Evergreen Plaza: Chicagoland's Early Mall
Evergreen Plaza opened in 1952 as an open-air shopping center on 95th Street, was enclosed in 1966, closed in 2013 and was torn down. Now it's an open-air center again. The full story.
Before Woodfield, before Oakbrook, there was Evergreen Plaza. The shopping center at 95th Street and Western Avenue in Evergreen Park opened in 1952 and is often called one of the first regional malls in the country. For the South Side and the southwest suburbs, it was the place to shop for decades.
The opening
Evergreen Plaza opened on August 24, 1952. It was developed by Arthur Rubloff, the Chicago real estate man who also gave the Magnificent Mile its name, with Charles R. Walgreen Jr.
It started as an open-air shopping center of about 500,000 square feet. The early stores included The Fair, Lytton's, Barnett's and a Walgreens. Shoppers parked in the big lot and walked between stores outside.
Going indoors
In 1966, the plaza was enclosed and became an indoor mall. It grew to about 1.2 million square feet on two floors, with more than 120 stores. Generations of families did their back-to-school and Christmas shopping there.
The decline
Like a lot of older malls, Evergreen Plaza lost shoppers as newer malls and big-box stores opened, and things got much worse after 2008. Stores closed one after another. The mall closed for good on May 31, 2013.
Torn down, and built again
Demolition started in October 2015 and was finished in 2017. In its place, the owners built a new open-air shopping center, called The Plaza. Macy's opened there in June 2022, and Whole Foods and Burlington are among the other stores.
So after more than 50 years as an indoor mall, the corner went back to what it was in 1952: stores you walk between outside.
More Chicagoland malls
Evergreen Plaza is part of our dead malls series:
- Dixie Square Mall in Harvey, the Blues Brothers mall
- Randhurst in Mount Prospect
- Spring Hill Mall in West Dundee
And for the store that defined downtown shopping, see how Marshall Field's clock became Macy's.
Photo: Evergreen Plaza, Evergreen Park, Illinois by Ken Lund from Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0.