No matter what side of the city you live on, many Chicagoans are flooded with memories at the mention of their favorite shopping malls. North Riverside Mall, Evergreen Plaza, Ford City and River Oaks are just a few of the area malls that shaped the teen years of Gen Xers and Millennials alike.
“This guy I had a crush on worked at Carson’s [Pirie Scott], and we went every single Saturday to try to bump into him at work,” Grand Crossing native Sheree Anderson said, recalling her teen years. She’s now 48 years old. “We had to coordinate our watches. We didn’t have [cell]phones. Everybody had to look at their watch to see what time it is, and we would have to meet back at Carson’s by 3 o’clock.”
For Anderson and her friends, once she started driving in high school, they would go to River Oaks and Evergreen Plaza to enjoy everything both malls had to offer. Being at the mall in the 1990s was a playground of freedom during those transitional years from childhood to young adulthood. Also, malls were a safe space for Black Chicagoans; many who were growing up in underserved communities with high crime rates.
Being at the mall helped keep them safe while allowing them to be kids, Anderson said.
“That was somewhere we could be us,” Anderson explained. “The workers looked like us. I don’t ever remember being there and [a stranger] followed us or anything like that.”
However, as Anderson grew into adulthood and motherhood, she witnessed a shift in mall culture. She remembers going to River Oaks in 2022, and seeing that it was a shell of what it used to be.
Although River Oaks initially opened as an outdoor mall in the 1960s, the owners at the time had plans to expand it. By the mid-1990s, owners enclosed the mall and added 80,000 square feet along with new tenants, making River Oaks the largest indoor mall in the South suburbs, according to Crain’s Chicago Business.
Namdar Realty Group and partner Mason Asset Management bought the 1.3 million square-foot River Oaks for $26.3 million in 2017, according to Crain’s.
But the mall faced many challenges in its later years. In 2013, two of the mall’s anchors — Carson Pirie Scott and Sears — closed. And its home, Calumet City, lost about 5 percent of its population between 2000 and 2017.
To reinvigorate the mall today, Calumet City mayor Thaddeus Jones wants to build an indoor water park on the former site of the Sears store. There is a proposal on the table to create a new section of the mall called Southland Live Casino, where a new 150,000-square-feet casino and entertainment complex would be built near Macy’s.
“You want your child to experience some of the things you’ve experienced,” Anderson said. “My daughter and her friends [are] not going to experience a mall shop.”
With online shopping and thrifting increasingly growing in popularity over the years, mall culture has shifted. For many, the mall is simply not the first priority for shopping as it once was in decades past.