Montgomery Mall: Regional Shopping Destination Takes Shape
Montgomery Mall is a two-story shopping mall in Montgomeryville, in Montgomery Township, near the borough of North Wales.
It sits along Pennsylvania Route 309, Bethlehem Pike, at the intersection with U.S. Route 202 Business, DeKalb Pike. The mall contains about 1.1 million square feet on 105 acres of developed land.
From the highway, it reads as a large, enclosed retail building set behind broad parking fields, positioned to catch traffic moving through the North Penn area.
The Kravco Company developed the property. The mall opened to the public on Saturday, February 26, 1977.
Captain Noah and Al Alberts attended as local celebrities. At opening, the mall's primary anchor stores were Wanamaker's and J.C. Penney.
Wanamaker's brought a long Philadelphia department store name to the lineup. J.C. Penney provided a national department store presence from the start.
The initial tenant mix combined major retailers with everyday services and food. Woolworth's operated as a general merchandise store.
CVS served pharmacy and convenience needs. Roy Rogers opened as a quick-service restaurant, adding a steady food option in the interior corridors.
Two national bookstores, Walden Books and B. Dalton, operated in the mall at the same time, giving shoppers competing storefronts for paperbacks, magazines, and mall gifts.
In its strongest period, Montgomery Mall had more than 90 stores and eateries.
The layout and store lineup were intended to make the property a one-stop regional shopping destination for Montgomery Township and the nearby highway-served communities.
Four anchors, then the long carousel
Montgomery Mall's anchor lineup expanded soon after opening and then changed repeatedly over the next three decades.
Bamberger's was added shortly after the mall opened in 1978, adding another full-line department store to the original mix.
In 1986, Bamberger's location was converted to Macy's, changing the name on the facade and aligning the store with a national chain.
Sears joined the mall in 1980 and remained for decades as a major anchor.
The original Wanamaker's space went through the most frequent transitions. In 1995, Wanamaker's was converted to Hecht's, a May Department Stores banner.
In 1997, after May acquired Strawbridge's, the same anchor was converted again and reopened as Strawbridge's.
Strawbridge's operated until 2006, when Federated Department Stores acquired May and restructured operations, leading to the store's closure.
Boscov's took over the former Strawbridge's space in 2007, but closed in October 2008 as part of the company's restructuring.
By 2008, the mall also added Dick's Sporting Goods as an anchor, bringing in a large-format sporting goods and apparel store.
That same year, junior anchor Tweeter, an electronics retailer that specialized in consumer audio and electronics, closed as the company went through bankruptcy and liquidation.
The building footprints stayed in place while the signs and store names changed.
The $8 Million Redevelopment Begins in 2014
In 2014, Montgomery Mall began an $8 million renovation focused on the Northern wing. The project targeted the parts of the building that shoppers met first and used most often.
The Northern wing received a redesigned exterior and a rebuilt entrance that changed how the section presented from the parking areas and access roads.
Inside, the renovation refreshed retail spaces in that wing and installed a new escalator to improve movement between levels.
The project added a new children's play area and new family restrooms, placing more of the upgrade budget into day-to-day amenities that affected how long people stayed in the mall and how easily families could use it.
Common-area seating was updated as part of the interior refresh.
The redevelopment also extended beyond interior finishes. Landscaping around the building was upgraded, and the food court received improvements intended to update the dining area and seating.
The 2014 work brought in new stores as part of the relaunch of the Northern wing and added two outward-facing restaurants.
Those restaurants were designed to operate with entrances oriented to the exterior while still connecting to the mall's interior corridors.
Wegmans arrives and changes how the mall works
In November 2011, Montgomery Mall announced plans for a 126,000-square-foot Wegmans supermarket to replace the vacant Boscov's space.
The project was notable for its format. The Montgomery Mall store was planned to be the first Wegmans grocery store located as part of a shopping mall.
The former Boscov's building was demolished to clear the site for new construction.
The replacement was built as a full supermarket with Wegmans' typical grocery and prepared-food layout.
Wegmans opened on November 3, 2013. The store was built with its own exterior entrance, allowing shoppers to enter from outside the mall without using the interior corridors.
The new grocery anchor changed how the property was used day to day, bringing regular traffic tied to routine shopping rather than seasonal retail peaks.
Other junior anchors shifted during the same period. The mall had a Disney Store that operated as a junior anchor and then closed in 2018.
The space was later replaced by H&M. H&M expanded by moving to a new spot in 2018, adding a large-format fashion tenant in a new footprint.
Uniqlo also operated at the mall as a junior anchor for a period and later closed.
By the mid-2010s, the mall's strongest draw was increasingly the grocery store, with a growing share of visits tied to Wegmans rather than to the enclosed mall's traditional department store and specialty retail mix.
Bankruptcy era: Sears out, loans crack
Simon Property Group acquired Montgomery Mall in 2003, bringing the property into its national mall portfolio.
In 2014, the mall was appraised at $195 million, a valuation tied to the commercial mortgage-backed securities financing connected to the site.
The loan issues surfaced later. In June 2020, Simon stopped making monthly interest payments on a $100 million loan backing Montgomery Mall.
A formal notice of default was issued in August 2020. In September 2020, the loan was accelerated.
Around the same period, the property was re-appraised at $61 million, a 69% decline from the 2014 appraisal.
The anchor lineup was also thinning. Sears had operated at the mall since 1980 and had been one of the long-standing department store anchors visible from the parking fields and access roads.
On November 7, 2019, Transformco announced that the Montgomery Mall Sears would close as part of a plan to close 96 stores nationwide.
Liquidation sales began on December 2, 2019. The store closed in February 2020, leaving a large anchor space empty.
In 2020, COVID-19 accelerated the shift toward online shopping. The mall entered that period with a closed Sears, an unsettled loan, and a lower valuation than it had carried a few years earlier.
Foreclosure, Kohan, and the sliced parcel
In June 2021, Montgomery Mall moved from payment trouble into foreclosure. Wilmington Trust, acting as trustee for Wells Fargo Commercial Mortgage, foreclosed on the property.
By June 22, 2021, the mall was placed into receivership, and JLL took over management.
The court ruling followed soon after. By July 2021, a court had issued a nearly $119 million judgment against Mall at Montgomery, LP, a Simon affiliate.
The judgment combined principal, unpaid interest, and expenses. The foreclosure sale that followed produced a much lower number.
In November 2021, Montgomery Mall was sold at foreclosure to Kohan Retail Investment Group for $55 million.
The price was less than half of the judgment amount, but close to the mall's appraised value at the time, about $57.5 million.
Kohan Retail Investment Group is based in Great Neck, New York, and focuses on distressed retail properties.
Its portfolio has been described as roughly 50 malls nationwide, including a few in Pennsylvania: Wyoming Valley Mall in Wilkes-Barre, Washington Crown Center in Washington, Clearview Mall in Butler, Colonial Park Mall in Harrisburg, and Lycoming Mall in Pennsdale.
In 2022, Kohan sold the Wegmans site to ExchangeRight for $22.6 million. The sale separated the grocery parcel from the rest of the mall property. No redevelopment plan for the remaining mall has been released publicly.
2025: Wegmans-driven traffic, shrinking mall
By 2025, Montgomery Mall was being described as a "dead mall." One count pegged occupancy around 43%, with about 42 open stores and 55 closed, and the food court more than half dark.
Traffic was estimated at about 2.5 million visitors a year, but most of them were heading to Wegmans first.
H&M, which opened in 2018, closed in January 2025, and later said it would shift away from traditional mall locations in early 2026.
In mid-March 2025, Forever 21's U.S. operating company began Chapter 11 proceedings and said it would run liquidation sales while winding down, with the Montgomery Mall store listed among locations to close.
Dick's Sporting Goods, added in 2008, relocated out by August 2025 to 1261 Knapp Road in North Wales at the Montgomery Square shopping center into a larger space.
Dick's outlet concept, Going, Going, Gone!, took the old spot in late 2025, with reporting placing the opening on December 5, 2025, and advertising discounts of up to 70%.
As of January 2026, the anchors are JCPenney, Macy's, Wegmans, and Going, Going, Gone!. Summit Properties USA and Kohan Retail Investment Group own the property now.
Montgomery Mall is still open, but it no longer operates like a full regional mall. The interior is quiet and lightly trafficked.
Several storefronts are closed, leaving long gaps in the retail corridors. The food court has been reduced, with fewer open vendors and more unused spaces.
The mall reads as a place built for far more stores and visitors than it currently has, with the remaining activity concentrated around a small set of open tenants.
