Bellis Fair is a large indoor shopping mall in Bellingham, Washington, the biggest in Whatcom County. It opened in the late 1980s on the north edge of town, near the freeway and the road toward the Canadian border.
For most of its life, it worked the way malls did: department stores at the ends to pull people in, smaller shops in between, a movie theater for the evenings.
It still runs on those anchors. Target, JCPenney, Kohl's, Macy's, Dick's, and others are open and doing business. What is unusual is what moved into some of the shops that closed: a high school, a wrestling academy, and, for now, a public library branch.
That mix is rare for a mall this size, and it is the reason the place is worth a closer look.
Bellis Fair Mall Opening Day, 1988: The Crowd at the Doors
At ten in the morning on August 3, 1988, people came through the doors of the new mall on the north side of Bellingham.
Inside ran a set of concourses lined with shops, with department stores at the ends. Parking surrounded the building.
The day before had been a preview for invited guests. Bellis Fair stood three miles from downtown, right off the highway, enclosed and air-conditioned, the kind of mall you drove to.
It sat where Interstate 5 meets State Route 539, the road people in town call Guide Meridian.
That put it within easy reach of the whole county and of the country north of it, up toward the border. Downtown had held the city's big stores for years.
Now they had somewhere else to go.
Before Bellis Fair: A Nursery, 1,200 Acres, and a Downtown Fight
The land grew plants before it sold anything. It had been the Washington State Nursery property at 4183 Guide Meridian, and before that, a USDA plant-materials center under the Soil Conservation Service.
In 1980, Trillium Corporation announced a regional shopping center for the site and put together 1,200 acres for retail and offices.
Bellingham was already arguing about where its stores belonged, downtown and on the waterfront or out by the freeway.
By 1986, Bellis Fair was the largest project in that argument. The Bon Marche had committed to a 100,000-square-foot store.
The mall's environmental review projected retail sales across the Bellingham area rising close to 20 percent.
Downtown's worry was not the new floor space but the stores the mall would draw out of the center. The city approved a planned contract for the property in 1986 and amended it in 1988.
That agreement still comes up when the city reviews a new building on mall land. General Growth Properties, then a major mall developer, built the 773,900-square-foot mall and owned it for decades.
Bellis Fair and the Canadian Shoppers Who Crossed the Border
The first anchors were JCPenney, Sears, The Bon Marche, Mervyn's, and Target, with a Cineplex Odeon theater.
Several had moved up from downtown Bellingham. The Target was one of the chain's first in the Pacific Northwest.
In the early 1990s, much of the lot carried British Columbia plates. Shoppers drove down from Vancouver and the Lower Mainland for the day, and the freeway made it an easy trip when the exchange rate favored them.
Canadian shoppers were a large part of the business in those years. The Canadian dollar fell in the mid-1990s, and that traffic dropped.
Nordstrom moved a store called Nordstrom Place Two from downtown into the mall in 1990, turned it into a Nordstrom Rack in 1994, and closed it in 1999.
Old Navy opened that same year.
When the Bon Marche Became Macy's and Mervyn's Became Kohl's
Through the 2000s, the anchor names changed, and the buildings stayed. The Bon Marche became Bon-Macy's in 2003 and Macy's in 2005.
Mervyn's left the Pacific Northwest in 2006, and Kohl's took the space and stayed one of the main anchors.
A Macy's Home Store grew out of the old Nordstrom building. The routes through the mall stayed the same. The signs changed.
The Sears Box, the Cinema, and What Replaced Them
Sears opened with the mall and closed in January 2013. Sports Authority took the space that year and closed in 2016 when the chain folded.
The mall split the box: Dick's Sporting Goods opened in one half in 2017, Ashley in the other in 2018.
A full Sears was rare. Most malls left them empty.
The theater closed in 2014, and restaurants moved into the space. One afternoon in that theater stayed in the record.
On March 13, 2000, Leah Roberts, 23, from Durham, North Carolina, bought a ticket for the 2:10 showing of "American Beauty."
Five days later, her car was found abandoned on a logging road in Whatcom County.
The mall was among the last places she could be placed. She was never found.
The 2015 Renovation and the Anchor That Held: Target
In 2015, the mall redid the parts people used most: the food court, the common areas, the entrances, and the restrooms. The enclosed layout stayed. DSW opened that April.
Target remodeled later in the decade. With Target, JCPenney, Kohl's, Macy's, Dick's, and Ashley all in place, Bellis Fair avoided the empty anchors that hollowed out other malls.
The $77 Million Default and the $44 Million Auction
Brookfield Property Partners bought General Growth Properties on August 28, 2018, and Bellis Fair came with it. Nothing changed inside. The owner changed.
In February 2022, Brookfield stopped paying a $77 million loan on the mall, a debt that went back to a 2011 refinancing when the property was valued at $145 million.
Bellis Fair was a small-market mall by then, living partly on cross-border traffic, with weak sales in its inline shops and national chains like Aeropostale gone from them.
The default sent it to auction.
4th Dimension Properties, a Florida company, bought it. The sale closed on December 8, 2022, at $44 million, after 11 bids that cleared the reserve.
It included the mall and 70 acres around it, but not the Target, Kohl's, and JCPenney parcels, which had separate owners.
Eleven years earlier, the property had been worth $145 million. It sold for $44 million.
A Library, a Wrestling Academy, and a New Tenant Mix
A walk-through in January 2023 counted 41 empty storefronts. A mall map showed 37 empty and 69 filled.
To fill the empty inline storefronts, the new owner stopped being particular about what a mall tenant was.
On April 26, 2023, the Bellingham Public Library opened a branch in Suite 616, the city's first on the north side, which had grown without one.
It was a two-year trial with computers, free Wi-Fi, holds pickup, and a children's area.
Other space went to tenants no mall developer had planned for: Bellingham MakerSpace, Whatcom Wrestling Academy, Whatcom Intergenerational High School, Cascade Motorcycle Safety, an animal nonprofit called PawsWithCause, and entertainment rooms like PlayDate and Ruckus Room.
As late as 2019, Canadian visitors still came. Then the border closed during the pandemic, and they went with it, and reopening it was part of the recovery.
The vacancies came down. Empty storefronts fell from 50 in mid-2022 to 25 by early 2024.
Non-anchor space reached 90 percent. By 2025, the mall was 88 percent full.
Parking Lots, Pad Sites, and What Bellis Fair Is Now
The newest building went up in the parking lot. A Chick-fil-A opened on April 30, 2026, at 4030 Cordata Parkway, on a 3.4-acre former parking parcel north of the mall; the south half of the lot was held back for later.
Permits came in August 2025, and construction ran near $1 million.
The 5,000-square-foot building with two drive-through lanes had taken environmental review along a stretch of the West Fork Spring Creek and a city approval in September 2024.
The review also called for bike improvements on Cordata Parkway and an exit-only curb cut near East Bakerview Road.
The rest of the mall's spare land will likely go the same way, parking turned into freestanding pads. The 70 acres the new owner bought around the building could be used for housing or more restaurants.
The JCPenney Deal, the Inline Turnover, and What People Come For
Not everything went through.
A $947 million sale of JCPenney's real estate across 119 properties, the Bellis Fair store included, fell apart at the end of December 2025 when it did not close, and the two companies went to court while the store kept operating on its lease.
The inline shops kept turning over.
GameStop and Attic Salt were gone, New York Jewelry was moving into the old Kay Jewelers space, and Forever 21 had closed near the food court in April 2025, with Spirit Halloween taking the spot for a season.
In 2026, the mall counted 74 tenants across 103 retail spaces.
Walk it now, and the inline stores are names like American Eagle, Hot Topic, Journeys, Maurices, Torrid, Vans, Victoria's Secret, and Zumiez, with salons and a barber academy mixed among them.
The food court and restaurants run to Buffalo Wild Wings, Chipotle, Panda Express, Subway, Cinnabon, and Seoul Kitchen.
The mall is not the one that opened in 1988. Sears is gone, with Mervyn's, the Bon Marche name, the Nordstrom store, the cinema, and the carloads of Canadian shoppers.
Target, JCPenney, Kohl's, and Macy's still hold the same concourse, open eleven to eight most days.
People come now for what a mall has always offered and for things it was never about: a run to Target or Dick's, lunch in the food court, and also a library card, a wrestling class, a day of high school.
When the downtown Central Library closes for its $8.5 million renovation in late 2026 or early 2027, the Bellis Fair branch will grow to cover for it.
A mall built to draw people away from downtown will spend that year standing in for it.
