Oakwood Mall in Eau Claire, WI Is Still Open With One Anchor Empty Since 2018

Oakwood Mall sits at 4800 Golf Road on the southeast side of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, close to where U.S. 53 meets I-94.

It opened in October 1986, and most of its anchors weren't there yet. Dayton's came in 1991. Sears opened in September 1996, 10 years after the mall did.

Neither name is on a building there now. The Dayton's store became Marshall Field's, then Macy's, and closed in March 2017. Sears closed in November 2018.

Hobby Lobby and HOM Furniture fill two of the old department stores now. Scheels is still there. The Sears box has been empty for eight years, with nothing announced for it.

Oakwood opened before most of its anchors did

Oakwood Mall opened on October 15, 1986 with balloons, confetti, a ribbon cutting, and the North High School Band.

It's an enclosed regional shopping center at 4800 Golf Road, on the southeast side of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, near where U.S. 53 meets I-94.

It opened as the retail centerpiece of the Oakwood Hills development, and it's still trading today.

Target was already open at 4850 Golf Road that month. JCPenney was there early too, and it's still there.

The rest of the anchor roster took another 10 years. Dayton's was five years away. Sears was a decade off.

The cinema wasn't ready either.

Six screens started showing films on November 21, more than a month after the ribbon cutting, on the food-court side of the complex.

Dayton's arrives, then Sears moves in

Dayton's opened at Oakwood in August 1991, in a new department-store building added to a mall that had been trading for almost five years.

The mall got bigger that year because someone put another building on it.

Scheels opened in 1995, another year the mall expanded.

Then Sears. The chain closed its London Square Mall store on September 21, 1996 and opened at Oakwood four days later, on September 25.

London Square lost its department store over a single weekend.

Oakwood went through a major renovation that same year.

By the end of 1996 the roster locals remember was complete: JCPenney, Target, Dayton's, Scheels, and Sears.

Three of those five were added to a finished building, one at a time, across a decade of separate projects.

Scheels grows as Target leaves Oakwood

Scheels kept growing after it opened. By 2000 the store filled 100,000 square feet at 4710 Golf Road.

That gave Oakwood an anchor people drove to without walking the concourse.

The cinema grew too. On November 5, 1997 it doubled from six screens to 12, and in 2005 the whole theater was refitted with stadium seating.

Target closed on October 3, 2000, 14 years after opening. The first anchor Oakwood ever had was empty.

The box stayed that way for roughly two years.

Younkers opened in it in 2002, which put the mall's newest anchor name inside one of its oldest buildings.

The Macy's building splits in two

The store Dayton's opened in 1991 became Marshall Field's, then Macy's.

In 2016 Macy's sold the 104,000-square-foot building to General Growth Properties, started a final clearance in January 2017, and closed in March.

Then a box at Oakwood stopped being a department store for the first time.

Crews took the inside apart and divided the building into two tenant spaces, one of about 39,000 square feet and one of about 65,000.

Electrical service and switchgear were replaced. Old rooftop units came off, and the roof was prepared for new equipment.

Then they built a 1,600-square-foot vestibule and a new front entrance onto the outside of it.

Hobby Lobby opened in the larger half on August 13, 2018, with about 1,400 square feet of added floor area and its own door to the parking lot.

A shopper could reach the store without going into the mall at all.

That vestibule is 27 years newer than the building it opens into.

HOM rebuilds the Younkers box

Younkers closed on August 27, 2018, during Bon-Ton's liquidation. The store employed 93 people.

The building was sold outright in 2019, to HOM Furniture ownership, and rebuilt for a use that has nothing to do with apparel.

About 70,000 of the roughly 100,000 square feet became showroom. The remaining 30,000 was held back for a separate tenant.

Inside, HOM laid out a patio section, a bargain floor, an urban range, a home-decor area, and a cookie shop, and gave Sleep Express its own entrance.

The store was supposed to open on March 19, 2020. The first pandemic shutdown stopped that, and it opened in May.

Oakwood Forest, the children's play area, sits in this wing now.

The old Target box, which became the Younkers box, is where parents take small kids to a furniture store.

The Sears box is still empty at Oakwood

Sears closed on November 25, 2018. Three department stores had emptied at Oakwood inside 20 months, and that was the third.

Two of those buildings were rebuilt. The Sears box hasn't been. Eight years on it has no replacement anchor and no approved project.

The theater shows how fast a reuse goes when someone wants the space. AMC ran its last Oakwood showtimes on October 2, 2022.

Micon Cinemas opened the same 12 screens on December 9, stadium seating and all.

Eau Claire started studying the mall area in 2022, focused on empty stores and underused parking.

The City Council held a work session on it in April 2024.

Through August 2026 the study is still a study, and the site isn't one property: the mall, JCPenney, Scheels, HOM, and the Hobby Lobby parcel have separate owners, and the outlots around them have others.

The mall kept trading through all of it, at 91 percent leased in 2020.

You can read the sequence from a bus stop. Route 6 marks its Oakwood stops by HOM Furniture, the theater, Scheels, and Hobby Lobby.

Three of those four names are new since 2018. Nothing stops at Sears.

Inside, the walkers get in an hour before the stores open, through the doors by HOM or the food court, and go around the loop from the Hobby Lobby end to the play area and back, about half a mile.