Uptown Janesville is an enclosed shopping center at 2500 Milton Avenue in Janesville, Wisconsin.
The old name still follows it around: Janesville Mall, its name from September 1973 until the 2020 rebrand.
It opened with JCPenney, Montgomery Ward, and Charles V. Weise. None of the three is there now.
Montgomery Ward closed in the 1980s, JCPenney in 2014, and the old Weise space, later Boston Store, in 2018.
The details are odd. The planned original anchor, Welles, went bankrupt before opening day.
Sears turned the mall down in 1973, said yes in 1996, then closed by 2019.
A movie theater became a Chuck E. Cheese that has outlasted every original department store.
The Sears that opened last is now the site of a city-owned sports and convention center with a hockey arena.
That's the pattern worth following: a mall that keeps replacing some of what it loses with something that isn't a store.
When a department store fell through before opening day
In 1970, a developer named Roger Benjamin went looking for a patch of southern Wisconsin to build a shopping center.
He wanted Welles, a Midwestern department-store chain, as his draw. His first sketch was a strip mall.
He found open ground in the Town of Harmony, along Milton Avenue, sitting between downtown Janesville and Interstate 90.
Montgomery Ward had already started developing a nearby parcel.
So Benjamin and two partners formed Janesville Properties Company and bought nearly 40 acres next to Ward's land.
Then the plan got bigger. Montgomery Ward agreed to anchor an enclosed mall with Welles.
Charles V. Weise, a Rockford department store owned by Bergner's, signed on as the third anchor within the year.
In November 1970, the project went public: a $10 million indoor mall, with construction set for spring 1971.
The layout put Welles and Montgomery Ward at opposite ends, Weise in the middle, and a courtyard outside the Weise doors.
The planned anchor whose parent filed bankruptcy before opening day
In late 1972, Miller-Wohl Company, Welles's parent, filed under Chapter XI. Welles was out.
That left a partially built anchor space and no tenant for it.
Management went to Sears, which already ran a store downtown.
Sears said no, because it also had a location at Beloit Plaza and didn't want a third store in the area.
JCPenney said yes. It took the half-finished Welles box, and crews enlarged the space before the doors ever opened.
Opening day, 1973
Janesville Mall opened in September 1973 with three department stores and 12 other tenants.
JCPenney, Montgomery Ward, and Charles V. Weise.
It was a single-level enclosed mall, and in southern Wisconsin that mattered.
You could shop in February without a coat.
The open-air centers couldn't offer that, and the new mall started pulling traffic their way.
The court by Weise gave people a place to sit between the anchors.
By the late 1970s and into the 1980s, this was the retail center for the Janesville area.
Beloit Plaza was the clearest competition, and the mall was winning.
The first anchor leaves
Montgomery Ward closed during the 1980s. The space didn't sit empty long.
Kohl's moved in during 1985 and, by the late 1990s, expanded into smaller storefronts beside it.
That same year, 1985, the Weise name came off the middle anchor.
Bergner's had bought the Boston Store chain, and the Janesville store ran under the Bergner's banner.
The mall got a facelift in 1986. New flooring, fresh benches, refinished courts, and live fig trees were planted inside.
Bergner's files Chapter 11, and the trees come out
In 1991, Bergner's filed for Chapter 11. The Beloit Plaza Bergner's closed during the reorganization.
The Janesville store was converted to the Boston Store name and stayed put.
The mall got another remodel that year. A brighter pastel color scheme went in, and the fig trees from 1986 came out.
Across town, Beloit Plaza was losing stores, and Janesville kept absorbing the department-store traffic those losses left behind.
The store that said no, then said yes
Sears had turned down the mall before it opened.
In 1996, management asked again, and this time the pitch came with an offer: trade your aging Beloit Plaza store for a brand-new anchor here. Sears took it.
By 1997, a 110,000-square-foot, two-story Sears opened with an auto center on an outparcel, giving the mall a fourth anchor.
After that, the property was listed at 627,000 square feet.
A year later, in 1998, CBL & Associates Properties bought the whole mall for more than $33 million.
The theater that became a pizza arcade
Late in the 1990s, the mall's interior movie theater closed. Chuck E. Cheese took the space.
It's still there, which makes it one of the longer-running tenants in a building that has cycled through anchors three times over.
Kids who went for birthday parties in 1999 could now take their own kids to the same spot.
JCPenney closes after 40 years
In January 2014, JCPenney put the Janesville store on a national list of 33 it planned to shut.
The store had been there since opening day, in the box originally framed for Welles.
It closed on May 3, 2014, after more than 40 years.
CBL didn't leave the anchor dark. It split the former JCPenney footprint for new tenants.
Dick's Sporting Goods opened there on October 2, 2015, as the chain's 10th Wisconsin store and its 631st nationwide.
Ulta Beauty took another slice of the redeveloped space.
Both are still open. The old department-store box found a second life as two smaller stores.
Boston Store, and the end of an era
Bon-Ton owned Boston Store and Younkers.
It filed Chapter 11 in February 2018; liquidation followed after the April bankruptcy auction.
The Janesville Boston Store closure affected 74 employees, with separations starting on or after June 5.
The store was closed by August 2018.
That was the middle anchor gone, the one that had opened in 1973 as Charles V. Weise and ended in 2018 as Boston Store.
No successor took the space.
Sold for roughly half its reported 1998 price
CBL had paid more than $33 million in 1998.
In 2018, it sold the mall to RockStep Capital for $18 million.
A binding agreement was in place by May, and the sale closed July 27, 2018.
The deal covered a 600,650-square-foot mall on 42.1 acres.
At closing, the anchors were Dick's, Kohl's, Ulta, a winding-down Boston Store, and a Sears ground lease.
The JCPenney space was already vacant of its original tenant.
The drop from the reported 1998 price to $18 million coincided with anchor losses and a national wariness about enclosed malls.
It was RockStep's first property in Wisconsin.
A new name and a missing anchor
Sears filed for bankruptcy in 2018, and on November 8, the Janesville store and its auto center were listed for closure.
The store closed by February 2019.
That left a two-story, 110,000-square-foot box empty on the west side of the property.
In July 2020, RockStep renamed the place Uptown Janesville, part of a broader renaming across its malls.
The company started talking about a mixed-use future: service tenants, education, recreation, community uses to fill the storefronts the department stores had left behind.
Plans for indoor sports at the old Sears site were already circulating in 2020.
Then the pandemic paused everything.
What replaced Sears
The city took the lead.
It demolished the empty Sears and built the Woodman's Sports & Convention Center in its place, a 140,000-square-foot facility at 2510 Milton Avenue, connected to the mall but running under its own name.
Janesville had needs piling up. The Janesville Jets hockey team wanted a new home.
The old Janesville Ice Arena dated to 1974 and was past its prime.
And the city had wanted convention space for years.
The new center folded all of it into one building on the old anchor footprint.
The final cost came in at $46.8 million, under a $50.3 million projection.
The money came from layers: $17.3 million from the city, $15 million in state ARPA funds, $9.7 million in private fundraising, and $5 million federal.
Woodman's Markets bought naming rights on a 20-year deal.
City leaders cited projections of about $23 million a year in area impact.
It opened to the public in September 2025.
Two ice rinks, a 1,500-seat arena, indoor courts for basketball and volleyball and pickleball, and a 25,800-square-foot conference space measuring 105 by 250 feet.
The Jets played their first game in the new arena on September 20.
The first season booked 10 conventions, 8 tournaments, and more than 70 hockey games.
What's left, and who still shows up
The department-store lineup that built this place is gone.
Montgomery Ward left decades ago, JCPenney in 2014, and the old Weise space ended as Boston Store in 2018.
Sears, the later addition, closed by early 2019. None came back.
But Uptown Janesville is open. The hours run 10 to 7 most days, noon to 5 on Sunday.
Kohl's, Dick's, and Ulta still anchor it.
Books-A-Million, Finish Line, Hibbett Sports, GameStop, Spencer's, and the long-tenured Chuck E. Cheese fill out the rest, alongside a barbershop, a nail salon, a couple of food spots, and a Beloit College presence inside the mall.
There's still room to change.
Large parking fields surround the property, and the east side near Liberty Lane keeps coming up in talk of a hotel, apartments, activity space, and other commercial uses.
In 2024, the city moved to expand a tax-increment district north around the mall to make that land easier to develop.
As of publication, publicly discussed hotel/apartment/activity-space pieces still appear preliminary.
What pulls people now isn't the old anchor draw.
It's a kid's hockey game next door, a pickleball court, a slice and an arcade token, and a 140,000-square-foot building sitting where Sears used to be.
