Charlestowne Mall in St. Charles: What Happened
Charlestowne Mall opened in St. Charles in 1991 and was mostly closed by 2017. Why it struggled, what's still open, and why the site is still waiting for a plan.
Charlestowne Mall on Main Street in St. Charles wasn't old when it died. It opened in 1991, about the time many of Chicagoland's malls were already peaking, and by 2017 its doors were mostly locked. Today a lot of people in the Fox Valley still drive past it and wonder what's going to happen to it.
Opening day
Charlestowne Mall opened on August 15, 1991. It was built by Wilmorite Properties of Rochester, New York, its first mall outside New York State. The original anchor stores were Sears, Carson Pirie Scott and JCPenney, and Kohl's was added later. A movie theater opened in 1999.
Changes and trouble
- Von Maur took over the old JCPenney space in 2001.
- Geneva Commons, an outdoor shopping center a few miles away, opened in 2002 and pulled shoppers away.
- By 2006, more than a third of the mall's stores were empty.
- Sears closed in 2011, and Kohl's closed in 2016.
The closing
The Krausz Companies bought the mall in 2013, with plans for a redevelopment called "The Quad St. Charles." The inside of the mall closed on December 1, 2017. Carson's closed in 2018 when its parent company went bankrupt.
Von Maur and the movie theater, now Classic Cinemas, kept going, along with restaurants on the outlots around the parking lot.
Still waiting
In 2021, a plan was proposed to tear the mall down and build townhouses and a hotel. St. Charles officials weren't sold on it, and the plan was dropped in 2022. In 2025, the owners hired a real estate firm to find a development partner for the roughly 72-acre site. The city says getting the property ready could cost $30 million or more, and any new plan would still need public review before anything is built.
So for now, the mall sits mostly empty, a 1991 building that is already history.
More Chicagoland malls
- Spring Hill Mall in West Dundee, just up the Fox River
- Randhurst in Mount Prospect
- Dixie Square Mall in Harvey
- Evergreen Plaza, one of the first
Photo: Charlestowne Mall (11-30-17).jpg) by Shoeshine0908, CC BY-SA 4.0.