Uptown Rapid

Des Moines-based General Growth Development Corporation built Rushmore Mall on 68.5 acres north of downtown Rapid City, dedicating a JCPenney on August 9, 1978 as the first operating store, alongside Herberger’s, which opened the same month. The property grew to roughly 844,500 sqft by 1993 with the addition of a seven-screen Carmike cinema, and passed through a chain of institutional owners: a 1997 Simon Property Group/Macerich joint venture, sole Simon management from 2012, a 2014 spinoff into Washington Prime Group, and a 2015 merger with Glimcher Realty Trust.

Washington Prime defaulted on its loans in June 2018, and Wells Fargo Bank installed Spinoso Real Estate Group as receiver to manage the property; Sears closed in April 2018 and Herberger’s followed in August 2018 after parent company Bon Ton’s bankruptcy, leaving two large vacant anchor spaces at once. Spinoso retenanted the former Sears as Trader’s Market in 2019, and the building Target had vacated (Target itself relocated to the newer, open-air Rushmore Crossing development in 2008) became an At Home home-decor store in 2016.

RockStep Capital bought the property in October 2021 after tracking it for roughly three years, and deliberately dropped “mall” from the name entirely, rebranding it Uptown Rapid. This wasn’t a one-off decision specific to this property: RockStep announced a company-wide “Uptown” rebranding initiative in July 2020, eventually renaming at least eleven of its mall assets across the country, including Uptown Willmar in Minnesota, Uptown Janesville in Wisconsin and Uptown Scottsbluff in Nebraska, on the reasoning that “mall” no longer described what these properties had become. Management has framed the renaming as a response to structural change in the format itself, not this property specifically: retail nationally has been shrinking, in their words, while properties like this one increasingly function as multi-use community destinations rather than pure shopping centers.

JCPenney, Planet Fitness, Trader’s Market and At Home are the current anchors. RockStep’s own marketing materials describe the trade area as drawing 3.65 million annual visitors, in a Rapid City metro area the company markets as growing faster than Reno, Charlotte or Fort Collins, driven heavily by tourism to Mount Rushmore, Badlands National Park and the Black Hills.