The Heritage Company built St. Lawrence Centre in Massena, New York, at a cost of roughly $50-55 million, with Sears signing on in April 1989 and the mall opening to the public on August 1, 1990, anchored by JCPenney, Hills, Sears and TJ Maxx. The mall served cross-border shoppers from nearby Ontario as well as workers from Massena’s General Motors plant and Alcoa’s local operations, both major employers at the time.
Ownership passed from Heritage Company to AP Massena Partners in 1995, then to Carlyle Development Group in 2003 (which brought in General Growth Properties to manage the property from 2004), and finally to Gerry Shapiro’s Groupe Shapiro, which bought the mall for $2.88 million in January 2017. By 2009 the property carried 55 stores anchored by JCPenney, Sears, Bon-Ton and TJ Maxx, but a weakening Canadian dollar and major local manufacturing job losses steadily eroded its trade area through the 2010s.
The property closed to the public on April 30, 2024, and has been rebranded the St. Lawrence Industrial Complex, offering more than 600,000 sqft of industrial and warehouse space, with conversion work on the former Hills/food-court section beginning in 2022 following Massena Town Planning Board approval that November. JCPenney remains on site but is now accessible only through an exterior entrance rather than the former mall interior; Maurices, the property’s other retail holdout, closed on April 21, 2024, shortly before the wider public closure.
That mall-to-industrial-complex conversion, driven by the same regional manufacturing decline (a shuttered General Motors plant, a scaled-back Alcoa operation) that had once supported the mall’s original retail trade area, reflects a genuinely full-circle economic story: industrial job losses first eroded the mall’s retail viability, and industrial space demand then provided the eventual replacement use for the same physical site.
