Standing in the highway triangle off Interstate 820 in Hurst, Texas, sits an enclosed mall that opened in 1971 with two Fort Worth department stores. Neither store is there now. North East Mall is still open, and it's still nearly full.
The mall opened as a single-level center with Leonard's and Stripling's attached to it. Dillard's ended up in both buildings. Around the turn of the century, the Stripling's building was demolished for Nordstrom.
The Leonard's building was only partly demolished, with Foley's taking part of the old space. Montgomery Ward closed in February 2001, so its building came down and an 18-screen cinema went up on the site three years later.
Sears stayed until 2019. Then it closed too, and nothing has replaced it. Primark opened in April 2026 in part of the old Nordstrom, which had closed in 2020. The Sears building is still on the market. The mall itself is 96.6 percent occupied, with Dillard's, Macy's, and JCPenney trading.
North East Mall opened one anchor at a time
North East Mall was still a construction project when Leonard's started ringing up sales.
Tandy Corporation had bought the Fort Worth retailer in 1967 and announced the Hurst center with Stripling's in March 1968 on a 98-acre site.
Drainage and utility problems slowed the project, including Leonard's own building.
Even so, Leonard's opened on July 10, 1970, and spent the next eight months trading without a mall around it.
Leonard's was closer to a one-stop complex than a conventional department store.
Groceries came from a supermarket with its own deli and bakery; western gear, saddlery, lawn and garden merchandise, meals at the snack bar-cafeteria, and a separate auto center all sat within the same operation.
Bulky purchases could skip the sales floor on the return trip: a conveyor carried them beneath the building to package pickup.
Stripling's was next, opening March 18, 1971. Its central escalators met at the Wishing Fountain.
Seven days later, North East Mall officially opened as a single-level center with roughly 750,000 square feet of leasable space, cutting the ribbon at the Dancing Waters Fountain in Leonard's Court.
JCPenney was still missing. It opened November 3, about 16 months after the 240,000-square-foot Leonard's had gone first and completed the center's three-anchor lineup.
Sears and Ward made it a five-anchor mall
The addition that began in 1977 brought the national chains in. In 1978, Sears opened a two-level store of about 164,100 square feet.
Montgomery Ward opened on two levels too, with about 178,000 square feet.
The addition also brought 20 new inline spaces and a six-screen United Artists house seating close to 1,500.
The auditoriums came on line in stages through July and August.
Ward built a split-level mall entrance with an escalator running up to its second floor.
One of the two names the mall opened with was already off its building.
Dillard's had bought Leonard's in 1974 and put its own sign up the year after, so the store where the ribbon had been cut was trading under a new name while the new wing went up around it.
The work took the center from roughly 750,000 square feet to roughly 1.3 million and past 100 stores.
It gave North East Mall five department-store presences at once: Dillard's in the old Leonard's building, Stripling's, JCPenney, Sears, and Montgomery Ward.
Dillard's ended up with both original anchors
Stripling's kept its own name until 1983.
That year's merger with Cox's turned the Hurst anchor into Stripling & Cox; after it closed in January 1986, Dillard's moved into the building as Dillard's West, chiefly for men.
That put one chain inside both of the buildings the mall had been designed around.
A shopper could walk into the old Stripling's for a suit and cross the mall to the old Leonard's to find the same name over the door.
Dillard's East ran to 240,000 square feet, more than twice the 106,000 in Dillard's West.
Not much else moved in those years.
About 100 shops were trading in July 1984, and the anchor list ran Sears, JCPenney, Montgomery Ward, Dillard's, and Stripling & Cox.
10 years on, both Dillard's buildings sat inside a much larger plan.
North East Mall spent $103 million on new anchors
Both of them came down, or most of them did.
Dillard's had already left both buildings in 1999 for a single three-level store of about 310,000 square feet.
The Stripling's box disappeared completely; its site got a two-level Nordstrom of roughly 142,400 square feet, open from March 22, 2001.
Leonard's was cut back instead.
Its former footprint was worked into an enlarged Center Court, a Gap store, lower-level cosmetology school space, and a three-level Foley's of about 232,800 square feet, which opened that October.
The enclosed-mall work cost $103 million and added 308,000 square feet of new space.
Saks Fifth Avenue opened in September 2000, JCPenney was enlarged and remodeled again, three parking decks went up, and a new South Wing added inline shops along the south side.
At the rededication on September 15, 2001, the center measured about 1.749 million square feet.
The land for the streets, utilities, and open-air retail beside the mall came out of Richland Park East, a neighborhood of 127 houses.
The city's economic development corporation bought most of them.
Ten owners refused to sell and challenged the use of condemnation for a project whose main beneficiary was a private retail development.
A Tarrant County district judge sided with the city in May 1997, and houses came down while the case went on.
The holdouts settled four years later for $3 million, three times what Hurst had first offered them.
By the end of 2001, neither building the mall had opened around was standing as it was, and four of the anchors were trading out of buildings that hadn't existed three years earlier.
Montgomery Ward's site became 18 movie screens
Montgomery Ward closed in February 2001, while the rest of the property was still being rebuilt.
Simon was still projecting a Lord & Taylor for the former Ward space that May, with a 2002 opening.
It never opened. The box came down instead, and Rave brought 18 screens to the site in November 2004.
That was a return of moviegoing, not a direct handoff from the mall's old theater: the six-screen United Artists house added in 1978 had already closed years earlier.
Cinemark bought Rave's theaters in 2013 and rebuilt the auditoriums two years later with oversized electric recliners.
Saks Fifth Avenue moved faster than any of it.
The store opened new in September 2000 with about 100,000 square feet, was identified for closure in 2004, and shut on September 16, 2006.
Dick's Sporting Goods took the space and opened in 2007, which left the largest empty box on the property idle for less than a year.
Foley's needed nothing done to it at all.
On September 9, 2006 it became Macy's, and the building that had opened in 2001 kept trading with a different name on the front.
North East Mall's anchor map in 2026
Sears closed in October 2019, 41 years after it opened. JCPenney spent that same autumn going the other way.
On November 1 it reopened as the first Penney's concept store, all of it inside the building it had held since 1971.
The extras ran from coffee and styling rooms to beauty services, a barber shop, and a selfie studio.
Nordstrom closed for good the following May and didn't come back.
That left two department-store boxes without department stores in them.
Quicklotz opened in the Nordstrom building in July 2021 and later moved its headquarters to Lewisville.
In 2025 the landlord cut about 44,828 square feet off the old store's first floor and split the utilities, making a smaller suite out of a piece of a two-level anchor.
Primark built out 44,800 square feet of it and opened on April 30, 2026, with a sales floor of more than 30,000 square feet inside a building that had held roughly 142,400 square feet of Nordstrom.
No use has been established for the rest of it.
The Sears site is the one still waiting.
Since 2023 the building has been offered for sale, lease, or joint venture, 128,000-plus square feet on 10.9 acres, and no replacement, demolition, or conversion has followed.
Inside the mall, the 2024 refresh took the canopy off Center Court, repainted and relit the common areas, and refurbished the fountain there.
North East Mall is an enclosed shopping mall at 1101 Melbourne Road in Hurst, Texas, in the triangle formed by Interstate 820 and State Highways 121 and 183.
It opened in 1971 with Leonard's and Stripling's, and Simon put it at 96.6 percent occupancy and 1,544,000 square feet at the end of 2025, with Dillard's, Macy's, JCPenney, Dick's Sporting Goods, Cinemark, and Primark as its major tenants in 2026.
Mall walkers still get in at 10 a.m. Monday through Saturday and at noon on Sundays.
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