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OPENED 1969 · CLOSED FEBRUARY 1, 2003 · DEMOLISHED 2004 · LAFAYETTE STREET AND SOUTH ANTHONY BOULEVARD
The retail record: Southtown's corridor story — the 86-acre site, the eminent domain, the demolition, the ground's rebirth — is told in the Corridors section and is not retold here. What belongs to this section is the mall as a retail machine. Melvin Simon & Associates of Indianapolis opened it in stages through 1969 — the Wolf & Dessauer store's grand opening came on March 10 and the mall-wide dedication on September 16 — with three anchors: JCPenney, Montgomery Ward, and a Wolf & Dessauer that became an L.S. Ayres when Ayres absorbed the chain. The Directory of Major Malls listed the finished mall at 927,613 square feet and 157 stores; the 1982 expansion, which added a Sears and a Service Merchandise wing, pushed the total past a million square feet in the Corridors account. Simon's own chief executive, David Simon, later judged that the expansion had made the mall too big for its market.
The decline, in the anchor record, ran like this. The International Harvester plant nearby closed in 1983, cutting the ground from under the south side's buying power; Kohl's arrived that same year, taking the former Montgomery Ward box, and in 1995 Kohl's ran an experiment in the former Spiece sporting-goods store, an outlet-format store. Ayres announced the closing of its Southtown store in 1991 and began holding closing sales — and then, in the strangest turn of the file, did not close: Elder-Beerman was proposed to take the box, Elder-Beerman's bankruptcy intervened, and the Ayres store traded on until July 1997. In June 1997 Service Merchandise and JCPenney closed within the same season, and the News-Sentinel counted the mall losing three of its five anchors.
Simon, which had first offered the mall for sale in 1992, tried again in 1998 and sold in 1999 to Heywood Whichard, whose ownership local developers criticized for landing no new stores; Kohl's left for a new freestanding store in 1999, and a local developer, Billy Lewis, opened a convention center in the empty Service Merchandise. On February 1, 2003, the last tenants were evicted and the mall closed. The City took the site by eminent domain in 2004 and demolished the mall the same year — the Sears and Service Merchandise boxes, first slated to be spared, came down too, on the cost of saving them. The ground reopened as the Southtown Centre power center: a Menards in March 2006, welcomed by the News-Sentinel as the development's first major store, and a Walmart that September, whose opening the paper headlined "Big box gets a big welcome." Fort Wayne's second mall thus ended as its clearest parable: an enclosed mall killed by the shrinking of the industrial city around it, and a site saved by the very big-box form that had helped kill the form it replaced.
Sources:
- Main Roads & Corridors — the Southtown arc as corridor history (site, eminent domain, demolition, Southtown Crossing/Centre), cross-referenced and not retold.
- Wikipedia, "Southtown Mall," from the News-Sentinel record (Doug LeDuc's reporting, 1995–2004) and the Directory of Major Malls (1990) — the anchor succession, the 1997 anchor losses, the Whichard sale, the 2003 closing, the 2006 Menards and Walmart openings.
- The News-Sentinel, March 17, 2006 and September 20, 2006 — the Southtown Centre openings.