Glenbrook Square: the region's mall

OPENED OCTOBER 1966 · 4201 COLDWATER ROAD · THE NORTH SIDE

Ground broken on farmland at the city's edge: On June 23, 1965, ground was broken for Glenbrook Center on the north edge of Fort Wayne, at U.S. 27 and the U.S. 30 bypass, on lots of Rahdert's Subdivision that a surveyor's family had platted in 1941 and would go on surveying for the mall for fifty years. The Journal Gazette's construction photographs, republished in its Throwback Thursday series, show the giant taking shape through 1966; the mall opened in October of that year with some seventy stores. On the question of who built it the sources divide, and the division is printed rather than settled: the retail-history record (malls.com's directory and the retail encyclopedias that follow it) names the Chicago firm Landau & Heyman as the builder, originally under the name Glenbrook Center; Wikipedia's listing names the developer as Glendale Centers Inc. The often-assumed name of the Taubman organization appears in no source reached for this mall, and it is not printed as its developer.

The anchors, in order: Glenbrook opened with two great anchors. Sears took one end, in a modernist store that local architectural writing would still be praising half a century later. L.S. Ayres took the other — its first store in an enclosed mall, as the Indianapolis Star noted on October 25, 1966 — and the Ayres store has traded at Glenbrook without interruption ever since, under its own name until Federated's rebranding made it Macy's in 2006. The third name of the opening was a Danners variety store, the largest in that chain at the time. The telling absence was Wolf & Dessauer: the downtown powerhouse was offered its chance at the mall and passed, sold itself to City Stores the same year Glenbrook opened, and was itself absorbed by L.S. Ayres in 1969; the downtown W&D closed in 1979. The mall had not only taken the trade; it had taken the store that declined it.

Five expansions and renovations followed — 1976, 1981, 1990, 1994, and 1998. The 1976 expansion built the JCPenney anchor. The 1981 expansion built the third great anchor box, opened as a Hudson's, converted to Marshall Field's in 1997, and closed in May 2005 after May Company — which by then owned both the Field's box and the Ayres box — consolidated; in December 2007 the merged Macy's Inc. sold the vacant store back to the mall's owner for $1 million. The box then lived the improvised life of an empty anchor — temporary retailers, a mini-golf course, a Habitat for Humanity holiday display — until Carson's renovated it for $1.6 million and opened in 2013. In the corner where an A&P grocery had been an original tenant, a Barnes & Noble opened in 2007. At its full build-out the mall measured 1,210,000 square feet of leasable space, one of the three largest malls in Indiana in the Journal Gazette's 2017 accounting, and the only enclosed super-regional mall in northeast Indiana — a draw its own archived marketing put at over 15 million visitors a year, from a trade area reaching into southern Michigan and northwestern Ohio.

The anchor obituaries arrive: The year 2018 took two anchors in one season. Sears, an original tenant, announced its closing in August and shut that November after fifty-two years; the building was demolished in the summer of 2019. Carson's closed on August 31, 2018, not for any failure of its own store but because its parent, The Bon-Ton Stores, went out of business entire. The Sears ground passed to Seritage, the Sears real-estate spinoff, which announced a new attached building with Dave & Buster's, HomeGoods, and Portillo's for 2020; the pandemic halted construction, Dave & Buster's withdrew, and the attached wing was never built — although Portillo's and BJ's Brewhouse did open on the mall's outlots, so that the Sears corner today feeds people rather than selling them appliances. The Carson's box drew an August 2019 announcement from Japan's Round One Entertainment for a 2021 opening that was likewise scrapped. An overnight water-main break on October 31, 2013, had earlier damaged fifty stores, all but one of which reopened by Black Friday — the kind of episode a healthy mall absorbs, and Glenbrook, for all its troubles, kept absorbing.

Distress, sale, and the revival specialists: The ownership line runs from the builders to General Growth Properties, which acquired the mall in 2003 with the rest of Landau & Heyman's remaining centers, and from General Growth to Brookfield in 2018. In July 2020 the mall's commercial mortgage — reported at $141 million — went to a special servicer, and Commercial Real Estate Direct reported Brookfield giving up on the property, its appraised value cut in a reappraisal to $95.7 million, roughly a third below the loan. New York's Spinoso Real Estate Group, a firm specializing in distressed enclosed malls, acquired Glenbrook in 2022. On August 29, 2025, Hull Property Group of Augusta, Georgia — owner of thirty-six enclosed malls in seventeen states, and a specialist in acquiring and revitalizing regional malls — announced it had bought Glenbrook Square, assuming a mortgage reported at $138.28 million. Hull's stated model is to rebuild regional malls as experience-driven destinations with dining at the center, and its first Fort Wayne announcements ran to new restaurant and snack tenants. As the record stands in late 2026, Glenbrook is anchored by Macy's in the original Ayres box, JCPenney, and Barnes & Noble, with two anchor boxes — Sears's ground and the Hudson's–Field's–Carson's box — still awaiting their next lives. It has been, for sixty years, the shopping center the region could not do without; the open question of its record is only what it will be filled with next.

Sources:

1. The Journal Gazette, Corey McMaken's Glenbrook construction series and Throwback Thursday features (May 2, 2019; July 28, 2022), collected at the Allen County Genealogical Society's Glenbrook Square page — groundbreaking June 23, 1965; the original seventy stores; the 1966 Journal Gazette and Spotlite on Fort Wayne coverage.
2. The Indianapolis Star, October 25, 1966 — the Fort Wayne Ayres as the chain's first enclosed-mall store.
3. The Journal Gazette, Sherry Slater, "Retailers' woes miss Glenbrook" (April 16, 2017) and "Carson's closing after 4 years" (April 21, 2018) — size and state ranking; the Carson's renovation and closing.
4. Wikipedia, "Glenbrook Square," and the retail directories (malls.com; Alchetron) — the developer listings (Glendale Centers Inc.; Landau & Heyman), the expansion years, the anchor succession, the 2013 water-main break, the Seritage plan and its halt.
5. Commercial Real Estate Direct, Fort Wayne reports (2020–2025) — the CMBS loan, the special servicer, the $95.7 million appraisal, the Hull purchase and assumed $138.28 million mortgage.
6. Hull Property Group, acquisition announcement (August 29, 2025); Whatzup, on the new owner's dining plans; The Indiana Lawyer, on the Spinoso ownership and 2025 sale.
7. Ted Shideler, "The landmark Glenbrook Sears, since eradicated" — the Sears closing and demolition and Wolf & Dessauer's passed chance, from Randy Harter's Wolf & Dessauer record.