Central Plaza (former Central Mall) is an enclosed regional shopping center and city-owned mixed-use property at 200 SW C Avenue in downtown Lawton, the county seat of Comanche County, Oklahoma.
The 48.5-acre site occupies the downtown street grid between SW 1st and SW 5th Streets and C through F Avenues, with Fort Sill a short distance north and 3,300 surface parking spaces encircling the structure.
Opened in 1979, it is the only enclosed regional mall in southwest Oklahoma, drawing from a trade area of 322,100 people across 131,000 households, plus a Fort Sill-related military population (active duty, trainees cycling through, dependents, and retirees) estimated at 55,000.
Its roughly 524,000 square feet are now divided between retail anchored by JCPenney and FISTA Innovation Park, a defense-technology accelerator in the former Sears and Dillard's spaces, housing 27 companies.
A Downtown That Bulldozed Itself to Stay Relevant
Stand at the corner of SW C Avenue and 3rd Street in Lawton today, and you are looking at a city that tore itself down on purpose.
In the 1970s, Lawton's urban-renewal program cleared large sections of its own central business district (bars, taverns, small businesses, and older storefronts along C Avenue and 3rd Street).
It replaced them with an enclosed shopping mall. Central Mall opened in 1979 at 200 SW C Avenue.
It covered 48.5 acres, held 3,300 parking spaces, and organized its retail around three department-store anchors: Sears on the west side, JCPenney on the east, and Dillard's toward the south-central end.
Large surface-parking fields surrounded the enclosed structure, a suburban-style footprint dropped into a downtown street grid bounded by SW 1st through SW 5th Streets and C through F Avenues.
The same decade brought a new library and a City National Bank facility to the same urban core; a new downtown post office followed in 1980.
The blocks those older buildings had occupied were gone.
What replaced them was designed to be the commercial center for all of southwest Oklahoma, and it filled that role for the better part of three decades before the anchors began to fail.
Central Mall's Opening and What Made It Work
Warmack and Company developed the Lawton mall. The Warmack family ran a regional mall portfolio across southern and plains-state markets, using the Central Mall name at several of their properties.
Ed Warmack was identified publicly as the developer in 1980. By December 1981, John Warmack was fielding complaints about large speed humps in the parking lot.
He explained they were there to slow vehicles and protect pedestrians.
That same month, Dillard's was advertising hours of 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon to 7 p.m. Sunday.
By 2008, the mall held roughly 524,000 square feet of gross leasable area. Sears occupied 105,400 square feet, JCPenney 101,900, and Dillard's 99,800.
The inline retail corridor added 185,500 square feet. A 32,000-square-foot theater eventually became a 12-screen Dickinson facility with stadium seating.
National chains filled the corridors: Victoria's Secret, American Eagle Outfitters, Hot Topic, Hibbett Sports, Old Navy, Aeropostale, Christopher & Banks.
The mall's trade area covered 322,100 people across 131,000 households, with an average household income of $45,100 and a median age of 35.
Fort Sill's surrounding military community (active duty, trainees passing through annually, dependents, and retirees) added an estimated 55,000 to that base and gave the mall consistent traffic regardless of broader local economic swings.
Ownership Changes and the Road to Public Sale
Central Mall operated under Warmack family ownership from its opening through at least the early 2000s. Gregory Greenfield and Associates held it through the mid-2000s into the early 2010s.
In 2014, three Central Mall properties went up for sale together: Lawton, alongside Texarkana, Texas, and Port Arthur, Texas.
The three were 98.3 percent occupied at that point.
Marketing materials at the time listed the Lawton property at 524,000 square feet, built in 1979 and renovated in 2001, with Dillard's, JCPenney, Sears, and the ShowPlex theater as anchors.
Kohan Retail Investment Group bought it and held the property until early January 2021, when the city took it over for $14.5 million.
That price was lower than what a normally operating regional mall of that size would have commanded, a reflection of the anchor vacancies and declining retail demand already visible by the time the deal closed.
The 2001 renovation was the last significant capital work done on the building. As of 2022, city leadership stated that the most recent meaningful improvements had occurred no later than 2011.
A roughly eleven-year gap in reinvestment is part of why the city did not treat its purchase as a straightforward retail turnaround.
Sears, Dillard's, and the Anchors That Stopped Holding
On January 4, 2017, Sears named its Central Mall location among a group of stores scheduled to close. The store shut on March 27, 2017. Kmart, Hastings, and a Walgreens had already closed in Lawton by then.
City officials were actively working to reduce retail leakage to neighboring markets and online sales, and the Sears closure added to that problem.
The departure left a 105,400-square-foot box on the west end of the mall. No replacement department-store tenant emerged, and the box stayed dark.
Dillard's closed its Central Mall store in 2020, one of many department-store closures that year. Two of the three anchors were now dark.
In a 2021 industry comparison of mall sales, the property was classified as a redevelopment case rather than an operating mall.
The sale price worked out to $34 per square foot on 420,300 square feet of gross leasable area (a figure that excludes the vacated Sears box from the income-producing total), at 69.2 percent occupancy and a 20 percent capitalization rate.
A 20 percent cap rate on a regional mall signals a property that investors consider distressed, not stable. JCPenney stayed open and, in 2025, renewed its lease for five more years, carrying it through 2030.
Floods, Gangs, and a Mall That Kept Absorbing Problems
The mall's troubles in its later years were not only commercial.
In April 2007, Lawton police identified Central Mall as one of roughly 30 locations across the city where gangs were gathering on Friday and Saturday nights.
The mall and police agreed on an 8 p.m. curfew and a no-loitering policy to manage the situation. The arrangement required regular police presence and ongoing coordination with mall management through at least that year.
Drainage was a recurring problem of a different kind. In May 2016, a storm overwhelmed the parking-lot drainage and submerged dozens of vehicles.
Water rose nearly to window level on some cars before receding around 8:30 p.m.
The following month, heavy rain sent several inches of water inside the building, flooding the courtyard and several stores.
The mall closed on Sunday and Monday and reopened on Tuesday.
The drainage system that failed in both 2016 events was serving a large flat surface-parking field in a flat downtown setting, a design that left the property with little margin against heavy rain.
The FISTA Plan and How a City Bought a Mall
Before considering the whole mall, the city's goal was narrower: find a home for a defense-technology accelerator.
FISTA, the FIRES Innovation Science and Technology Accelerator, is tied to Fort Sill's missions in long-range precision artillery and air and missile defense.
An earlier plan to house FISTA in the Fairmont Creamery, a vacant historic building elsewhere in downtown Lawton, fell through.
On September 22, 2020, the former Sears space was approved as FISTA's location instead, under a lease at $28,500 per month running to December 2030.
Within weeks, the scope changed. On October 16, 2020, Lawton officials considered buying the entire mall for $14.6 million.
Eleven days later, the city approved spending up to $50,000 from Industrial Development Sales Tax funds to check the details carefully and gave FISTA a $240,000 advance to start work inside the old Sears building.
The City Council voted on the purchase while the full engineering report was still outstanding, which drew questions from the public.
On January 5, 2021, the city closed on the purchase for $14.5 million and signed a 25-year lease with the FISTA Development Trust Authority for $100 a year, superseding the earlier $28,500-per-month arrangement once the city itself became the landlord.
Intouch Management Services took care of daily retail operations. The mall was renamed Central Plaza on August 31, 2021. Interior work started in spring 2022, and the opening ceremony was held in April 2023.
Central Plaza and the Defense Companies Filling the Empty Anchors
Epirus flew in equipment from outside Oklahoma to set up a 5,300-square-foot center inside the old mall in August 2025: simulation terminals, control interfaces, and Leonidas high-power microwave hardware for counter-drone work tied to Fort Sill.
That kind of tenant was not part of anyone's plan for a downtown Lawton shopping center in 1979.
FISTA Innovation Park now holds 27 technology companies in the spaces where Sears and Dillard's used to operate.
Twenty-three of those companies had no Oklahoma presence before they moved in. One came from Denmark. Each one carries a hiring obligation: at least 10 employees, averaging $100,000 a year.
The physical conversion produced something that looks nothing like a mall from the inside.
Nearly 200,000 square feet of the former retail building now contains secured offices, a classified conference center, an engineering makerspace with more than 40 industrial 3D printers, laser cutters, a water-jet table, 5-axis CNC machines, and a STEM lab for students in grades 3 through 12.
Cameron University, the University of Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State University all use space inside the building.
BlueHalo set up operations here in October 2024 to support air-defense training for Army customers at Fort Sill.
Congress placed $1 million in earmarked funding for FISTA into the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act.
Retail That Remains and What Central Plaza Looks Like Now
The public retail corridors at 200 SW C Avenue still open at 10 a.m. Monday through Saturday and noon on Sunday. JCPenney anchors one end.
Bath and Body Works, Claire's, GameStop, Hibbett Sports, Hot Topic, Journeys, Lids, Maurices, Spencer's, Victoria's Secret (with its Pink line), and Zumiez fill the inline spaces alongside salons and beauty services.
Food tenants include Charley's Grilled Subs, Daisy Cafe and Bakery, Italia Express, La Grand Cantina, Pho Delicious, and Stir Fry 88.
Air Force, Marine, National Guard, and Navy recruiting offices hold mall space, the same military-market connection the property has had since 1979.
The property still leases individual suites on short- and long-term terms; available spaces have been marketed with features like hard-corner locations, showrooms, storage, and proximity to Claire's, Journeys, and Tradehome Shoes.
Firehawk Aerospace started as a FISTA tenant.
In April 2026, Firehawk broke ground on a 40,000-square-foot manufacturing facility on Goodyear Boulevard, a $65 million project: $23 million for the building and $22 million in machinery, with roughly 100 jobs expected and a completion target of May 31, 2027.
