Maplewood Mall

Homart Development Company opened Maplewood Mall on July 31, 1974, in Maplewood, Minnesota, on a 125-acre former farm site along White Bear Avenue, following a January 23, 1968 project announcement and an initial $8 million investment; architect North Architectonics designed the property, which opened with Sears and Powers Dry Goods as anchors and roughly 120 stores.

Donaldson’s acquired Powers in 1985, and a 1996 expansion added Mervyn’s alongside a Dayton’s store in the former Carson Pirie Scott space, the first new Dayton’s location in the region since 1978. A Metro Transit park-and-ride hub with 425 spaces opened on site in 2004, and renovations followed in 1988, 1996 and 2011, the last adding updated entrances, carpeting, tile, lighting and restrooms.

At roughly 931,000 sqft across two floors, the property’s traditional department-store anchor era wound down by 2025, with plans underway to convert former anchor spaces into the Pan Asian Center, now split into Pan Asian Center North and South wings alongside continuing anchors Barnes & Noble, JCPenney and Kohl’s. Brookwood Capital Partners currently owns and manages the mall’s central parcel directly, though the surrounding anchor buildings, including the former Sears (owned separately by Seritage Growth Properties) and Macy’s parcels, are held by separate landlords, a common structure among older super-regional malls. The property retains a handcrafted double-decker Venetian carousel, assembled inside the mall in 1998, as a signature attraction.

That shift from a conventional Sears-and-department-store-anchored super-regional mall to a property anchoring part of its space around a dedicated Pan Asian retail and cultural center, reflects how thoroughly Maplewood Mall has adapted its anchor strategy to the Twin Cities’ changing demographics and retail preferences over five decades, moving well beyond a simple anchor-replacement model toward a genuinely reoriented community identity.