New Towne Mall broke the usual rule. A small-market mall that loses its anchor stores tends to follow them toward closing, and this one lost all five it opened with in 1988.
It sits on Mill Avenue SE in New Philadelphia, Ohio, the county seat of Tuscarawas County, an enclosed center from the late-1980s mall boom.
Survival did not come cheap. The property changed hands twice and sold for $10 million in 2023, years after one of its giant anchor boxes had gone dark.
The names that fill those anchor boxes today would have puzzled a 1988 shopper, and getting there cost the mall almost everything it started with.
New Towne Mall's 1988 Opening: JCPenney Led the Way In
When New Towne Mall opened on October 20, 1988, one of its anchors arrived with customers already attached.
JCPenney moved over from Miracle Lane Plaza in Dover, carrying a familiar local name into the new enclosed center on Mill Avenue SE.
It joined four other large stores: Sears, Elder-Beerman, Hills, and Phar-Mor.
Three department stores, one discount chain, one deep-discount drug and variety store. For a county seat the size of New Philadelphia, that was a deep lineup.
Glimcher Realty Trust developed the place, a Columbus-based shopping-center company putting up enclosed malls in Ohio and the wider region in the late 1980s.
The 1987 plan called for five anchors, around 80 stores, a food court, and a movie theater.
The Cleveland firm Keeva Kekst Associates drew the building, and it came out close to a twin of Glimcher's Indian Mound Mall in Heath, a regional template the company could repeat instead of a one-off.
One level, about 505,000 square feet, big anchor boxes at the ends and smaller shops strung between them.
Inside New Towne Mall: A Fountain, Tile Floors, and a One-Level Concourse
The concourse ran on a simple plan: white and brown tiled floors, storefronts down both sides, wooden benches to sit on, and a circular fountain set into the common area.
One climate-controlled level, no second story, walkable end to end.
Outside sat the parking fields and highway access, with Interstate 77 and U.S. 250 tying the mall to Canton, Akron, Cleveland and the smaller towns in between.
At half a million square feet, it never reached the size of the big metropolitan malls, but it was large enough to be the county's enclosed retail center, and its anchor boxes could be converted later, when chains came and went.
The whole building was organized for people arriving by car, which fit the point in 1988.
What New Towne Mall Meant to New Philadelphia's Retail Map
The mall changed where Tuscarawas County shopped. Downtown stores and older plazas were still a major part of the area's retail map before 1988.
After the mall opened, national chains and specialty retailers clustered along the highway-side retail corridor, and the Mill Avenue SE area became the city's main shopping district.
JCPenney's move from Dover was an early sign of that pull. Retail on that scale in a small county seat of around 16,000 people was built to draw from across the county and the towns around it.
It put people to work in the anchors, the inline shops, and the restaurants, plus seasonal hiring, and gave the area one enclosed place for holiday shopping, weekend outings, and everyday errands.
New Towne Mall's First Losses: Phar-Mor and Ames Close in 2002
The discount end emptied first. Ames had bought Hills at the end of 1998 and converted the box under the Ames name in 1999, and then Ames itself failed, and the New Philadelphia location closed in 2002.
Phar-Mor went the same year, gone after the company's bankruptcy. Two of the five original anchors stood empty within months of each other.
Kohl's filled the Ames space in 2005 and brought a stronger apparel-and-home format into that wing.
The same year, Elder-Beerman expanded its store, a sign that at least one original department store still saw room to grow here.
For a stretch, the mall held a workable balance: an old anchor putting money in while a new one moved in to replace a chain that hadn't lasted.
One New Towne Mall Storefront, Four Tenants: The Phar-Mor Box
For years, the old Phar-Mor space struggled to hold a tenant. Goody's moved in during 2004 and closed in January 2007.
Steve & Barry's took over later that year, filed for bankruptcy in 2008, and shut the New Philadelphia store soon after.
Jo-Ann Fabrics finally settled into the box across 2013 and 2014, the same stretch that brought Marshalls and rue21 to the mall.
Marshalls mattered more than it looked. Off-price retail was climbing just as the department stores weakened, and the mall passed its 25th anniversary in October 2013 with that shift already underway.
The Phar-Mor box told the churn story in one storefront: after Phar-Mor, three replacement names in roughly two decades, each a chain that grew, stalled, and moved on.
Of the replacement tenants, Jo-Ann lasted longest. Then the Joann chain hit its own bankruptcy, and the New Philadelphia store was closed in April 2025.
Sears, JCPenney, and Elder-Beerman: The Original Anchors Vanish
Sears closed in 2016 as its parent company shrank across the country.
Dick's Sporting Goods took the box that same year and kept the wing busy, swapping a department store for a sporting-goods chain that still pulled its own crowd. That one was easy.
JCPenney closed in 2017 and left 51,000 square feet empty. The space stayed mostly dark for just over five years.
Spirit Halloween moved in for a few months each year and cleared out again, and the rest of the year the box sat empty.
Elder-Beerman closed in 2018 when the Bon-Ton chain liquidated. It was the last original anchor still running. After that, none of the five stores the mall opened with in 1988 was operating in its first form.
Each closure traced back mainly to a chain in trouble somewhere else, not to anything obvious that happened in New Philadelphia.
Glimcher, Washington Prime, Kohan: New Towne Mall Changes Owners
Glimcher held the mall from the start until 2015, when Washington Prime Group bought the entire company.
Washington Prime had been spun out of Simon Property Group a year earlier, and the Glimcher deal folded New Towne Mall into a large portfolio of enclosed and open-air centers.
At the end of 2018, the mall was still 86.6 percent full, even with the JCPenney and Elder-Beerman boxes sitting empty.
A vacant anchor keeps costing the building. The big box still needs heat and upkeep, and a dark store at the end of a wing pulls down foot traffic for the inline shops near it.
Carrying two of them at once strained the whole center.
Then the corporate trouble arrived. Washington Prime and its affiliated companies filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on June 13, 2021, after years of store closures, pandemic shutdowns, and rising debt.
The mall kept its doors open through all of it. In 2023, a buyer tied to Kohan Retail Investment Group of Great Neck, New York, paid $10 million for the property.
It was 82 percent leased, and the empty Elder-Beerman wing was the only anchor without a tenant once a deal for the JCPenney box came together.
Ashley and Hobby Lobby Refill New Towne Mall's Empty Anchors
The JCPenney box came back first. Ashley was announced for the space in 2023 and opened in March 2024, with a grand opening that May.
It put a furniture store and an outlet under one roof, the first Ashley Store and Ashley Outlet hybrid in northeast Ohio.
One of the mall's largest empty fronts turned back into a working anchor.
The Elder-Beerman wing took longer, and it had one odd detour. In early 2025, after a school bond issue failed, New Philadelphia officials looked at the empty store as a possible site for a new school building.
The idea didn't survive review. An architect figured renovating the old department store for classrooms would cost more than building from scratch, and the plan was dropped.
Hobby Lobby took the wing instead, opening a 53,000-square-foot store at the end of May 2026, the chain's 45th in Ohio. Both of the anchor boxes that had gone dark in the late 2010s were working again.
New Towne Mall Today: Crafts, Sporting Goods, Wrestling, and a Play Lounge
The anchor list reads nothing like 1988, and it has grown beyond the original five as new chains arrived over the years.
Kohl's, with Sephora inside, Dick's Sporting Goods, Ashley, Marshalls, Hobby Lobby, and Dunham's Sports hold the big spaces now, while Ulta Beauty and smaller tenants fill out the rest: Bath & Body Works, Kay Jewelers, LensCrafters, Finish Line, GNC, Claire's, Sbarro, Empire China Buffet, and Flory's Authentic Latin Food among them.
The mix runs well past shopping. Quaker Digital Academy puts a school inside the mall. Powerslam Pro Wrestling and Next Level Play Lounge draw people who aren't just there to shop.
Seasonal tenants stayed part of the plan even after the big boxes filled: Spirit Halloween keeps coming back each fall, and the mall leases kiosks, pop-up space, and advertising spots alongside its permanent stores.
Claire's showed up in a permanent, roughly 1,600-square-foot lease starting in late 2025.
The numbers are small and steady. The mall recorded about $2.6 million in effective gross income in 2025 and about $1 million in net operating income.
The circular fountain still sits in a concourse built for a kind of shopping that mostly moved elsewhere.
What's left works: a county still drives to Mill Avenue SE to buy crafts, furniture, and shoes, to grab food, to catch a wrestling match, or to drop a kid at class.
The mall outlasted every original anchor that opened it.
