When Northtowne Mall opened in Defiance in the spring of 1986, its new enclosed concourse was joined onto an older store that already stood on the site.
By 2014 the mall had three department stores, Sears, JCPenney, and Elder-Beerman, along with a nine-screen cinema and Hot Rice in the food court.
Then the big stores left. Sears went in 2016. Elder-Beerman held its last day on April 29, 2018, and JCPenney closed in October 2020. Each had filled one of the mall's largest buildings, so every closing emptied far more than a storefront.
In 2026 a blank wall seals the old JCPenney doorway off the concourse. At stake are those three big buildings and the indoor walk that leads to them.
Northtowne Mall opens on North Clinton
Work on the building ran into the spring of 1986, the season Northtowne Mall opened as an enclosed shopping mall at 1500 N. Clinton Street in Defiance, Ohio.
It sat on the west side of North Clinton, just south of the U.S. 24 interchange, on the road that held the city's north-side shopping.
Retail had come to that ground before the mall did.
An older store building stood at the north end of the site, and the project kept it, joining the new indoor concourse onto its side.
From the first season, then, one end of Northtowne was older than everything else in it.
The cinema came along after the mall had opened.
It started with five screens, and it was later expanded to nine, the size it would keep through every operator that ran it afterward.
By 1990 the same address also held Jolly Time Amusements, an amusement business trading alongside the shops.
Gumberg buys a mall of small shops
Northtowne changed hands in 2005, when companies tied to the Gumberg retail group bought it for about $19.1 million.
J.J. Gumberg Co. ran the property under the Northtowne Mall name.
Between its department stores, the mall Gumberg took over was lined with small specialty shops.
In those years the corridors held F.Y.E., Joe's Records, Kay Bee Toys, and RadioShack, Hot Rice Chinese Restaurant cooked in the food court near We're Rolling Pretzel Company, and the nine-screen cinema ran as a Regal.
In March 2007 the mall advertised its hours as 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. on Sunday, and anyone who brought the ad to the customer-service desk before the month was out got a free gift.
Even with all of them, the building had room to spare.
At the end of 2012, 85.9 percent of the mall's space was leased, and the rest waited for tenants.
Small shops make room for Marshalls
By early 2014 the owners planned to turn a row of small storefronts into one big store.
They had signed Marshalls to a 22,400-square-foot space, with the lease set to start in May 2015, and the smaller tenants standing in the way were to be moved.
The build-out and the moves were budgeted at about $2.2 million.
Books-A-Million had signed for a shop of about 3,800 square feet and was due to move in that June, and Dunham's Sports already had 26,000 square feet of its own.
Counting those signed leases, 95.8 percent of Northtowne was leased in February 2014, against 85.9 percent at the end of 2012, though Marshalls and Books-A-Million had not yet moved in.
The mall then measured 386,000 square feet on about 50 acres and had 37 tenants.
Three of those tenants were department stores: Sears, JCPenney, and Elder-Beerman. The mall's 2014 loan was written around them.
If certain of those stores left, the departure counted as a trigger event, and the loan set out cure provisions for those events.
The community room beside Sears had regular users of its own. The Defiance Coin Club met there on the third Wednesday of every month.
Sears and Elder-Beerman close
Sears left Northtowne in 2016.
It had filled about 87,000 square feet, the largest of the three department stores, and its exit emptied the biggest of the three buildings.
Elder-Beerman's closing sale opened in February 2018, and the store did its last day of business on April 29 of that year.
Each departure set off one of the loan's trigger events, and the owners cured both.
The Elder-Beerman building went to a church.
Xperience Church leased the empty store in March 2019, spent the months until November renovating it, and held its first service there on December 1, 2019.
The church took about 44,000 square feet, nearly all of the 45,000 square feet the department store had filled in 2014.
That Christmas, Santa at Northtowne received the toys left from a local family-assistance project and handed them out to families in the area.
JCPenney's exit tests the loan
JCPenney had extended its Northtowne lease through March 2020.
In June 2020, with the chain in Chapter 11, the Defiance store went onto JCPenney's list of closings, and clearance sales began that month at the first 154 stores on it, Northtowne's among them.
The store stayed open into the fall and closed on October 18, 2020.
That made three.
Under the loan, JCPenney's departure was a third trigger event, and the loan did not let the owners cure one the same way a third time.
Northtowne Associates, the Pennsylvania partnership that owned the mall, joined the owners of related shopping centers in asking a federal court to stop the loan servicers from starting a cash sweep, which would hold the shopping centers' spare cash as extra security for the loan.
A replacement for the store was already lined up in Ollie's Bargain Outlet.
In November 2020, after a hearing, the court refused the injunction the owners wanted.
Ollie's was not yet in the building, open, or paying rent, and it was still months from opening, so it did not yet meet the loan's terms for a replacement tenant.
In February 2021 a federal court sent the wider dispute back to state court.
Phoenix Theatres reopens the cinema
The nine screens went dark in June 2022, when MovieScoop's Northtowne Cinemas closed.
That September, Phoenix Theatres signed a long-term lease on the cinema, set a reopening for early 2023, and announced a $1.43 million renovation built around heated recliners, Dolby Atmos sound, and a new lobby.
Elsewhere in the building in 2022, Just Be Original Fine Arts Academy, which had started downtown in 2013, held art classes and parties at Northtowne, and the community room hosted landlord classes run by Northwestern Ohio Community Action Commission.
By opening time the spending had passed $2 million.
Phoenix enlarged the lobby into the space next door, put up new walls, paint, and carpet, added new concessions, put heated recliners in all nine auditoriums, and installed Dolby Atmos in the two largest, with Dolby 7.1 in the other seven.
The ribbon was cut on March 8, 2023, and public screenings began March 9.
Hobby Lobby and Ollie's fill the old anchors
Northtowne runs as an enclosed mall, with its concourse, food court, and cinema all in use.
The concourse has tile floors, round skylights, lamps made to look like streetlights, and a stage in center court.
A long concrete basin there once worked as a fountain. It was dry by 2024, and plants grow in it now.
In the food court the sunken seating sits under a big round skylight, and Hot Rice still serves there, though the mezzanine above is closed.
Hobby Lobby and Family Farm & Home share the old Sears building, and shoppers reach both from the parking lot.
Ollie's fills the former JCPenney, where a blank wall closes the old concourse doorway, though its outline still shows.
Xperience Church holds services in the old Elder-Beerman and keeps a door on the concourse as well as one at the back.
Inside, the wide Sears-era opening holds overflow displays for Dunham's, behind the old railings.
Marshalls and Dunham's both open onto the concourse, and Phoenix runs the nine screens.
Northtowne Mall keeps its concourse open
The empty space is in the small shops.
About six in ten storefronts are filled, counting big and small alike, and most of the vacancies line the western concourse.
Claire's was one of the stores in its parent company's bankruptcy filing in August 2025, and its storefront is empty.
In the space Books-A-Million once used, Last Man Standing sells music, movies, comics, and video games.
In 2023 the city drew a broader commercial planning area around Northtowne, pairing infrastructure for the mall with possible new development on underused pavement nearby.
The mall hosts public events through the year.
A tractor show and a library book sale were held there in 2024, and the Parade of Heroes ended in center court in December 2025 with toys for local children.
On October 17, 2026, a fall craft show spread across more than 200 tables, followed that evening by Malloween trick-or-treating, after a Truck-or-Treat and a truck-driving event outside Ollie's earlier that month.
The 2026 farmers market season at the entrance ran through October, and the community room is offered for parties and meetings.
The 2014 loan treated losing a department store as trouble the owners had to cure, and it let them use the same cure only twice.
All three of those stores are gone now, and the enclosed mall they anchored is still open.
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