Licking County has no other enclosed regional mall. The nearest comparable center is more than 30 miles away, which is why Indian Mound Mall draws shoppers from Knox, Muskingum, Perry, and Fairfield counties alongside Licking County itself.
Glimcher Realty Trust opened it in October 1986 on the Route 79 corridor in Heath, about 35 miles east of Columbus, accessed via South 30th Street and Hebron Road.
JCPenney is the only original anchor still operating. The former Sears - 92,000 square feet sold in October 2025 for $2.25 million - is becoming an electrical apprenticeship training center with capacity for up to 2,000 apprentices annually.
A 300-acre mixed-use district called Central Park has city approval and $218 million in planned investment directly behind the parking lot.
Inside Indian Mound Mall on a Saturday Afternoon
Walk through the entrance off South 30th Street and the air hits you - cool, faintly sweet, carrying a trace of popcorn from the AMC theater at the far end.
The ceiling vaults above a wide interior corridor. Natural light still reaches the center of the building. JCPenney anchors one end.
Dick's Sporting Goods fills the old Lazarus wing. A trampoline park now bounces kids where Elder-Beerman once sold housewares.
The food court keeps its roughly 400 seats. None of this resembles the department-store-driven mall that opened here in October 1986, but the building is still active, and the parking lot fills on weekends.
Heath, Ohio, built its commercial identity around this intersection of South 30th Street and Hebron Road.
Whatever the mall has become, it still sits at the center of more than 2 million square feet of surrounding retail.
Target is next door. Walmart Supercenter is close by. The strip extends along Route 79 in both directions. It became one of the major reasons people had to come here in large numbers.
A few hundred feet to the west, behind the parking lot, a developer is planning a new mixed-use district called Central Park on roughly 300 acres of undeveloped land.
Indian Mound Mall Opens in Heath, Ohio
Glimcher Realty Trust broke ground on Indian Mound Mall in the early 1980s. The Columbus-based developer moved into mid-sized Ohio markets with a clear plan.
It selected the Heath-Newark market in Licking County, about 35 miles east of Columbus, where enclosed regional retail had been limited.
The mall opened on October 23, 1986. Its address was 771 South 30th Street in Heath. Elder-Beerman, JCPenney, Lazarus, and Hills filled the four anchor spaces.
The store lineup followed a familiar 1980s regional mall pattern. Two full-line department stores held down part of the mix.
A national mid-market chain and a discount anchor broadened the customer base. It was a practical formula, built to serve several kinds of shoppers under one roof.
The mall took its name from the area's older landscape. The Newark Earthworks, a large group of Hopewell-culture ceremonial earthworks built roughly 2,000 years ago, sat a few miles from the site.
Mound-related names had been used in the surrounding area for generations. The original logo used a circle, linear geometric elements, and a feather.
Glimcher later used a similar model at River Valley Mall in Lancaster, Ohio. That mall had the same anchor mix and the same suburban surface-parking footprint.
Indian Mound Mall drew trade from beyond Heath and Newark into Knox, Muskingum, Perry, and Fairfield counties.
Local employers and campuses helped carry that market, including Licking Memorial Hospital, Owens Corning, Anomatic, Denison University, and Ohio State University at Newark.
The Early Years: Fountains, Cinemas, and Growing Anchors
Crown Cinema opened at the rear of the building in 1988 as a six-screen theater. In July 1995, Target opened next door, adding another major big-box retailer to the corridor.
In 1996, Sears completed construction of a new anchor building at the north end of the mall, replacing a nearby freestanding Sears.
Sears opened inside the mall in 1997. The same year, the mall removed its center-court fountain, a fixture that had been part of the original interior design since 1986.
The theater expanded from six screens to eleven screens between 1997 and 1998 under the Hollywood Theaters banner.
Elder-Beerman expanded its anchor store in 1998. The mall then had five anchors - Elder-Beerman, JCPenney, Lazarus, Hills, Sears - and an eleven-screen cinema.
The mall measured 557,400 total square feet, with anchor space at 389,600 square feet and inline store space at 167,800 square feet.
Non-anchor tenants were 84.4 percent occupied in 2007, with store sales running at $238 per square foot.
The Anchor Collapses That Reshaped the Mall
Hills became Ames in 1999, when Ames acquired the Hills discount chain. Ames closed in 2002.
Lazarus closed in 2004; the space did not become a Macy's. Goody's opened in the former Lazarus space in 2005 and closed at the end of May 2008.
Steve & Barry's had moved into the old Hills-then-Ames box in 2004, but that chain also disappeared before the decade ended.
Elder-Beerman closed on August 26, 2018, after the Bon-Ton chain entered liquidation.
Dick's Sporting Goods had opened in the former Lazarus-Goody's space in 2011. Big Sandy Superstore replaced Steve & Barry's in 2017.
Sears had operated at the north end of the mall since 1997. The August 2019 announcement of another round of Sears closures included the Indian Mound location, and Sears shut its doors there in December 2019.
The building sat unused as a retail space for nearly six years. Every original anchor except JCPenney was gone or replaced.
Three of the original four had cycled through multiple subsequent tenants - and one of those replacements, Steve & Barry's, had itself closed nationally before the space turned over again.
Washington Prime, a $4.3 Billion Deal, and a Parcel Sale
Washington Prime Group announced its agreement to acquire Glimcher Realty Trust on September 16, 2014. The transaction was valued at about $4.3 billion, including assumed debt.
Mark S. Ordan was named executive chairman of the combined company, with Michael P. Glimcher as vice chairman and chief executive officer.
Indian Mound Mall passed into Washington Prime's portfolio in 2015. By the end of 2018, Washington Prime counted the mall at 556,700 total square feet with 89.5 percent occupancy.
The anchor lineup that year was AMC Theatres, Big Sandy Superstore, Dick's Sporting Goods, JCPenney, and Sears.
On May 16, 2017, Washington Prime sold a vacant 80,000-square-foot anchor parcel at Indian Mound Mall to a private real estate investor for approximately $800,000.
Stockbridge Enterprises later listed Indian Mound Mall within its real estate portfolio, and 2025 leasing materials identified the property as being under new management and ownership.
Regal took over the cinema operation on April 1, 2013, closed the theater in January 2016, and AMC reopened it in April 2016.
The current operation runs as AMC Indian Mound Mall 9.
Community Uses That Moved In While Retail Moved Out
Blend moved from Granville to Indian Mound Mall on April 3, 2017. The program was tied to the Licking County Board of Developmental Disabilities and had formerly been called Studio SPARK.
It needed more room for its gallery, art-making studio, classes, and paid jobs for artists with developmental disabilities.
The mall offered space at a time when its interior held more vacancies than it had carried in decades.
Altitude Trampoline Park opened in part of the former Elder-Beerman space on November 18, 2020, converting a section of closed department-store floor into an active-recreation venue.
Neither Blend nor Altitude replaced the retail revenue that Elder-Beerman had produced, but both kept parts of the building active and drew visitors who came for art, work, classes, and recreation rather than conventional shopping.
Community organizations, fitness operations, and entertainment venues moved into spaces that department stores had vacated - tenants that would not have looked at mall space when the same stores were still competing for leases.
By April 2026, Indian Mound Mall carried 19 available retail spaces totaling 53,500 square feet at $12 per square foot per year.
The Former Sears and 900 Apprentices Who Need a Building
Newark Electrical Joint Apprenticeship and Training Trust purchased the former Sears building on October 1, 2025, for $2.25 million, with a $2.3 million mortgage recorded the same month.
Newark Electrical JATC had 35 apprentices in 2015. By January 2024, it had 200. A year after that, 400. By late 2025, roughly 800.
In April 2026, more than 900. The organization's existing building at 450 South 22nd Street in Heath was designed for a fraction of that scale.
The former Sears building is 92,000 square feet - about 6.5 times larger.
The conversion plan includes individual classrooms, hands-on lab environments for electrical training surrounding each classroom, and a section called the Twelve Clear Career Exploration Center with programming for elementary, middle-school, and high-school students covering electrical and STEM subjects.
Renovation work on phase one was underway in the spring of 2026, with phase two still seeking funding. When fully completed, the facility is planned to support 16 classrooms and up to 2,000 apprentices annually.
Newark Electrical JATC planned to leave its South 22nd Street building in June 2026 and continue instruction through the summer from the former department-store floor.
Central Park and the 300 Acres Behind the Parking Lot
The City of Heath approved the planned unit development for Central Park in late 2023.
The project covers roughly 300 acres immediately west of and behind Indian Mound Mall - land that had drawn development proposals for two to three decades without one getting built.
Central Park received $4.1 million in Ohio Transformational Mixed-Use Development tax credits on January 31, 2024. The first phase covers approximately 48 acres near the mall.
It includes four mixed-use buildings, a clubhouse or community center, and eight multifamily buildings with 424 residential units, plus about 42,000 square feet of commercial space for retail, restaurants, offices, and shops.
Later phases expand to 24 buildings, 21 multifamily structures, restaurant spaces, a senior-living building, public plaza elements, and a large sports complex.
The total project cost has been placed at $218 million.
Four hundred and twenty-four residential units on the mall's western edge would put residents within walking distance of a building that has spent its entire existence assuming everyone arrives by car.
The Newark Electrical JATC training center is planned to open in that same building in the summer of 2026.
