North Hills Village opened in 1956 as a row of stores on McKnight Road in Pittsburgh's North Hills, with an outside walkway in front and a parking field laid out for 3,500 cars.
In 1976 the whole row went under one roof. The enclosure left parts of the old storefront exteriors facing the new single-level concourse, and the place had a new name: North Hills Village Mall.
Orange Julius, Jo-Ann Fabrics, and Old Country Buffet traded along that indoor passage, and Gimbels held the two-story anchor.
In December 1984, Gimbels announced it was leaving for the new Ross Park Mall, which opened in 1986 at about 1.2 million square feet and grew to more than 170 stores. The chain was broken up and sold that year and never got there.
The building Gimbels opened in 1957 has stood empty since Burlington Coat Factory, its fourth big tenant, closed there in 2025.
Gimbels comes to McKnight Road
North Hills Village Shopping Center opened in November 1956 as an open-air center on McKnight Road in Ross Township, about seven miles north of downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Its stores stood in one row facing a large parking field, and shoppers went from door to door along an outside walkway.
S.S. Kresge and W.T. Grant were among the first tenants, and an Acme supermarket sold the groceries.
Edward J. DeBartolo of Youngstown, Ohio, developed the center after McKnight Road had been widened and improved for the postwar North Hills.
The McKnight Shopping Center had opened farther north in 1953, and Pines Plaza on Perry Highway in June 1956.
Shoppers from the new subdivisions reached all three by car.
The department store came after the rest.
Gimbels had announced its North Hills branch in April 1955, and the store opened on February 21, 1957, on two floors.
With it, the row on McKnight Road had its anchor: one building of about 130,000 square feet in a project of about 367,000.
A parking field for 3,500 cars
In August 1962 the McKnight Shopping Center reopened up the road as Northway Mall, fully enclosed, with a department store, a supermarket, and small shops all reached from indoors.
North Hills Village kept the shape it was built with.
Its doors opened onto the outside walkway, and the field in front of them had been laid out for 3,500 cars.
That field found a second use.
The North Area Environmental Council and local civic groups ran a monthly recycling collection, and their site at the Berkeley Hills Fire Hall could no longer cope with the cars that came to it.
In October 1972 the collection moved to the shopping center's lot, where it stayed through most of the decade.
Residents drove to North Hills Village with their recyclables, and the stores beside the lot still opened to the outdoors.
Under one roof
In 1976 North Hills Village answered Northway by putting a roof over the row it already had.
A single-level concourse tied the former outdoor storefronts together, while traces of their original exterior treatment remained inside the finished mall.
Gimbels kept its two floors. The center took a name to go with the roof, and by 1977 it was trading as North Hills Village Mall.
Northway had gone indoors in 1962. North Hills Village followed in 1976.
Over the indoor years, small shops such as Orange Julius and Jo-Ann Fabrics traded along the concourse, and Old Country Buffet had its door there too.
Acme left around the time of the enclosure. A Giant Eagle supermarket sat at the mall's south end.
Gimbels plans a move to Ross Park
Gimbels had been the center's department store since 1957. In December 1984, the chain set the timetable for leaving North Hills Village.
Its lease would expire in 1986, and the next store was planned for Ross Park Mall, a new enclosed center less than a mile and a half away.
Ross Park was bigger and newer than any shopping center already in the North Hills.
It opened in August 1986 with about 1.2 million square feet, and once it filled, it held more than 170 stores.
The move never happened.
Gimbels' parent put the chain up for sale in 1986 and sold the stores separately, leaving the McKnight Road building without the store it had been built for.
Hills Department Stores, a discount chain, took it over and reopened the store as a Hills in 1986.
Discount anchors and a new owner
The Gumberg family bought North Hills Village in 1987, and J.J. Gumberg Co. of Pittsburgh took over its management.
Ross Park was built around department-store fashion and a long run of small specialty shops.
In July 1987 North Hills Village was repositioned around discount and value retailers, with Hills, Burlington Coat Factory, T.J. Maxx, and Marshalls as its major stores.
The four complemented one another, and they fit a property that had been arranged for shoppers in cars since 1956.
Burlington had a storefront of its own, apart from the old Gimbels building.
Behind the four big names, the mall still worked the way it had since 1976: its smaller shops depended on the indoor corridor to bring them customers.
The concourse stayed through a small interior remodel around 1990.
Best Buy opens onto the parking lot
Best Buy became the first clear break with the enclosed-mall layout.
Marshalls had left for Northway in the mid-1990s, and Best Buy opened in its former North Hills Village space in 1995 with access from the parking lot rather than the mall corridor.
That setup pointed toward the center's next phase: large stores that did not need an indoor passage to function.
The 1996 work did not eliminate the mall all at once.
Exterior-entry stores took over the south end, while an enclosed passage survived to the north. By 1998, Shop 'n Save had its own outside entrance.
Michaels had succeeded Leeward's, while Old Country Buffet continued using the concourse during part of the transition.
The project brought the center to about 490,000 square feet, up from roughly 367,000 when it was built.
The same conversion reached the north end. Around 1997, Kohl's opened in an enlarged space there.
Nearby, the old single-screen theater had become Sun Television, and Staples later occupied the site.
Petco removed another piece of the enclosed corridor, leaving only a short indoor stretch by the end of the decade.
The last of the indoor corridor
The old Gimbels building changed hands again in 1999, after Ames acquired the Hills chain in late 1998 and converted the McKnight Road store.
Ames closed the store in 2002 as the chain collapsed, and the building stood empty.
In 2004 North Hills Village was part strip center and part enclosed mall.
In 2005 Burlington Coat Factory left its separate storefront and moved into the empty Ames building, where its new store took over the spot that had been the mall's central gathering area.
That move ended the last indoor concourse. By late 2005 North Hills Village was an open-air center again.
Burlington's first storefront could now come down for a new anchor.
In June 2005 the Ross Township commissioners approved a Target for that site, and the Pittsburgh contractor Bridges Co. had construction under way by the end of the year.
The new Target came to about 125,000 square feet. The Gimbels branch had opened at about 130,000.
Built in 2006, the store was expected to employ about 275 people and was scheduled to open that October.
21 tenants and every space leased
The open center filled. In October 2016 every space at North Hills Village was leased, to 21 tenants across about 560,000 square feet.
Each big store had its own door from the lot: Target, Burlington in the old Gimbels building, Kohl's, and Kuhn's in the grocery space.
Best Buy, Michaels, Petco, and Staples took the middle sizes, and the remaining space went to smaller shops, services, and places to eat.
Most of the floor area belonged to the big stores. By then the center's rivals included newer open-air centers in the area as well as Ross Park.
After years of additions and a new layout, the field once laid out for 3,500 cars held 2,338 spaces.
From 2007 to 2016, occupancy averaged about 98 percent.
An empty anchor and a Wayfair plan
Burlington closed its North Hills Village store in 2025, and the building Gimbels had opened in 1957 went empty for the second time.
In August 2026, Wayfair announced plans for its first Pennsylvania store in that space, with an opening set for 2027.
The planned store would cover 95,000 square feet on one floor.
A design studio would sit alongside displays built around rooms and decorating styles, with some merchandise stocked for shoppers to take home that day.
The building held one large store after another from 1957 until 2025, and Wayfair would be the fifth, after Gimbels, Hills, Ames, and Burlington.
Around that empty building, the rest of the center is open and trading.
Target, Kohl's, Best Buy, and Kuhn's hold the big spaces, and Michaels, Petco, Staples, GameStop, Five Below, and a plasma donation center fill smaller ones.
Orange Julius, Leeward's, Top Hat Tuxedo, and Old Country Buffet, all shops of the indoor years, are gone from the property.
J.J. Gumberg Co. manages it, as it has since 1987.
North Hills Village is still in business, with no shared indoor space left: shoppers park and walk straight into Target or Kohl's.
In 1976 its stores were joined under one roof, and the center was renamed North Hills Village Mall.
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