Entrance Door
Belvidere Discount Mall is a small shopping mall located in Waukegan, Illinois.
It was one of the first shopping malls in the Chicago metropolitan area, and the first enclosed shopping mall in Lake County.
Its current main anchor store is The Home Depot.
The mall is notable for reinventing itself over time to remain open with a current store mix.
History[]
Belvidere Mall first opened on November 18, 1965 and was Lake County's first enclosed shopping mall. At its opening, it contained 35 stores and 300,000 square feet (28,000 m2).
While the mall thrived at first, the opening of the much larger nearby Lakehurst Mall in 1971 put a serious dent in Belvidere's fortunes. In 1988, sole anchor Montgomery Ward left for Lakehurst.
After about seven years of being empty, Builders Square occupied the anchor spot in 1995 and was replaced with The Home Depot around 2000.
The Home Depot
The mall has been renovated twice, in 1985 and again in 1998. The mall is currently owned by Imperial Realty, who purchased it from original owners Landuau & Heyman Inc. in the fall of 1985. As part of the 1998 renovation, the mall was renamed Belvidere Discount Mall.
A 1,000 seat movie theater opened at the mall in January 1966. It was originally operated by the General Cinema Corporation, and began as a single-screen. In January 1980 it was twinned. General Cinema operated it until September 1988 and it was run independently until mid-1989. In 1991 it was twinned again to create a four-screen "miniplex" and reopened as a discount theatre. Village Entertainment acquired the lease in 2002 and closed it at the end of 2003, focusing operations in Waukegan on the nearby Lakehurst 12. Since November 2021 the Belvidere Cinema has operated as the Belvidere Cinema Gallery: a volunteer-led DIY venue, art gallery and revival cinema.
Today, Belvidere Mall differs from Lake County's other shopping malls, Gurnee Mills and Hawthorn Center because all of the tenants (except for The Home Depot) are family-owned. Nearly all of them are Hispanic-owned or Hispanic-oriented.