Dakota Square opens on Minot's south edge
By late April 1980, tenants were already moving into a new building on the south side of Minot, North Dakota.
It was Dakota Square, an enclosed regional mall at 2400 10th Street SW, almost all of it on one level, and it opened that year as the property of General Growth Development Corporation, while General Growth Management Corporation ran it day to day.
JCPenney moved out to the new mall from downtown Minot that year, and Target was part of the center from the beginning.
Not every early tenant lasted. One early clothing tenant had a January lease at about $3,100 a month, but its stay was brief.
It took possession on April 25 and ceased doing business on November 14, when the lease passed to another retailer.
Food arrived in the same first year.
A restaurant and lounge was built inside the mall for about $310,000, with its equipment going in during August, and it held its grand opening on September 29, 1980.
By the end of that year, Minot had its largest enclosed shopping center, and one of its storefronts was already on its second tenant.
Sears arrives, then a hotel and water slides
In 1988 Dakota Square took a department store away from its older, established rival.
Sears left Town & Country Mall that year and moved into a building at Dakota Square, and Town & Country was left without a Sears.
By 1996, Dakota Square had 1,500 employees, which made it the largest employer in Minot that year.
Around the start of 2004, the mall began taking overnight guests.
A Sleep Inn & Suites with 126 rooms opened attached to it, joined to a 10,000-square-foot convention center, and in April 2004 Splashdown Dakota Super Slides opened as part of the same complex.
The water park took up about 24,000 square feet.
It had an activity pool of roughly 2,500 square feet, three large slides and two smaller ones for children, four play structures, and a hot tub shaped like a four-leaf clover that was built to hold 48 people.
By that spring, the hotel, the water park, the convention space, and the mall were one connected complex on the south side of the city.
Barnes & Noble and a bigger Scheels
Between 2006 and 2008, some Dakota Square shops did business out of temporary spaces.
The Lightstone Group had bought the mall in 2005 and set out to rework its interior around two large stores, with about 28,000 square feet for a new Barnes & Noble book and media store and a larger Scheels.
About 10,700 square feet of new shop space came with them.
Making room meant emptying storefronts.
Nine tenants along the corridors had to relocate, some into temporary quarters and some into spaces Lightstone had kept vacant on purpose while construction went on around them.
The plan, drawn up by 2006, set the first quarter of 2007 for the end of the work and about October 2007 for every displaced tenant to be paying rent again.
The expansion was finished in 2008, the year after its target.
Lightstone also worked on the edges of the property.
In March 2011 Olive Garden signed for 7,800 square feet with 255 seats along the mall's north side, set to open late that summer.
The Paradiso Mexican Restaurant was to be torn down to make room, and the Olive Garden replaced it.
The mall gets new floors and an addition
Thirty-five years after Dakota Square opened, CBL began a $6 million mall-wide renovation in April 2015, after only smaller updates to the center.
Crews did most of the work after closing, leaving stores open during the day, and the project was scheduled to finish in mid-November.
The overhaul brought new floors and lighting, a different interior color scheme, new food-court furniture, and new landscaping outside.
The owner paying for it was CBL & Associates Properties, which had bought Dakota Square from Lightstone in May 2012 for $91.5 million.
The anchors CBL took over included a Carmike cinema and a Herberger's department store, alongside Sears, Scheels, and the hotel and water park.
In 2013 nearly all of the mall's shop space was leased, and when the 2015 work began it held more than 100 stores.
CBL kept building after the renovation. A 23,900-square-foot expansion, a $7.3 million project planned for fall, opened in November 2016.
Sears and Herberger's leave the mall
Sears announced in June 2017 that it would close its Minot store, and its last day was September 3, 2017.
The building it had filled since 1988 went over to temporary shops and attractions.
Within months, Herberger's was going too.
In April 2018 its closing was confirmed as the parent company, Bon-Ton Stores, liquidated the chain, and going-out-of-business sales began that month at all of its stores.
The Minot store closed later in 2018, and its building was divided among smaller tenants.
Ross signed for part of it in 2019, with construction expected that year, and the finished project, Ross and smaller shops in about 30,000 square feet, opened in January 2020 at a cost of $6.4 million.
Off-price and specialty stores arrived in the same years.
T.J. Maxx opened in May 2017 in part of the old Miracle Mart area, and HomeGoods opened beside it in April 2019, just north of the mall.
A Party City with its own outside entrance opened in 2018.
The cinema got a new name as well: AMC finished buying Carmike in late 2016, and AMC Theatres was on the anchor list by the end of 2017.
KJ's Fresh Market, an anchor at the end of 2016, was gone from that list by 2020.
At the end of 2020, one of the names on the mall's anchor list was simply the former Sears.
Scheels and Target build bigger stores
The empty Sears building found its tenant inside the mall.
In February 2021 Scheels announced it would combine its two Dakota Square stores there in 2022 and keep them open while it built.
The city's planning commission voted unanimously in June 2021 to recommend the plan, with conditions on parking and traffic flow.
CBL sold Scheels the former Sears location that July for $4 million.
CBL was working through Chapter 11 at the time and came out of it in November 2021 still owning the mall.
By 2022 the two Scheels stores were becoming one roughly 110,000-square-foot operation.
Scheels spent $20.6 million on the move, remodeling about 85,000 square feet of the Sears building and building another 25,000 for offices, a classroom, and a conference room.
R.L. Engebretson Architecture designed it and Kraus-Anderson built it.
The finished store mixed Ginna's Cafe and Fuzziwig's Candy Factory with taxidermy exhibits, a golf simulator, and a rollerball game built like an arcade machine.
Construction was finished by August 2022, with the new Scheels trading that year.
Target drew up its own expansion while the Scheels work was under way, sending the proposal to the city in December 2021.
The $7.7 million job was expected to take 18 months to two years.
It would add a Starbucks and more grocery space, improve drive-up pickup, and push the store outward on its west and north sides.
Tilt Studio takes the old Scheels space
The move emptied Scheels' old space inside the mall.
Elsewhere in the building, the fall of 2022 brought a run of new arrivals, and Five Below opened that season.
Crumbl had been announced for summer in part of the old KJ's space between T.J. Maxx and HomeGoods, and it opened months late, on November 18, 2022, with hundreds of people in line that morning.
That Black Friday the mall set a 7 a.m. opening, with Santa's Workshop, more than 60 stores, and over 19,000 square feet of extra holiday space.
Tilt Studio was announced for the former Scheels space in December 2022, with an opening planned that same month.
By February 2023 it was running bumper cars, mini golf, arcade games, and rooms for parties.
By the first half of 2023 the conversion was finished, and nearly 50,000 square feet of former Scheels floor had become an indoor amusement center.
The anchors hold as the shop corridors thin
Dakota Square is an operating enclosed mall, and CBL still owns it.
Its anchors are all open: a Target whose expansion is done, Scheels, JCPenney, the Sleep Inn, Barnes & Noble, Tilt Studio, and a nine-screen AMC with recliners.
The trouble is in the smaller shop spaces. At the end of 2022, 91 percent of the mall's shop space outside the anchors was leased.
At the end of 2025 the figure was 81 percent, in a footprint that had barely changed.
Party City went out of business nationwide in 2025, and in March 2026 a permit was issued to turn a former party-supply space at the mall into a Nail Boss spa.
It was under construction that spring and unopened in September 2026.
New shops keep arriving.
Halberstadt's opened a men's clothing store in May 2024, Do Eat Asian Cuisine opened that November with seats for more than 200, Moshi Taiyaki began selling fish-shaped waffles in December 2025, Dakota Chappy moved in from Broadway in April 2026, and BoxLunch held its grand opening in August 2026.
Getting to the mall has meant roadwork.
A $20 million drainage project began around the mall in April 2025 to replace culverts and pipes, some over 40 years old, and the loop roads reopened that November before another phase partly closed 24th Avenue SW in June 2026.
The winter market that started in November 2024, with about five local vendors near Santa Land and JCPenney, is set to return on November 14, 2026, and the mall is advertising Santa photos.
In 1996, with Sears among its anchors, Dakota Square employed 1,500 people, more than any other employer in Minot.
The Sears building is a Scheels now, and the space Scheels left behind has bumper cars.
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