2006 and the Village: the anchor successions completed

MARSHALL FIELD'S CLOSES 2006 · MACY'S 9 SEPTEMBER 2006 · BARNES & NOBLE 8 APRIL 2009

The year 2006 remade the mall's ends: in March 2006 the Marshall Field's store — the 1980 Hudson's box — closed in the Federated consolidation of the Marshall Field's name, and on 9 September 2006 the L. S. Ayres store of 1979 was converted to Macy's, the name it carries today. The year's smaller closures record the same churn at inline size: KB Toys, Sam Goody, and Casual Corner all closed in 2006. The empty Marshall Field's was then demolished, its site cleared by 2008 for an outdoor lifestyle concourse built into the mall's side and named the Village. Barnes & Noble opened there on 8 April 2009 — the bookstore closed its older Grape Road store at 4601 Grape Road the day before, 7 April, and reopened in the Village, a relocation measured in hundreds of yards along the same corridor. The Village's roll at its opening included Five Guys, Ulta Beauty, Bar Louie, Lane Bryant, and Jared, arranged on an outward-facing courtyard: the enclosed mall of 1979 had grown an open-air street of its own.

The 2010s were maintenance and slow attrition, at documented size. An Apple Store opened in November 2010 — Simon credited the presence of the University of Notre Dame for landing it — and electric-vehicle charging followed in 2011. A renovation in December 2013 found the mall at ninety-five percent occupancy, with Coach and Michael Kors among its names; the food court was reconfigured in July 2014. Gap closed in 2016 and Dry Goods opened the same year. In 2018 Ulta Beauty moved out of the Village across Grape Road to a larger store — the corridor by then competing with the mall that had created it, on the mall's own terms.

Sources:

1. The University Park Mall record as compiled from the South Bend Tribune's dated coverage — the Marshall Field's closing of March 2006; the Ayres-to-Macy's conversion of 9 September 2006; the KB Toys, Sam Goody, and Casual Corner closings of 2006; the demolition and the Village concourse; the December 2013 renovation at ninety-five percent occupancy; the food court's July 2014 reconfiguration; the Gap closing and Dry Goods opening of 2016; the Ulta relocation of 2018.
2. Inside Granger, April 2009 — Barnes & Noble closed its store at 4601 Grape Road on 7 April 2009 and reopened at University Park Mall on 8 April 2009.
3. Simon Property Group, as carried in the compiled record — the Apple Store of November 2010 and the Notre Dame credit; electric-vehicle charging, 2011.