Golf Mill Shopping Center

John F. Cuneo Sr., under the Milwaukee-Golf Development Corporation, broke ground on Golf Mill Center in November 1958 on 88 acres of farmland at the intersection of Golf Road and Milwaukee Avenue in Niles, Illinois, becoming Greater Chicago’s eighth shopping mall. The first nine stores opened October 12, 1960, with the full public opening the following day featuring roughly 65 stores, anchored by a two-level, 230,000 sqft Sears that physically divided the open-air property into North Mall and South Mall sections.

The property took its “mill” theme seriously at opening: ponds, bridges and a working waterwheel turned near “Mill Island,” where visitors could sit beside a koi pond, and the Mill Run Playhouse, a 1,600-seat rotating theater-in-the-round that hosted performers including Sammy Davis Jr., Ray Charles and Dolly Parton, operated on the north grounds from 1965 until its 1984 closure and demolition. A single-screen cinema on the mall’s southeast out-parcel grew into Golf Mill Theatres 1-2-3 by 1973 before closing in 2000; a 12-screen Kerasotes ShowPlace multiplex, later AMC Niles 12, replaced it in November 2006, and an $8 million interior remodel completed in 2007 refreshed the property’s flooring, lighting, seating and food-court entrance.

At roughly 1,057,000 sqft, the property most recently carried JCPenney, Target, Kohl’s and Ross Dress for Less as anchors (Sears, an anchor since 1960, closed in September 2018), alongside more than 100 specialty shops, a Gordon Food Service grocery store, an XSport Fitness and AMC Theatres. Florida-based Sterling Organization, the property’s owner and developer, secured village approval in 2024 for a $440 million redevelopment, Golf Mill Town Center, backed by up to $96 million in tax increment financing from the Village of Niles.

Demolition of most of the enclosed mall’s interior, including the AMC-anchored wing, began in the following phases, clearing the way for a mixed-use, open-air district with roughly 300 luxury apartments, a hotel, medical office space, new retail and restaurants, organized around a public plaza and a water feature explicitly designed to recall the original 1960 waterwheel; the project’s own name, Golf Mill Town Center, echoes an earlier informal “Town Center” branding the property had periodically used since the early 2000s. Sterling Organization explored a sale of the property in 2025 while remaining publicly committed to completing the project, with the village confirming the redevelopment agreement’s terms hadn’t changed regardless of any ownership transition.

That trajectory, from a private-developer-built 1960s open-air center with a genuine performing-arts venue hosting A-list entertainers to a $440 million, TIF-backed transformation into an open-air mixed-use “town center” under its original owner, reflects a redevelopment pattern increasingly common among aging enclosed malls on strong, well-located sites near major Chicago-area arterials: rather than simply losing anchors to vacancy, Golf Mill’s own owner is proactively demolishing and rebuilding the property before it reaches the anchor-depleted state affecting several other malls in this batch.