The mall plan redrawn for Gages Slough
In 1982 the land meant for Cascade Mall was open ground in west Burlington, between Interstate 5 and Garl Street, with Gages Slough along its south side and a drive-in theater beside it.
The tract ran to about 80 acres of floodplain, with Gilkey Road to the north and Burlington Boulevard to the east. The owners paid for hydraulic work to learn what a mall, and the fill under it, would do to drainage and flood flows.
By July 1982, the findings had sent the project back to the drawing board: the owner and architect changed the layout and planned for less imported earth. Federal flood rules stood in the way anyway.
A second hydraulic study came in April 1983, and in August 1983 the Federal Emergency Management Agency rejected the work as lacking scientific or technical backing, adding that federal rules required Burlington to assess the hydraulic effect of development, including fill.
In December 1983 the agency told the state's Department of Ecology that no building permit could go out until the flood limits were enforced, since no regulatory floodway had been drawn.
An appeal over Burlington's flood insurance study was denied in February 1984.
Construction on the slough-side field came later in the decade.
Four department stores open Cascade Mall
Cascade Mall opened in Burlington, Washington, in November 1989: an enclosed, single-level mall beside I-5 near exits 229 and 230, with about 450,000 square feet and four department stores, JCPenney, The Bon Marche, Emporium, and Sears.
The project cost about $30 million.
Winmar Company of Seattle and Pan Pacific Development developed it, Sellen Construction built it to a design by Mithun Partners, and in 1990 the mall won a Gold Nugget award for large retail projects.
It opened into a building rush.
Bellis Fair had come to Bellingham in August 1988, and in Burlington, Pacific Edge Outlet Center opened 35 stores in two phases across 1989 and 1990.
Winmar was building beside its own mall as well.
By March 1991 its Cross Court Plaza, on the land just north of Cascade, was planned around a 90,000-square-foot Target, plus a second major tenant, small shops, and a restaurant.
That Target would stand on a separate property, under separate ownership.
In the same month, with all four of its department stores trading, Cascade Mall was looking to sign another anchor.
Two Bon Marche stores become two Macy's
The building grew again in 1998, in a major expansion and renovation that turned out to be its last.
In February 1999 Macerich and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board bought it through a 51-49 joint venture, as one piece of a Washington and Oregon portfolio that also took in Washington Square, Redmond Town Center, and Kitsap Mall.
In the early 2000s the center measured about 590,000 square feet, against the 450,000 it opened with, and in November 2002 an Applebee's opened on the property at 188 Cascade Mall Drive.
The department stores were changing names meanwhile.
Emporium was an anchor at the end of 2002 and gone a year later, and The Bon Marche had taken its building as a second store.
By the end of 2005 both Bon Marche buildings carried the Macy's name, one as the main Macy's and the other as Macy's Men's, Children's and Home.
Four anchor buildings by then held three chains, and two of the four belonged to Macy's.
A full mall in 2014, then the Sears notice
In 2014 the corridor ran under skylights and white roof beams, over polished floors, past freestanding kiosks and soft seating, with American flags hanging overhead and a big geometric emblem set on a wall of the atrium.
The mall opened at 10 a.m. Monday through Saturday and at 11 on Sundays.
Along its single level were the two Macy's, JCPenney, Sears, a 14-screen cinema, and a TJ Maxx, and in those years the smaller storefronts included a Spencer's, a Claire's, a Zumiez, and a GameStop.
One tenant was not a store at all.
In April 2008 the Children's Museum of Skagit County moved into the mall from downtown Mount Vernon, serving children 12 and younger, and in the fall of 2013 it started a preschool program called Museum Explorers.
In June 2014 Macerich paid $15.2 million for the 49 percent of Cascade it did not own, and the whole mall became its own.
That October, Sears announced that its Burlington store would close.
Sears and JCPenney leave the mall
Sears closed in January 2015, and its building stood vacant. At the end of 2014 about 91 percent of the mall's space had been leased.
A year later, with Sears gone, about 79 percent was. The stores that stayed sold more per square foot, $339 in 2015 against $317 in 2014.
In January 2017 Macerich sold Cascade Mall to Merlone Geier Partners, in one deal with Northgate Mall in San Rafael, California, for $170 million for the pair.
JCPenney, the only one of the opening four left under its own name, announced in February 2018 that its Burlington store would close in May, and it closed that year, leaving nearly 50,000 more square feet of department store empty.
The Children's Museum left too.
In August 2018, with a staff of 12, it started working out a new home, and in March 2019, after nearly 11 years at Cascade, it reopened elsewhere in Burlington.
Macy's closes, and the inside corridor shuts
In January 2020 Macy's announced that both of its Burlington stores, about 110,000 square feet between them, would close that spring.
The closings covered 114 workers, with layoffs beginning in March.
Once both Macy's stores were dark, none of the four department-store buildings the mall had opened with held a department store.
The mall itself closed for good on June 30, 2020, in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In announcing it, the mall gave two reasons: the loss of its department stores, JCPenney, Sears, and Macy's among them, and what the pandemic had done to the finances of its tenants and its owner.
The closing stopped at the corridor.
Businesses facing outside were allowed to stay and to reopen when health rules permitted, among them the AMC cinema, TJ Maxx, Chuck E. Cheese, Furniture World, Cascade Chapel, Heritage Portable Buildings, and Applebee's.
The smaller storefronts along the inside corridor closed with the mall.
Empty windows and an $18.5 million sale
By March 2022 most of the remaining activity was around the mall's edges.
The businesses open to the outside kept trading, while inside the shut corridor was lined with empty display windows and walls marked by missing signs; much of the parking field sat idle.
The lot kept one event. The MG Car Club Northwest Centre had started and finished its annual Tulip Rallye at the mall more than once.
For the 38th, on April 27, 2019, drivers checked in from 8 a.m., and the first cars rolled out at about 9:45 on a four-hour route that brought them back to the same lot.
The 40th, on April 22, 2023, gathered in the southwest lot beside I-5, with the enclosed mall closed behind it, and entry cost $20 for drivers who signed up ahead.
The property changed hands again that year.
Merlone Geier put it up for sale in January 2023, and in April 2023 Burlington Investment Properties II LLC bought the main mall parcels for $18.5 million.
The original project had cost about $30 million in 1989.
The Burlington Gallery name and a pickleball club
By July 2024 the place was going by The Gallery, and that October Burlington Gallery signs replaced the Cascade Mall sign beside I-5.
The enclosed interior was promised a later reopening.
For 2025, Christ the King Hope Church was announced for the former Macy's Men's, Children's and Home store, while the old JCPenney was divided between Playtime Pickleball Club and Slingshot Adventure.
Christ the King Hope Church was in use there by September 2025.
The pickleball club opened in November at 300 Cascade Mall Drive, with eight indoor courts in roughly 23,000 square feet, and the old JCPenney became the first of the anchor buildings turned over to recreation.
Slingshot Adventure, meant for the rest of that store, missed its 2025 opening. Inside, the corridor had not reopened by the end of 2025.
Open storefronts around a closed corridor
Burlington Gallery belongs to Burlington Investment Properties II, and its enclosed corridor, promised a reopening in 2024, is closed.
Everything trading on the site is reached from outside: the AMC cinema at 200 Cascade Mall Drive, which shows current films with reserved seating and discount matinees, TJ Maxx, open seven days a week, Applebee's, Tepic Mexican Restaurant, Chuck E. Cheese with its arcade games, play area, and trampoline zone, and the pickleball club in the old JCPenney.
Two of the old department stores have new uses.
Christ the King Hope Church holds part of a former Macy's, and it set a public trunk-or-treat at its address, with decorated car trunks and candy, for the afternoon of October 31, 2026.
Slingshot Adventure has not opened in the rest of the old JCPenney.
The city's rules for the site are not finished.
In December 2024 Burlington put the former mall on its 2025 planning list after noting that the largely vacant property had recently changed hands and was far larger than the infill sites its existing rules were built around.
Staff thought a narrow first round of rules might be finished by the end of 2025. That date slipped.
By December 2025 the work had rolled into 2026, with December 2026 as the new target.
The city planned to set basic limits on development and land use first; a more detailed scheme would wait for an actual major proposal.
In 2014 the corridor opened at 10 six mornings a week, under skylights, past kiosks and soft seating.
The people who still come to the old mall, for a film or a game of pickleball, walk in from the parking lot.
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