Lakeview Square Mall

Forbes/Cohen Properties, led by Sidney Forbes and Maurice Cohen, opened Lakeview Square Mall on August 3, 1983, on Beckley Road in Battle Creek, Michigan, after first announcing plans in 1980 and securing a Michigan Department of Natural Resources permit to relocate Brickyard Creek along the site’s western edge. The mall opened at 70 percent occupancy, roughly 46 stores, anchored by JCPenney, Sears and Hudson’s, drawing more than 10,000 shoppers on opening day.

General Growth Properties bought Lakeview Square, along with Westwood Mall and Lansing Mall, from Forbes/Cohen in 1998; that same year, Old Navy replaced Gilmore Brothers, which had closed five years earlier. Hudson’s became Marshall Field’s in 2001 and was rebranded Macy’s by 2006, following Federated Department Stores’ 2005 acquisition of May Department Stores, Marshall Field’s then-parent company. Dunham’s Sports opened in 2006, and Steve & Barry’s briefly occupied the former Old Navy space from 2007 until its 2008 bankruptcy closure, later becoming Shoe Dept. Encore.

At roughly 550,000 sqft, the property’s original three department-store anchors are all gone (Macy’s closed March 2017, JCPenney closed July 2017, and Sears followed in February 2019), but the former Sears space has since been reoccupied at anchor scale: B2 Outlets, a regional discount chain expanding across Michigan, opened there in late 2024, with Dunham’s Sports also occupying anchor-scale space elsewhere in the property. Ownership passed to Cushman & Wakefield in 2011 and to current owner and manager GK Development in 2013. Roughly 21 to 26 tenants remain, including Barnes & Noble.

The City of Battle Creek has separately proposed a “Lakeview District” redevelopment plan, presented in reporting as recent as January 2026, that would demolish the mall’s interior corridors, the former Sears/B2 Outlets wing and the property’s northern section, creating individual street-facing entrances for surviving tenants while opening the northern portion to potential housing, a hotel and pedestrian-friendly public space connected to the nearby Horrocks Farm Market.

That anchor-format shift, from three traditional department stores at a 10,000-visitor opening day to a discount-retail and sporting-goods anchor mix four decades later, alongside an active municipal redevelopment proposal to demolish part of the structure entirely, reflects how Lakeview Square has adapted its anchor strategy even as it sheds physical square footage, distinguishing it from properties in this batch that have simply lost anchors to vacancy without a replacement or redevelopment plan in place.