The old JCPenney at Wilton Mall sells produce now. Part of it, anyway. Planet Fitness has the rest.
Wilton Mall is the Saratoga Springs area's enclosed mall, a one-level Wilmorite build from 1990 at 3065 Route 50 in Wilton, NY.
It opened with four department stores: JCPenney, Sears, Addis & Dey's, and Steinbach. One by one, the store spaces changed tenants.
Dick's Sporting Goods replaced Steinbach in the mid-90s. Healthy Living Market opened in 35,000 square feet of the old Penney's in 2013.
Saratoga Hospital began turning the former Sears into support-office space after signing a lease in 2019.
Of the old department-store spaces, only the Bon-Ton space, empty since 2018, is still waiting for a new tenant.
After a local group bought the mall in 2025, the old plan to raze it for apartments was off, though housing is still being discussed elsewhere on the property.
JCPenney, the one main store that never left, closed its original store in 2007 and just moved to another spot inside the building.
The whole history of Wilton Mall is like that: keep the building, change what it is used for. It began with a fifth main store that never arrived.
Wilton Mall opens off Exit 15
In 1990, Wilmorite Properties of Rochester opened a one-level enclosed mall on Route 50 in the town of Wilton, just north of Saratoga Springs and a short drive from Exit 15 of the Northway.
The address said Saratoga Springs. The tax bill went to Wilton.
The mall opened with four department stores: JCPenney, Sears, Addis & Dey's, and Steinbach.
Around them, Wilmorite built the full late-1980s kit: inline stores, a food court, and parking wrapped around a split-face block building with sunburst rooflines over the entrances.
Shoppers came down from Glens Falls and Lake George and up from the rest of Saratoga County.
Wilmorite knew the format.
The same company had Eastview, Marketplace, Greece Ridge, and Rotterdam Square in its portfolio.
The fifth anchor that never showed up
The site plan had room for a fifth department store, and Montgomery Ward was supposed to take it.
The store never got built. For years, the anchor ring stayed at four.
That gap mattered later.
When JCPenney closed its original store in 2007, the chain stayed in the building and moved into a different space, leaving its old box behind.
The mall would spend the next decade figuring out what to do with department-store buildings that no longer held department stores.
The old mall down the road didn't survive it
Route 50 already had an enclosed mall.
Saratoga Mall, opened in the 1970s as Pyramid Mall Saratoga, stood nearby on the same corridor, and for most of the 1990s the two coexisted.
Then the anchors started leaving the older building.
Carl Company, Jamesway, Montgomery Ward, and Service Merchandise all went during the 1990s as stores and shoppers shifted to the newer property.
In 1999, crews demolished Saratoga Mall, and the Wilton Square big-box center went up on the site.
That left Wilton Mall with the enclosed-mall market in the Saratoga Springs area to itself.
Its competition from then on came from strip retail and big boxes along the same road.
The anchor names start rotating
The original lineup lasted three years intact.
In 1993, Addis & Dey's became The Bon-Ton, and Hoyts opened a cinema at the mall the same year.
In the mid-1990s, Steinbach closed, and Dick's Sporting Goods took the box.
The mall got a conventional renovation in 1998.
After that, the biggest changes were less about fresh finishes and more about what the big boxes could become.
The old JCPenney would turn into a grocery store and a gym.
The old Sears would turn into hospital space.
Macerich buys in, occupancy peaks
Macerich, one of the country's biggest mall owners, acquired Wilton Mall in April 2005 as part of its purchase of the Wilmorite portfolio.
The property looked healthy.
In 2009, it measured 740,800 square feet, with 455,200 square feet of leasable mall and freestanding space, and it was 92.6 percent leased.
In 2010, it hit 96.5 percent.
That was the peak. The mall never got back to that level.
A grocery store and a gym move into a department store
JCPenney's original box came back in pieces.
Planet Fitness took part of the space during the reuse push of the early 2010s.
In March 2013, Healthy Living Market and Cafe opened in 35,000 square feet of it, the Vermont grocer's second store after South Burlington.
A building put up for a department store now held a grocery, a cafe, and a gym, tenants that run on repeat daily visits rather than weekend trips.
It pushed the mall further away from the format it was built in, and it happened years before anyone filed a formal redevelopment plan.
Two anchors close in six months
The Bon-Ton closed on August 24, 2018, as the whole chain liquidated.
By February 2019, closed signs were up at Sears, which Sears Holdings had put on a closing list during its bankruptcy.
Two of the four original department-store boxes went empty within six months of each other.
The Bon-Ton box at the east end stayed vacant, and it would spend the next several years as the most argued-over piece of Wilton Mall.
The hospital takes the Sears space
The Sears box found a tenant from outside the old mall playbook.
In October 2019, Saratoga Hospital leased more than 56,000 square feet of the former store for information systems and support functions, moving them off its Church Street campus to free that space for patient care.
So one former anchor sold groceries and another processed hospital paperwork.
The mall was turning into a container for whatever the area needed square footage for.
The theater closed twice and came back
The cinema had the mall's strangest run.
Hoyts opened it in 1993. Regal bought it in March 2003, then closed it on February 18, 2013.
Bow Tie Cinemas took over the gutted space and opened an eight-screen Wilton Mall Cinemas that October, with a large-format BTX auditorium.
The pandemic closed it again.
Other regional Bow Tie locations reopened; this one didn't, and by February 2021 the signage had come off the building.
The screens stayed dark until 2024.
In March 2024, Scene One Entertainment reopened the theater with eight screens, leather rocking chairs, and a large-format auditorium called The Big Scene, built around a 2,000-square-foot screen.
The mall had an evening draw again for the first time since March 2020.
The mall's value fell by $60 million
While the tenants churned, the tax numbers collapsed.
In a decade, the main mall parcel's assessed value fell from $77 million to $20.5 million.
The mall-related parcels together dropped from just under $100 million to below $40 million by 2023.
Wilton cared about that math more than most towns would.
The mall's commercial assessment mattered because Saratoga County shared sales tax partly by taxable value, and Wilton had long avoided a town property tax.
A mall assessed $56.5 million lower meant a smaller tax base and a smaller cut of that sales-tax pool.
That decline became one of the main arguments for putting housing on the property.
Tear down the Bon-Ton, build 382 homes
Macerich partnered with Paramount Development in May 2021 on a housing plan for the Bon-Ton end of the property.
By September 2022, the Planning Board was reviewing a mixed-use PUDD covering about 101 acres: 680,000 square feet of commercial space and 420,000 square feet of residential.
The 2023 version priced the project at $120 million to $124 million, with 296 apartments and 86 townhomes, all rentals, and the former Bon-Ton demolished to make room.
The October 2023 public hearing pulled in both sides.
Supporters pointed at the empty anchors and the falling assessment.
Opponents raised traffic, school enrollment, and the rents: the units were pitched as market-rate, with rents expected to start around $2,000, and some residents wanted affordable housing instead.
An earlier idea, a conservation easement on Vincek Farm, the town's last working farm, drew questions at the hearings about who would benefit, then got dropped.
The final package traded it for trail connections to the county forest, pedestrian and bike improvements, mall-entry upgrades, and a $300,000 contribution to the Larry Gordon Outdoor Educational Center at Camp Saratoga.
The approval also ordered work on the building itself: power washing the split-face block walls, new signage in place of those dated sunburst rooflines, painted roof panels, and refreshed entries.
In April 2024, the Town Board approved the plan 4 to 1, with the town supervisor voting no.
At the time, the schedule had the Bon-Ton coming down in spring 2025 and apartments opening in 2026.
Wilton Mall sells for $24.8 million
The approved plan never broke ground under Macerich.
On March 27, 2025, the company sold Wilton Mall for $24.8 million to Wilton Mall Development LLC, a local group, with about $15 million financed through Broadview Federal Credit Union.
The JCPenney parcel and the nearby BJ's Wholesale Club parcel weren't part of the deal.
The new owner reversed the order of everything.
The Bon-Ton would stay standing and get marketed as leasable space.
A multi-million-dollar mall renovation would come first, along with a leasing push: about seven tenants over eight months, including outlet clothing stores, a pizza place, a possible Mediterranean restaurant, and a coffee shop.
Housing stayed in the plan, now 300 apartments and 80 townhomes, but moved onto parking-lot land and unused property, with construction no earlier than the third quarter of 2027.
The plan included a connector so residents could walk into the mall's interior without going outside in bad weather.
What's open in 2026
Wilton Mall is still open, with listed mall hours starting at 10 a.m. Monday through Saturday and 11 a.m. on Sunday.
Occupancy was about 75 percent after the 2025 sale, down from 96.5 percent in 2010.
JCPenney and Dick's Sporting Goods still sell the conventional way, and HomeGoods fills another box with off-price home goods.
But much of the everyday draw is routine: groceries at Healthy Living from 8 in the morning, workouts at Planet Fitness, hospital staff in the old Sears, a movie at Scene One in the evening.
The Bon-Ton box is still empty, eight years after the chain folded, now waiting for tenants rather than a demolition crew.
Renovation and leasing come first, and no housing before late 2027.
Until then, the mall runs as what it turned into: a one-level building where the Saratoga Springs area buys groceries, works out, catches a movie, and keeps a hospital's back offices running.
