Standing on Center Street in downtown Salem, Oregon, sits an enclosed mall built across separate downtown blocks and joined together on the second floor. The bridges made it one mall.
The oldest of those blocks opened in 1966 as Salem Plaza, with no crossings at all and a concourse that pointed the wrong way. A reconstruction in 1987 added the bridges and gave the property one name, Salem Centre.
The spelling later changed to Salem Center. Nordstrom shut its store in April 2018, and the building was demolished four years later. The skybridge that reached it was taken down at the same time.
A five-story apartment building holds that block now. The bridge to the city's Marion Parkade is still open, and the garage on the far end of it is being renovated through November.
Salem Plaza opened three and a half blocks short
Commonwealth, Inc. announced a downtown shopping center for Salem in January 1964, and the version it drew covered four and a half blocks.
The problem was getting shoppers across the streets between them.
Salem never granted permission for mid-block crossings, at street level or above it. Without those crossings, the larger plan started to come apart.
It had called for overhead walkways to Meier & Frank across High Street and to the Pay Less block across Liberty Street, with a third link possible to the block just south.
Meier & Frank had opened in 1955 with 185,000 square feet on four levels. Further study cut the project down.
What opened in fall 1966 was one block of it. Salem Plaza was dedicated on October 20 with about 100,000 square feet and 17 stores and services.
A one-story concrete building covered the south half of the site, with a covered open-air concourse and a basement under most of it.
There were 188 parking spaces on the roof and 88 more at ground level.
The rooftop parking was hard to reach, and the concourse did little to move people between Meier & Frank and the Pay Less block.
Salem Plaza had been laid out as one piece of a much larger project. It kept that layout for the next two decades.
The city clears a block for Nordstrom
Salem came back to the same problem from the other end.
In the late 1970s the city assembled and cleared most of a block south of Salem Plaza, then went in on the retail project that followed, a roughly $10 million enclosed mall developed with Ellis-Dutcher Properties of Santa Monica.
Ground was broken on February 6, 1979.
Nordstrom Mall opened in 1980 with two levels, about 185,000 square feet of leasable space and room for about 46 stores when full.
Nordstrom took about 72,000 square feet of that, on both floors. The new mall emptied the old one.
By April 1986, Salem Plaza had no tenants left. Some had closed; the rest had moved south into Nordstrom Mall.
Downtown now had two retail blocks under two roofs, with a street between them.
One bridge over Liberty Street
The first crossing arrived 18 years after Salem turned the idea down.
In November 1984, a skybridge opened over Liberty Street into J.C. Penney, which had been trading on that block since January 6, 1965 in 102,500 square feet on two sales floors and a basement.
Liberty Street was one of the two streets the 1966 plan had wanted to cross.
A much larger network was on the table by then, the Salem Skywalk System, but only part of it was realized.
The Reed Opera House, the Equitable building, the Pay Less block and the First Interstate building were among the proposed connections that never opened.
Salem had shown a crossing could be built, but the full network never followed.
Salem Centre gets three more bridges
A $15 million rebuild put the missing plan back on the block where it had failed.
Three bridges went up between 1986 and 1987: one to Meier & Frank, one to the new Marion Parkade, one to the Nordstrom Mall.
Below and around them, the old one-story plaza became two levels, with a Mervyn's of about 80,000 square feet and a nine-bay food court upstairs.
From the upper floor, a shopper could now eat, cross into a department store, cross into the other half of the mall, or cross into a parking garage without going back down to the sidewalk.
The city built the Marion Parkade the same year and parked jurors on its roof.
By its July 17, 1987 dedication, the rebuilt property and Nordstrom Mall had become Salem Centre.
Its roughly 600,000 square feet held about 80 stores and services. The 1966 plaza had opened with 17 stores and services in about 100,000 square feet.
What Salem had refused to permit in the mid-1960s was now the shape of its downtown.
Nordstrom's block becomes apartments
Nordstrom announced on January 31, 2018 that the Salem store would close, and it stopped trading on April 6.
The building was controlled separately from the mall core, so what happened to it next was not the mall's decision.
No permanent tenant followed. By 2021 the owner had moved to demolition and housing.
Salem's Urban Renewal Agency voted seven to zero in June 2021 to put public money into the replacement, a five-story building then drawn at 162 rental units and costing about $25 million.
The grant was $749,999. The director's approval limit was $300,000, so the board approved an exception to get there.
One of the blocks the bridges existed to connect was about to stop selling anything.
The city pays to take the bridge down
The bridge was in the way.
By 2022 it still tied the south mall building to the old Nordstrom, and the apartment developer wanted the bridge agreement ended so demolition could move ahead.
Salem Center was in bank receivership. Wells Fargo was not going to fund work that had nothing to do with tenants or mall operations.
A bridge to a closed anchor did not qualify.
So the bill went to the city. On February 28, 2022, the Urban Renewal Agency approved another exception, up to $200,000 for the full removal cost.
The bridge and the Nordstrom building came down together that year.
What went up on the block is Rivenwood, five stories and 157 apartments, from studios to two-bedroom units.
It was finished in 2024 and occupied that year.
What still crosses the street at Salem Center
Salem Center is an enclosed shopping mall in downtown Salem, Oregon, and it opened in pieces: Meier & Frank in 1955, J.C. Penney in 1965, Salem Plaza in 1966 and the Nordstrom Mall in 1980.
The pieces took the single name Salem Centre in 1987, and the spelling has been Salem Center since 2004.
Its 289,000-square-foot core was about 70 percent occupied in April 2026.
The four blocks the crossings once joined have gone four ways. Kohl's still trades where Mervyn's did.
Rivenwood holds the Nordstrom block. The former JCPenney, closed since October 18, 2020, is being cut into smaller suites.
The former Macy's, which traded as Meier & Frank until 2006, closed in March 2025 and went on the market in April 2026 at about $7.9 million, with 600 covered parking spaces and a skybridge still attached to it.
Temporary fencing runs along part of that frontage. The other bridge still carries people.
The city started renovating the Marion Parkade on April 6, 2026 and phased the work so visitor, permit and accessible parking stay available, and the skybridge into the mall has stayed open through it.
Anyone who parks there this autumn can walk straight into Salem Center on the second floor. The garage is due to be finished in November.
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