Chautauqua Mall

Edward J. DeBartolo Sr., the developer whose company later became Simon Property Group, opened Chautauqua Mall in 1971 in Lakewood, New York, anchored at opening by Sears, Woolworth, JCPenney and Quality Markets. JCPenney vacated in 1986, with most of its space converted to Jamesway that same year.

At roughly 40,450 sqm, the mall’s anchor lineup includes Planet Fitness and JCPenney, per both the property’s own current site and its Facebook page; a separate, more recently updated directory listing marks the JCPenney location as closed, so I’m noting this as a genuinely unresolved discrepancy rather than asserting either status with full confidence. The property carries 31 stores in total. Kohan Retail Investment Group, a Great Neck, New York-based firm known for acquiring distressed regional malls, owns the property, with Summit Properties USA handling day-to-day management.

An Olive Garden restaurant opened directly in front of the mall in 2013, a freestanding addition distinct from the enclosed mall’s own interior tenant base, reflecting a broader pattern of national restaurant chains locating on mall outparcels even as interior mall tenancy has thinned.

That anchor evolution, from a four-department-store, DeBartolo-developed regional mall in 1971 to a fitness-and-discretionary-retail property under a specialist distressed-mall operator five decades later, reflects how thoroughly rural western New York’s retail landscape has shifted away from traditional department-store-anchored malls toward a leaner, fitness-and-value-retail-oriented format.