The newest part of Tacoma Mall is not inside Tacoma Mall.
It opened off Interstate 5 in the mid-1960s as the first large enclosed mall built for Pierce County, with department-store anchors taking shape at its edges to pull people in.
Now two single-story buildings sit west of the concourse, close enough to the lot that drivers reach them before they reach a mall door.
Inside are Shake Shack and Dave's Hot Chicken. A short walk northeast, the ground where Sears stood for decades holds newer stores and a Kohl's.
A building made to draw shoppers indoors is now spending to pull them back out to the edges, where the parking used to be.
How a mall ends up undoing its own design, and why that counts as survival, runs under all the new construction.
How Tacoma Mall Began as a Freeway Project off Interstate 5
Before it had its name, the project was the Tacoma Freeway Mart.
That was 1959, when the coming Interstate 5 and South Tacoma's auto-era growth made a large mall near the highway look like a sound investment.
The Tacoma Mall name came in 1961, after 1959 zoning changes had cleared the way, and the project was approved that December.
Ground broke in June 1963 on a $40 million build, designed by John Graham & Company, the Seattle firm behind Northgate and Southcenter.
The developer was a division of Allied Stores, which also owned the Bon Marche, so the mall's biggest anchor was built in from the start.
The opening came in pieces. The Bon Marche opened its three-level store on August 3, 1964, a full year before the mall around it was finished.
The main concourse and JCPenney followed on October 13, 1965, when a ribbon across the main entrance was cut in front of more than 50 stores.
The lineup gathered the pieces of a downtown shopping trip into one place: Weisfield's Jewelers, a PayLess drugstore, Leeds Qualicraft Shoes, Motherhood Maternity, a men's wear shop, a women's apparel store.
Shoppers came off Interstate 5 to thousands of parking spaces ringing the building.
The idea was to put all of it under one roof you could park beside, and it worked.
Tacoma Mall became Pierce County's main shopping center almost at once.
When Tacoma Mall Had a Supermarket and a Movie Theater
The early mall did things Tacoma Mall itself would eventually stop doing.
It carried a full supermarket, a 25,000-square-foot Thriftway that opened with the center, closed in early 1967, returned as Mall Super Foods, and by 1970 had become a Lucky Stores.
It carried a 20,300-square-foot S. H. Kress variety store, the low-price general goods that downtown five-and-dimes used to sell.
You could do a real grocery run inside the building.
Out in the northeast parking lot stood a movie house.
The Tacoma Mall Theatre opened in 1968, split into two screens in 1974, and spent the rest of the century as the Tacoma Mall Twin.
It closed in July 2002 and came down soon after. Groceries inside the building and a movie across the parking lot were both ordinary here once.
The grocery store vanished early.
The theater held on longer, but by the time the big department-store losses arrived, that part of the old mall had already gone dark.
The Anchors: Nordstrom, Penney, and the Stores That Left
Nordstrom's history at Tacoma Mall is part of Nordstrom's own.
The 43,000-square-foot store that opened on August 5, 1966, was the first to run under the Nordstrom Best name, before the company dropped the older Best's Apparel label for good.
Nordstrom expanded in two steps in 1983, opening a new section in May and reopening the combined store that October at 130,000 square feet.
JCPenney, which had opened with the mall in 1965, added a third level in 1986 and reached 210,000 square feet.
One corner of the mall kept changing its sign.
It opened in the 1970s as Liberty House, with the old Rhodes thread still running through the company behind it, then became Frederick & Nelson, which closed on September 22, 1991.
Mervyn's took the space the next July.
The names changed faster than the building did, and for a while the box behind the sign stayed put.
The Bon Marche, the anchor that had opened before the rest of the mall in 1964, outlasted the names that disappeared.
It became Bon-Macy's in 2003 and plain Macy's in 2005, and it still operates under that name.
What Happened on November 20, 2005
The mall's biggest day of trouble came in its fifth decade.
On November 20, 2005, around midday, a 20-year-old man walked into Tacoma Mall with a rifle and a handgun and opened fire.
Six people were wounded. He took four hostages inside a store and gave himself up after a three-hour standoff.
Everyone who was wounded survived. He was convicted and, in 2007, sentenced to more than 160 years.
Another incident near the food court in November 2021 wounded one person; stores reopened the next morning.
Nordstrom Built a New Store, and the Old Site Changed Shape
By the 2000s, the mall belonged to Simon Property Group, after a path that ran from Allied Stores through DeBartolo's 1987 takeover and Simon's 1996 merger with DeBartolo.
Simon and Nordstrom went a different way with the aging 1966 store.
Rather than renovate it again, Nordstrom built a new two-level, 138,000-square-foot store that opened on October 3, 2008.
The old store closed, and the site was remade.
That freed up space, and the mall filled it with tenants meant to draw crowds.
The former Nordstrom area was divided into smaller shops for Sephora, Apple, and Forever 21.
Forever 21 opened in the west wing in late 2010, left its 84,000-square-foot space in July 2016, and returned the next summer in a much smaller spot near JCPenney.
The Cheesecake Factory opened in December 2016 in a rebuilt section near the food court, and Dick's Sporting Goods held its grand opening in October 2017.
The direction had been set back in 2006, when Simon announced a mall facelift and 105,000 square feet of new shops and restaurants.
The center was shifting away from leaning only on department stores.
Sears Left in 2018, and the Promised Cinema Never Came
Sears had anchored the northeast end since the early 1980s, 37 years in all.
It closed on September 2, 2018, and came down in April 2019, which left a large gap and a stretch of empty parking on one side of the property.
Simon's 2018 plan for the Sears footprint and its parking fields showed five new buildings, around 69,000 square feet of shops and restaurants, and a 50,000-square-foot cinema.
The cinema never got built.
Kohl's went up roughly where the theater had been drawn, and Nordstrom Rack opened nearby in 2021, with Kohl's following in 2022.
The Sears corner became the same kind of outward-facing retail the mall would build next, this time on purpose.
The Village at Tacoma Mall and the Plan to Build a Neighborhood Around It
The newest buildings sit west of the main mall.
The Village at Tacoma Mall is 26,000 square feet across two single-story buildings made to face outward, with patios instead of an interior corridor.
Shake Shack, Dave's Hot Chicken, Lovesac, and Happy Lamb Hot Pot are open, while Supreme Dumplings, Simply Thai, and Gong Cha remain the next pieces of the Village lineup.
Inside the enclosed mall, a Pop Mart now sells blind-box toys and Labubu figures, and the building itself has been going through a 2025 and 2026 makeover: new flooring, redesigned entrances, a refreshed food court, and a children's play area near JCPenney, with the mall open the whole time.
The longer plan reaches past the property line.
Tacoma made the area a regional growth center in 1995 and adopted a 580-acre subarea plan in 2018, with the goal of turning a low-density spread of retail and parking into a place where people also live and work.
The Madison District requires at least 35 homes per acre, allows buildings up to 75 feet, and was Tacoma's first use of inclusionary zoning for affordable units.
Because the whole area sits over the South Tacoma Groundwater Protection Area, the plan leans on green stormwater design and a 25 percent tree-canopy target.
In the planning record, retail still dominated, and only 3 percent of residents worked inside the area, which is part of why the plan pushes for housing and other kinds of work.
The mall is still a place you drive to, served by a transit center and seven Pierce Transit routes, while the district around it is being rewritten on paper.
What the Mall Is Today, and Why People Still Go
Tacoma Mall lists more than 140 retailers.
The three department-store lines from the start are, by lineage, still there: Macy's, where the Bon Marche opened in 1964, JCPenney, and Nordstrom in its 2008 building.
Apple, Sephora, lululemon, H&M, and Uniqlo line the concourse, with a food court inside the south entrance between BJ's Brewhouse and Woobling Korean BBQ and a children's play area near JCPenney.
Gone are the supermarket, the S. H. Kress variety store, the twin theater in the parking lot, Sears, Mervyn's, and Frederick & Nelson.
What's left is the part that was always the draw: an enclosed, climate-controlled place where you can stay for hours without buying anything.
Tacoma Mall still allows concourse walking during posted mall-walking hours, 10 a.m.
to 8 p.m. most days. After 60 years, Tacoma Mall has changed almost everything about itself except the reason people keep showing up.
