 2022, the most concrete reuse yet arrived, and it wasn't a store.
Cayuga Health bought 108,000 sq ft of former department-store space, the old Bon-Ton and Sears parcels, for $8.5 million.
The health system had already used the mall during the pandemic for testing and vaccinations.
Now it wanted the space for good.
The renovations brought exam rooms, lab services, check-in kiosks, accessible parking, and a patient plan built partly around the property's TCAT bus stop.
Cayuga Heart and Vascular opened at the mall on March 25, 2024.
Cayuga Primary Care and Cayuga Rheumatology followed on April 8.
Practices that had been scattered across Triphammer Road, Brentwood Drive, Trumansburg Road, and Community Corners all moved under the old mall roof.
The corner that opened as J.W. Rhodes in 1976 now takes blood pressure.
Storage units where the sporting goods were
That end got a different fate.
In July 2024, the Village approved a special permit for a CubeSmart-managed self-storage project, sprawling across the former Dick's, Ulta, and DSW spaces and tied to the Best Buy box.
The plan came in phases. Phase I works inside the existing building.
Phase II adds outbuildings in front of Best Buy, with the Best Buy box waiting for whenever Best Buy leaves.
A mall wing built for sneakers and cosmetics, approved to become rows of locked metal doors.
That's the clearest measure of how far the retail side has slid.
When the reuse plan for a whole mall wing is storage units, the shopping mall is no longer mainly a shopping mall.
What's still open in 2026
Walk in today, and the place is alive, just not the way it was.
Target anchors one end with its CVS and Starbucks inside.
Regal still runs 14 screens, having survived a January 2023 spot on Cineworld's bankruptcy closure list.
Best Buy and Michaels were still major stores into 2024.
BJ's Wholesale Club, 85,000 sq ft, has pulled traffic from next door since January 2012.
The rest of the tenant list tells you what a small-market mall becomes when the department stores leave.
Kay Jewelers and LOFT, sure.
But also Pickle Ball Mania, the Ithaca BJJ School, the Finger Lakes Toy Library, the Family Reading Partnership, Unity House of Cayuga County, and as of October 2025, a weekly Community Dining lunch run by Cayuga Health and Foodnet Meals on Wheels in the old Sears area.
The food court thinned out to match. Subway closed.
Then at the end of May 2026, Auntie Anne's and Carvel shut down after a run that started in April 2016, leaving Sicilian Delight in Cafe Square and Zocalo Mexican Bar & Grill just outside it.
And in January 2026, Spencer Gifts finally left after standing in the mall since the doors first opened in 1976: one of the original tenants, gone after nearly 50 years.
