What stands now on the land where North Towne Square mall drew Michigan shoppers to Toledo, OH?

Before North Towne Square mall went up at the top of Toledo, the land just below the Michigan line was an airfield.

The mall opened in stages in 1980 and 1981, built to pull shoppers south from Monroe County and the rest of southeastern Michigan.

By 2002 all three department stores were gone, and in 2005 the enclosed mall closed. Toledo took the ground in 2011 and cleared it in 2013 and 2014.

Even then the land sat. Access rights left over from the days of separately owned department stores kept it from selling cleanly until 2021.

That fall, a new plan for the site promised a first groundbreaking by spring 2022. The wait for the rest of that plan ran into 2026.

Skyview National Plaza stalls at the state line

Before anyone planned a store on it, the ground at the top edge of Toledo was an airfield used for commercial and municipal flying, with a mobile home park on part of the wider tract.

It lay just below the Michigan border, north of Alexis Road, with Telegraph Road to the west and Detroit Avenue to the east.

The area came into Toledo through an annexation, with city zoning approved in 1960.

In 1961 the title lease on one aviation parcel passed from one flying company to another.

The first shopping plan came in February 1973, when the Toledo Plan Commission approved a preliminary drawing for Skyview National Plaza, and the City Council rezoned the land for it that March.

The spot was picked to serve north Toledo and to draw shoppers south across the line from Monroe County and the rest of southeastern Michigan.

The commission extended its approval in March 1974, but Skyview stalled, and the project passed to Melvin Simon & Associates.

In February 1977, four years after the first drawing, the commission approved a new one for the same ground, and an amended site plan cleared that spring.

The Lion Store and Lasalle's open first

The Lion Store opened a branch at the state line in 1980 and closed its downtown Toledo location that year.

Lasalle's, the other Toledo department-store name on the site, opened a 162,000-square-foot store there in 1980 too.

Both were trading before the mall between them had its formal opening.

That mall was North Towne Square, an enclosed shopping mall on the north side of Toledo, Ohio, which opened in stages across 1980 and 1981.

It ran on a single level, set between department stores of more than one floor.

Shortly after the doors opened, shoppers walked an enclosed corridor past Kay Bee Toys, GNC, Thom McAn, and County Seat, whose storefronts opened straight onto it.

Montgomery Ward, the third anchor, was open by 1981, with an automotive service area attached to its building.

Each of the three department stores stood on a parcel with its own owner, apart from the mall's ground.

Cross-access easements tied the pieces together, giving shoppers the right to drive and walk from one ownership to the next.

The Lasalle's store changes its name twice

The sign on the Lasalle's store changed twice in the mall's first years.

Macy's, long affiliated with Lasalle & Koch, folded the Toledo stores into Macy's Midwest and put its own name on them in the early 1980s.

By the middle of the decade Macy's had sold its remaining Toledo-area stores to Elder-Beerman, and the North Towne building took a third name.

North Towne had come into a city that already shopped at Woodville Mall, Franklin Park Mall, and Southwyck Mall, and its own territory was the north side and the drive down from Michigan.

In 1988 Frenchtown Square opened in Monroe, Michigan, with department stores and shops of its own on the far side of that line.

All three anchors were open in 1996: Elder-Beerman, the Lion Store, and Montgomery Ward.

The mall around them held about 750,000 square feet of leasable space, and roughly 73 percent of it was occupied.

The mall loses all three department stores

Elder-Beerman closed the old Lasalle's store in 1997, after more than a decade under its name.

The Lion Store held on longer, keeping its own name through the 1980s and most of the 1990s.

That name belonged to Mercantile Stores, and when Dillard's bought Mercantile in 1998, the North Towne branch became a Dillard's.

Dillard's closed it in 2000. Montgomery Ward was the last traditional anchor open after Dillard's left.

The chain went through its final bankruptcy and liquidation in 2000 and 2001, and by 2002 all three department-store buildings at North Towne Square stood with no department store operating in any of them.

That year Simon Property Group, the successor to Melvin Simon & Associates after a corporate reorganization, sold the mall the company had owned since it was built.

North Towne went as one of five regional malls Simon let go in 2002, a group whose sales had averaged under $190 a square foot.

Super Fitness stays open as the mall closes

At the start of 2005 the mall's new owners decided that running the enclosed corridors for the tenants who were left cost too much, and electricity was the cost that settled it.

North Towne Square closed on February 21, 2005, and the enclosed building stopped working as public retail space.

Super Fitness, a gym in part of the old Montgomery Ward building, kept going.

It sat physically walled off from the mall, in a store building that, with its automotive service area, could be cut loose from the corridors and kept in use.

The businesses on the outparcels around the property went on trading as well.

The same year the Plan Commission and City Council approved industrial zoning for parts of the old mall property, at 301 and 501 New Towne Square and 220 Mel Simon Drive.

Through the rest of the decade the enclosed structure stood vacant beside the gym.

The city takes over the mall and tears it down

In February 2010 a water main broke and damaged the Super Fitness space, and the break laid bare the state of the empty mall beside it.

Toledo cited the owners for code violations again and again, and a judge ordered them to remedy the danger.

By November 2011 the city had a deal to take the site over so that public brownfield money could pay to bring the mall down.

Before the title moved, the owners agreed to pay $30,000 toward the city's costs and to settle $40,000 in public-utility bills they had left unpaid, along with their back property taxes.

The deal named Super Fitness as a stand-alone building that would stay.

Toledo took title, and federal brownfield money and Ohio redevelopment funds paid for the cleanup and the demolition.

Demolition began in January 2013.

Over that year and into 2014 the concourses, the old Lasalle's and Lion Store buildings, and the cinema came down.

The Montgomery Ward building was left standing, with Super Fitness inside it, beside cleared ground the city owned.

A $112 sale clears the land

The cross-access easements written for the mall's separate owners outlasted the buildings.

Toledo held the main tract, a company called Development 2002 LLC held the old department-store parcel with Super Fitness on it, and the easements ran between them, clouding the title.

For most of the 2010s the cleared core sat as empty ground next to the gym.

Even a 2017 rezoning toward industry brought no building, because the title and access problems stood in the way.

In February 2021 the City Council approved a trade.

Toledo would sell Development 2002 11.2 acres at $10 an acre, $112 in all, and both sides would release the access easements and the rights that came with them.

The trade left the city about 60 acres it could market.

That September the council moved the land from limited to general industrial zoning, a broader industrial class that lifted one more limit on what could be built there.

Toledo Trade Center rises on the mall site

In October 2021 Toledo announced a deal with NorthPoint Development to put two industrial buildings on the land, with groundbreaking on the first one promised for spring 2022.

The plan had grown to three buildings when the Plan Commission approved it in May 2022.

That June the project won a $10 million state brownfield grant for water, sewer, and stormwater work and for groundwater tainted with arsenic, on what was among the biggest brownfield sites around Toledo.

NorthPoint bought the tract in July for $2.7 million, and Toledo put part of that sale money toward rebuilding the roads around the site.

The site took the name Toledo Trade Center.

Its first building, about 285,000 square feet, went up before it had a tenant and was finished in 2023, and in December 2023 Mobis North America chose it for an electric-vehicle component operation, announcing 185 jobs.

The rest of the 2022 plan did not keep its schedule.

In February 2026 the Plan Commission approved one cross-dock building of 408,000 square feet at 301 New Towne Square Drive, on lots that had been held for two.

NorthPoint's Toledo Trade Center holds the old mall core, and the Mobis electric-vehicle parts operation occupies its first building.

No store trades on the ground where the corridor ran.

Super Fitness is still open in the one surviving piece of the old department-store buildings.

In 1996 that building held one of the three anchors of a mall with roughly 750,000 square feet of leasable space.

An industrial park covers the rest of that ground.