Edgewater Plaza and the Twin Malls of Manitowoc
Before Edgewater Plaza opened in 1979, Manitowoc already had a taste of mall life. Just across East Magnolia Avenue, Mid-Cities Mall had opened in the late 1960s, starting with Montgomery Ward in October 1967.
Soon after, JCPenney, Woolworth, Osco Drug, and A&P joined in. For a small lakeshore city, having two enclosed malls so close together made it clear that Manitowoc was embracing suburban modern life in a big way.
Edgewater Plaza was built between Manitowoc and Two Rivers on Highway 42, which was the main road before Interstate 43. Its main stores were well-known names in the Upper Midwest.
There was Prange, a department store from Sheboygan that started in the 1800s, and PrangeWay, its discount version.
There was also a Sears catalog store where people could order everything from appliances to winter coats. Smaller shops filled out the rest of the mall.
In 1981, local planners came up with an idea to connect Mid-Cities and Edgewater into one huge mall across Magnolia Ave. The plan never became reality.
The two malls stayed separate, facing each other across the parking lot, like siblings sharing a room and pretending to get along.
Highway 42, Mid-Cities, and the Shift to I-43
The real changes to Manitowoc shopping did not happen in the plans. They happened in real life, four miles to the southwest.
In 1981, Interstate 43 opened west of downtown, and over the next ten years, more and more businesses moved toward the new exits, slowly at first, then quickly.
You could still drive along Highway 42 for errands, but it was clear the future was moving toward the freeway.
Edgewater Plaza and Mid-Cities started the 1980s still busy, but their best days were over.
In 1984, a Hardee's opened at Mid-Cities, and families still bought school clothes and picked up fast food. Teenagers walked between the two malls, using Magnolia Ave.
as their shortcut. Still, big national stores were leaving, replaced by smaller local shops, and more empty stores appeared as the years passed.
These were the first signs that the area was starting to have problems. In 1990, Walmart opened near I-43 and Calumet Ave.
The low prices that once drew people to PrangeWay now led them to choose a single big store with a huge parking lot and easy access from the freeway.
By 1993, problems were much easier to see. The Sears catalog store at Edgewater Plaza closed.
Woolworth shut down its Lakeview Centre store across the street. It was the old Mid-Cities, which had a new name but the same problems.
In 1996, PrangeWay at Edgewater closed for good, leaving a big empty store. That same year, the Hardee's at Lakeview closed.
In 1998, Osco Drug left its spot inside the mall and moved to its own store across East Reed Street.
Highway 42 still had cars, but the money was going elsewhere.
Edgelake's Makeover and the Slow Unraveling
By the early 2000s, Edgewater Plaza was already in decline, but people tried to make it seem better than it really was.
The owners painted the building beige and changed its name to Edgelake Plaza, hoping it would sound more upscale and closer to the water.
Still, the parking lot made it clear what was really going on.
Changing the name could not move the interstate, or Walmart, or change the fact that big stores now cared more about being near highway exits than being near the lake.
Inside, more stores closed each year. The empty PrangeWay store showed that even well-known stores could leave for good.
Smaller shops were left in the early 2000s as the building got older and fewer people visited. The mall did not fall apart all at once; it faded little by little.
Every closing made it easier for the next store to leave.
Across Magnolia, Lakeview Centre was doing even worse. By 2000, JCPenney was the only store left in a building that used to have many big-name stores.
When Penney's finally closed in 2011, the building was completely empty.
It was torn down in 2015, removing the Mid-Cities/Lakeview complex for good.
That left Edgelake, which used to be Edgewater Plaza, as the last indoor mall on Manitowoc's northeast side, winning a contest that nobody wanted to win.
The New Lakeshore Mall in Its Final Years
In 2007, Edgelake Plaza changed hands and changed its name again, this time to The New Lakeshore Mall.
The new label suggested a fresh start, but by then the trend line was already pointing down. The rebranding tried to bring new energy to a place that was no longer popular.
At the same time, malls all over the country had the same problems, with fewer big-name stores wanting to be in older malls and more shoppers going to places near the highway.
During the 2000s and 2010s, the number and types of stores at New Lakeshore Mall got smaller and changed. Instead of looking like a normal indoor mall, it became just a few businesses that could keep running.
In the last years, as the mall got quieter, only a few places were left: a children's play area called Wizard's Kingdom, with a ball pit, bouncy houses, and arcade games, and a hearing-aid shop that helped a small but steady group of customers.
The first idea for a big mall with three main stores was gone, leaving just a few special services and Younkers in a space that was now much too large for them.
Younkers' Final Days and Six Vacant Years
For a long time, Younkers helped the mall keep its original feel as a busy shopping center.
The Iowa-based department store, over 160 years old, was the last big store at Lakeshore Edgewater Plaza and attracted shoppers who still wanted the classic department store experience.
Around it, most of the other stores had become small businesses, but as long as Younkers was there, the place could still call itself a mall. That changed in early 2018.
On January 30, The Bon-Ton Stores Inc., Younkers' parent company, announced that the Lakeshore Edgewater Plaza location would be one of four Younkers stores closing in northeast Wisconsin, as part of a bigger plan to close 47 stores across the country.
The effort to save the company did not work, and Younkers ended up closing for good.
When the Manitowoc store closed that year, Lakeshore Mall lost its last big store and could no longer really call itself a working shopping center.
Mayor Justin Nickels said clearly that when Younkers closed, it meant the end of the site as a place for shopping.
From about 2018 to 2024, the mall became more and more of a problem: windows were broken, parking lots were covered in weeds, and the building was falling apart.
People had talked about fixing up the mall since 2013, but for years, nothing real happened, and the empty building became a sign of plans that never moved forward on Manitowoc's northeast side.
Demolishing the Lakeshore and Mid-Cities Mall Sites
By the late 2010s, the patience of city officials had worn thin. The deserted Lakeshore Mall had become a prominent eyesore and a reminder that private ownership alone was not going to solve the problem.
In 2018, Mayor Nickels said the city was aggressively pursuing the owner to push for demolition. He acknowledged there was no real use left for the building.
He also suggested that the site could sit untouched for some time, a prediction that proved accurate as the structure lingered on in limbo.
In spring 2024, Manitowoc decided to step in and take action.
The city bought the old Lakeshore Mall property after deciding that the private owner of the Mid-Cities land and the larger area was not making real progress on building anything new.
To pay for buying the land and getting it ready for a new project, city leaders set up a special tax district and got a short-term loan from the city's utilities.
The plan was for new tax money from future development to pay back these costs instead of using regular taxpayer money.
With the land now owned by the city, things finally started moving. Crews tore down the last Lakeshore Mall buildings and what was left of Mid-Cities.
On March 6, 2025, the mayor announced that all Mid-Cities mall buildings were gone and that the old Younkers store was the last to be demolished.
Workers stayed to remove the building foundations and level the land. After decades as a place for two malls, the northeast area was now just flat, planted ground, ready for something new.
Mariner Lux, New Housing, and What Replaces the Malls
Once the site was clear, the question shifted from removal to replacement.
Manitowoc signed a development agreement with Tycore Built, a Green Bay-based firm founded in 1982 and known for housing projects in Wisconsin communities such as Waupaca and Marinette.
The plan calls for transforming roughly 30 to 37 acres of the combined Mid-Cities and Lakeshore properties into a mixed-use neighborhood with a strong residential core.
The project's scope is large by local standards.
Tycore intends to build more than 40 single-family homes and between 150 and 170 multi-family apartment units, along with three commercial spaces reserved for restaurants or other businesses.
For a city with limited room to expand outward, the emphasis on housing meets an obvious need. Manitowoc, like many places, faces a housing shortage.
The northeast side lacks both housing and commercial services after years of retail growth shifting toward the southwest near the interstate.
Manitowoc retains the right to sign off on any business that locates there, a safeguard meant to avoid low-quality structures and short-term speculation.
Tycore's payments depend on how much and how quickly it builds, and the company has signaled it wants people living on the site within a year.
In March 2025, the Common Council approved the preliminary plat for the Mariner Lux Subdivision, a 41-unit mix of single-family and two-family homes on the former Younkers footprint, amended the zoning map, and released old easements on the land.
Two grants totaling about 190,000 dollars were paying for environmental testing and site preparation, so the ground was ready for construction in 2025.
A dedicated marketing site has already drawn significant interest, pitching Mariner Lux as Manitowoc's newest residential and multi-family development, minutes from the highway and within walking distance of the lakeshore.
For residents who remember visiting the mall as children, the transformation from enclosed retail to a new neighborhood is not abstract; it is a front-row view of how a dead mall gets written back into the city as housing, streets, and a handful of carefully chosen storefronts.
