Holiday Village Mall

Don F. Robinson, Theodore J. Mitchell and John T. Mitchell conceived Holiday Village Mall in 1956 and opened its first phase, a 92,000 sqft strip plaza anchored by Albertsons, in November 1959. Ownership passed to Macerich in 1979, then to Illinois-based GK Development in 2006, which still owns and leases the property.

Phased expansions through 1967 enclosed the center and added a movie theater and additional anchors, growing the property to roughly 510,000 sqft by 1969, a scale that made it Montana’s largest shopping center at the time and still the oldest enclosed mall in the state.

JCPenney, Ross Dress For Less and other current anchors followed a sequence of department-store turnovers, Sears in 2014, Herberger’s in 2018, among the closures GK Development has had to backfill since.

The current leasing push runs toward local and community tenants alongside the national chains that remain, a Christian bookstore and an Asian restaurant among the recent additions, plus recurring events like a winter craft show that management is using to test whether community programming can rebuild the foot traffic Cascade County’s roughly 84,600 residents once gave the mall by default.