Great Northern Mall is an enclosed shopping mall in North Olmsted, Ohio, about 15 miles southwest of downtown Cleveland. It opened on November 3, 1976, with about 100 stores and services.
May Company, J.C. Penney, and Sears were its first department stores. Sears had opened its two-level building of about 179,600 square feet that July, ahead of the rest of the mall.
That Sears closed in August 2020, the last full-line Sears in Ohio. In November 2021 an auto group's affiliate bought the building and 15.6 acres and used it for showroom, office, and workshop space.
An agreement North Olmsted adopted in March 2026 covers that parcel. It calls for the Sears building to come down and for a grocery supercenter, a gas station, and a convenience store to rise there.
From open-air plaza to enclosed mall
On October 16, 1958, Great Northern Center was dedicated near the junction of Lorain and Brookpark roads.
It was an open-air strip of shops, and its charter stores included J.C. Penney, W.T. Grant, Fisher Foods, and a Sears catalog and appliance store.
May Company arrived in September 1965 with a freestanding three-level branch east of the original plaza. For the next 11 years, it stood on its own.
The 1976 project changed the layout: an enclosed concourse connected to May, while Sears and J.C. Penney shifted out of the plaza into new, much larger two-level stores.
The mall venture included the plaza's developer.
Sears, about 179,600 square feet, opened on July 28; J.C. Penney's roughly 165,400-square-foot store was in place when the mall opened on November 3.
Great Northern Mall opened on November 3, 1976, in North Olmsted, Ohio, about 15 miles southwest of downtown Cleveland.
It opened as a single-level concourse of about 100 stores and services, with May Company, Sears, and J.C. Penney as its anchors, and it still operates as an enclosed mall.
Under its roof were about 844,500 leasable square feet. The open-air plaza of 1958 had about 365,000.
The mall grows to five anchors
The May Company branch also got larger, growing from about 181,000 to about 228,500 square feet through a one-level addition in the late 1980s.
In 1987, a separate 15-store South Court opened at the mall's southwest corner.
Six years later, May's Cleveland stores were folded into its Pittsburgh-based Kaufmann's division, putting the Kaufmann's name on the Great Northern store.
Westfield took over Great Northern in 2002.
Dillard's followed the next spring: its roughly 220,000-square-foot, two-level store opened on March 19, 2003, at the end of an expanded South Court whose new wing held 15 inline stores.
Another anchor was supposed to carry the Galyan's name.
The sporting-goods chain had an approximately 84,000-square-foot building planned along the mall's north side, but Dick's Sporting Goods acquired Galyan's before it opened.
By 2005, Dick's was operating there, giving Great Northern five anchors.
By the middle of the decade, Great Northern had roughly 1.24 million leasable square feet, up from the 844,500 it opened with.
In September 2006 the old May Company store changed its name again, to Macy's.
The food court moves and a cinema moves in
The Food Commons dated from 1988, when the mall's original food operation was reworked into a two-level court of 17 bays between J.C. Penney and Sears.
It was the mall's main food destination until 2011.
That May, Westfield launched an $8 million renovation that moved the food court to a new 12-bay Dining Court beside Dick's.
The project was dedicated on November 3, 2011, exactly 35 years after the mall opened.
Moving the food court opened up the zone the Food Commons had filled.
Work started there in late 2012 on roughly 55,000 square feet, which became a 10-screen Regal cinema with two restaurants beside it.
The cinema's RPX auditorium had a screen more than 55 feet wide.
Regal Great Northern Mall Stadium 10 & RPX opened on December 12, 2013.
The theater reopens and a play center arrives
Regal closed the theater at the end of January 2023, during Cineworld's bankruptcy restructuring, and its 10 screens sat dark for nearly 17 months.
Kids Empire was announced in 2023 for a 14,800-square-foot space elsewhere inside the mall, and it opened there as an indoor play center with climbing structures, slides, ball pits, and a toddler section.
In January 2024 the mall announced a long-term lease with Phoenix Theatres for the dark cinema.
Phoenix put about $5 million into the 44,000-square-foot complex, which had cost about $10 million to build.
The money went into new screens and seating, heated reclining seats in every auditorium, and four ENCORE auditoriums with 4K projection and Dolby Atmos, the largest with a screen up to 60 feet wide.
Phoenix Theatres Great Northern opened to the public on June 13, 2024, in the footprint Regal had left.
A demolition deal for the old Sears
Sears closed its Great Northern store in August 2020, the last full-line Sears operating in Ohio.
Its building sat on a parcel outside the mall's main ownership.
That parcel changed hands on its own: in November 2021 R6 Motors, an affiliate of Rafih Automotive Group, bought the building and 15.6 acres around it for $6.6 million.
The building was painted black and used for showroom, office, and workshop space.
A luxury-auto headquarters and dealership was considered for the site, and Rafih Automotive Group later chose a site in Avon for its dealership project.
North Olmsted introduced a development agreement with R6 Motors for the parcel in early 2026.
It called for the Sears building to be torn down and replaced with a grocery supercenter, a gas station, and a convenience store, with room for more commercial development on the rest of the parcel.
It carried a $600,000 demolition grant payable only after a certificate of occupancy was issued.
The city's Finance Committee took up the agreement on February 24, 2026.
Its members discussed where the grant money would come from, whether the incentive would set a precedent for future mall projects, the temporary title transfer the deal required, and whether the mall had authorized the work.
The committee recommended the agreement by a two-to-one vote, and City Council adopted it on March 17.
When the enclosed mall opened in 1976, more than 6,000 free parking spaces surrounded it.
Parking and roadways cover roughly 100 of the site's 138 acres today, and since June 2025 the city's zoning has allowed apartments and townhomes on that land.
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