Oakwood Mall in Enid, OK: The Mall That Made West Garriott Road, Then Lost to It

Oakwood Mall covers 62 acres on the south side of West Owen K. Garriott Road in Enid, Oklahoma.

It's one story, fully enclosed, and it has no operating department store and no movie theater. It had all of them once.

Melvin Simon & Associates opened the mall on February 29, 1984, with Dillard's, JCPenney, and Newman's, plus a five-screen theater that grew to eight screens by 2005.

Leasing went from 25 percent of the space on opening day to 70 percent within a year.

Sears replaced Newman's in 1990 and left in January 2015. Dillard's left in 2019, JCPenney in 2020, and AMC in 2021.

A Houston buyer paid $4 million for the property at the turn of 2017 and hasn't rebuilt it, and the city permits from 2025 and 2026 cover signs, plumbing and mechanical work, one section at a time.

The site now has a museum, a thrift store and a restaurant, and it hosted a spring carnival in the lot. Here's the whole run, from Leap Day 1984 to the carnival that ran in the parking lot this spring.

Oakwood Mall opened on a Leap Day

Enid got its enclosed shopping mall on a date that barely exists. February 29, 1984.

Oakwood Mall opened that day at 4125 W Owen K.

Garriott Road, one story of climate-controlled corridors on the west side of Enid, Oklahoma, developed by Indianapolis-based Melvin Simon & Associates.

Three department stores held the outer edges. Dillard's opened a 70,000-square-foot store, its first in Enid.

JCPenney and Newman's had both been downtown stores, part of the shopping trip in the central business district for decades, and both moved out to the new building.

The rest was small shops, a food court framed for 12 vendors, and the Oakwood 5 Theatre, five screens run by Carmike Cinemas.

Most of it was empty hallway on day one.

The building was drawn for 85 to 95 stores, and 25 percent of the leasable space was rented when the doors opened.

Enid wanted it anyway. Enid shoppers looking for a wider selection had been driving to Oklahoma City for it. Now the drive was to Garriott Road.

How the west side took over

Leasing caught up fast. Occupancy hit 70 percent inside the first year, and by March 1985 the mall was doing exactly what it was built to do.

Over the years, the names filled in around the anchors. Waldenbooks and KB Toys. RadioShack. Zales, Claire's, GNC.

Orange Julius, Sbarro and Great American Cookies in the food court. Ruth's Christian Book Store. The Buckle and Famous Footwear.

The mall put its common space to work too, with seasonal displays, promotions, community gatherings and activities aimed at kids.

Downtown Enid felt the hole.

Two established stores had walked out of the central business district in a single year, and the merchants who stayed went through a slump.

Over the following decades, downtown rebuilt around local shops, restaurants, offices, services and events, while most of the national-chain retail stayed west.

That western pull is the thing that came back around on Oakwood. The mall helped turn West Owen K.

Garriott Road into the street you built retail on in Enid. Every new shopping center there gave Oakwood another competitor.

Newman's closed, Sears moved in

The first anchor space went empty in 1987. Newman's closed after three years in the building, and the mall was down to two department stores.

It stayed that way until 1990, when Sears moved into the old Newman's space.

Three department stores again, and they held through the 1990s and most of the 2000s.

The theater went through its own version of that. Carmike closed the Oakwood 5 in January 2000, and the mall went several years without a movie house.

Dickinson Theatres later reopened the place and added three auditoriums, taking it from five screens to eight.

Showplex Cinemas ran it next, and Starplex followed.

So by the end of the 2000s the mall looked healthy from the road.

Three anchors, eight screens, a food court, and a parking field wrapped around all four sides of a 62-acre site.

The plan to turn the mall inside out

By 2012 the mall belonged to J. Herzog & Sons of Denver, a 543,100-square-foot enclosed center anchored by JCPenney, Dillard's and Sears.

That June, Vector Companies of Tulsa announced a $35 million plan to stop it from being a mall at all.

Strip out most of the enclosed middle. Give every store its own door onto the parking lot.

Leave the three department stores standing as separate buildings, and have all three renovated.

On November 6, 2012, the city commission and the Enid Economic Development Authority created Oakwood Mall Tax Increment Financing District No. 5.

Underneath the paperwork, it meant one thing: up to $4.7 million of public help for site work, paid back out of the new property and sales taxes the finished project was supposed to generate.

The project never generated the new taxes the TIF was built around.

Vector and the owner separated in 2014, the contract ended by that May, and nothing was built.

The corridors stayed enclosed. The anchor renovations never happened.

Oakwood's TIF stayed in the city's financial statements after the redevelopment deal ended.

Sears left, then the mall changed hands

In October 2014, Sears announced that the Enid store and its auto center were closing.

The doors shut that January, 25 years after Sears moved into the mall, and eight months after the project meant to modernize the building fell apart.

Another buyer was already in line.

S Squared Development held the property under contract from the fall of 2014, and in 2016 the deal ended with no purchase. Back on the market it went.

The asking price was $6.9 million. Houston-based Routh Properties bought it for $4 million in cash in a deal announced on December 20, 2016.

The new owner talked about entertainment uses, a hotel, and apartments on part of the land. None of that got built either.

Stores kept leaving for newer buildings in the same corridor.

Land Run Town Center was 93 percent leased by 2016, and it had already pulled The Buckle and Famous Footwear from the mall.

Dillard's, JCPenney, and then the movies

Dillard's announced the closing of its Enid store in August 2019 and was gone by the end of the year, 35 years after it opened the first Dillard's the city ever had.

That left JCPenney alone in a building designed around three department stores.

In June 2020, JCPenney put Enid on its first list of 154 stores to close in bankruptcy.

The store shut on October 18, 2020, ending more than a century of JCPenney doing business in this town and emptying the last of the three anchor positions.

AMC had taken over the eight screens on December 16, 2015, and the name eventually became AMC Classic Oakwood Mall 8.

On December 19, 2021, AMC closed it permanently. Enid was left with no regular indoor movie theater.

The interior went quiet along with them.

Each department store had its own entrance from the parking lot and brought its own crowd through, so once all three were gone, there were far fewer reasons to walk from one end of the building to the other.

A fighter jet parked inside the old Sears

There's an F-4 Phantom inside the former Sears.

Also a MiG-21, a T-33 simulator, artillery, military vehicles, uniforms, war dioramas and the Heroes of the Heartland portrait collection.

The Woodring Wall of Honor and Veterans Park organization opened a 40,000-square-foot military-history exhibit in part of the old department store on November 4, 2023, and in 2024 it was dedicated as the permanent American Military Heritage Museum.

Visitors come in through a north-side mall entrance, past Chen Garden, which has kept serving food at the mall through all of it.

Goodwill Central Oklahoma came next.

It opened a store and donation center at the address on October 9, 2025, in the space Big Lots and Spirit Halloween had used near the empty JCPenney.

The sales floor runs 14,000 square feet, the opening was expected to create 24 to 30 jobs, and free job training and career coaching were planned for early 2026.

Beds Unlimited, a local furniture and mattress business, has worked out of the property as well.

What's still open at Oakwood Mall in 2026

As of July 2026 the building is still standing and still partly occupied.

No demolition date has been announced, no plan for the whole site has been approved, and there's still no department store or cinema.

SB Retail Group Carlsbad LLC was still the named owner, with no sale announced.

Enid's city government doesn't own the place, which is why every plan for it has depended on somebody else saying yes.

The permits show what work there is. $30,000 in sign permits in April 2025, a $238,000 mechanical job that August, a $45,000 plumbing remodel in March 2026.

Repairs and remodels, one job at a time.

The part of the property that draws a crowd now is the asphalt.

The Wee Entertainment Carnival set up in the parking lot from April 17 to 26, 2026, and the Pride of Texas Summer Carnival followed from June 25 through July 4.

Inside, school groups book time with the aircraft in the old Sears, and Chen Garden still turns up on Enid's list of places to eat.

Some of the building's largest active spaces now hold a museum and a thrift store, and neither one needs a department store to survive.