Midway Mall

The Richard E. Jacobs Company opened Midway Mall on September 29, 1966, in Elyria, Ohio, becoming Lorain County’s only enclosed regional mall at the time, anchored by Sears and Higbee’s with JCPenney added as a third anchor in 1967 and Woolworth’s occupying a smaller anchor corner. The mall drew shoppers away from downtown Elyria, Lorain and Oberlin, reshaping regional shopping patterns for decades.

At roughly 940,000 sqft, down from a peak that supported as many as six anchor tenants and 120 stores, the property now has zero operating anchor stores; the former Dillard’s, JCPenney and Sears spaces are all vacant, with two-level structures remaining from their original construction. Ownership has passed to the Lorain County Port Authority, which has outlined plans to convert the site into a business and industrial park rather than attempting a conventional retail redevelopment.

The mall’s later years saw a steady drumbeat of anchor and inline-tenant departures, including a discount clothing retailer’s 2008 Chapter 11 bankruptcy and Midway store closure as part of broader Midwest store eliminations, part of a longer pattern of eroding anchor tenancy through the late 2010s and 2020s.

That government-agency ownership and planned industrial conversion, a public port authority acquiring a fully anchor-vacant 1966 regional mall specifically to repurpose it for business and industrial use rather than retail, reflects how thoroughly some of Ohio’s earliest enclosed malls have moved beyond conventional adaptive-reuse retail models into genuinely non-retail redevelopment paths.