Gurnee Mills is an indoor shopping mall located at 6170 W. Grand Ave in Gurnee, Illinois (which is a village west of Waukegan, Illinois) which opened on August 8, 1991. It is located about halfway between Chicago, Illinois and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a 40-minute drive either way and near Six Flags Great America.
Gurnee Mills is a single-level S-shaped mall. At 1,912,969 square feet (177,720.6 m2) of gross leasable area, it is the third largest mall in Illinois and is visited by more than 20 million people each year.
History[]
Opening and 1990s[]
The Gurnee Mills concourse opened to the public at 8 a.m. on August 8, 1991, allowing 70,000 visitors to see the place before stores opened at 10 a.m. The mall's architecture and design were themed after "the agrarian heartland", a look inspired by its rural setting and taking after a wide variety of sources, from the Googie-style diners of the 1950s to Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie School architecture.
Unlike most malls of its size, the stores at Gurnee Mills are all on a single level and oriented along a single Z-shaped corridor that runs for 4,400 ft (1,300 m). 70 percent of the mall's retail spaces were leased at the time of the mall's opening, including seven of the ten anchors: Sears, Phar-Mor, Spiegel, Marshalls, Bed Bath & Beyond, Waccamaw Pottery, and the Family Entertainment Center. An eighth anchor, Filene's Basement, opened in October.
Marcus Theatres
With about 200 retail spaces and two separate food courts: the Dine-O-Rama and the Lake County Fare Food Court, Gurnee Mills was intended from the beginning as a state-of-the-art mall, with high-tech features like a television studio where mall-specific commercials could be produced and shown on the mall's 55 monitors, and its 15 ft (4.6 m) "video wall". The Family Entertainment Center featured a video arcade and other attractions for children. These features were intended to help turn the mall into a center for entertainment, not just for shopping, as the Mills Corporation felt entertainment was the future for shopping malls. One marketing study found Gurnee Mills was so large that many shoppers preferred to drive to the other side of the parking lot rather than walk to the other end of the mall.
Tilt Studio
Advertised as the "world's largest outlet mall", Gurnee Mills faced confusion from local consumers over the fact that it featured full-price stores as well as discount outlets, and the first six months of profits were lower than Western Development and the Gurnee tax base was hoping. Some retailers were satisfied with the mall's financial performance, while others were disappointed but optimistic.
In 1992, Phar-Mor, on the other hand, closed its store after one year of disappointing sales, becoming the first anchor to leave. Additions to the mall continued in 1993, with a new retail space constructed for Burlington Coat Factory, as well as Foot Locker, Syms, and The Clearinghouse by Saks Fifth Avenue opening that fall. Circuit City opened in the area at the mall on November 24, and a ten-screen movie theater, one of Marcus Theatres' first Illinois locations, opened at the mall on December 10. The same year, Sears closed its chain of catalog outlet stores, leaving a space which was filled by a Macy's Close-Out store and later by JCPenney in 1994. The vacant space left by Phar-Mor was finally filled by Value City in 1995.
In 1995, Sam's Club and Walmart Supercenter opened across the street from the mall.
Older Map
By 1995, Gurnee Mills was the second-most popular tourist attraction in Illinois, behind the rival Woodfield Mall, drawing 14.4 million visitors and 2,300 tour buses in a year. Capitalizing on this growth and the idea of the mall as a regional entertainment destination, major new developments began to be added to Gurnee Mills, beginning with the Rainforest Cafe in June 1996. The Mills Corporation announced its plans to invest $50 million into expanding the mall in 1997, beginning with the July opening of a Planet Hollywood restaurant, the second location in Illinois. Another major addition was the Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World, second in a chain of heavily themed outdoor recreation destination superstores, in November 1997. The former location of Filene's Basement was combined with other spaces to create the new 133,000 sq ft (12,400 m2) anchor store, the mall's largest retail space, which previously was intended to hold an Incredible Universe store before plans fell through in 1996.
2000s[]
Sears Grand
Kohl's
Spiegel Clothing Store closed in 2002 and was replaced by Kohl's.
A decade after closing its outlet store in the mall, Sears returned to Gurnee Mills with a 201,000 sq ft (18,700 m2) Sears Grand hypermarket store in 2004, replacing and expanding the vacant space formerly home to Waccamaw Pottery. On its opening, Sears Grand became the largest store at Gurnee Mills, and it was the second of its kind after the store in Jordan Landing in West Jordan, Utah. Unlike most Sears Grand locations, the store in Gurnee is directly attached to a shopping mall, and since the Sears Grand at Pittsburgh Mills closed in 2015, it has been the only mall-attached Sears Grand location. The introduction of new full-price department stores like Sears and Kohl's represented the beginning of the mall's "third life", as retail analysts described it, following its period as an outlet mall and as an entertainment center.
In 2007, the mall was sold to Simon Property Group. Value City Department Store closed in 2008 as a result of Chapter 7 bankruptcy and converted to a Value City Furniture Store. Neiman Marcus opened a Clearance Center in 2009. That same year, JCPenney closed its doors.
2010s[]
Gurnee Mills announced in 2011 that it would demolish the vacant former Circuit City location entirely and construct an entirely new building for a Macy's department store at one end of the building, and remodel an area between Kohl's and Value City Furniture to create a "full price wing." The mall promised that these new developments would turn it into the "first true hybrid center" and change its "personality." The new stores opened on July 24, 2013, in time for the mall's 22nd anniversary, with the promise of other retailers following Macy's path, and "positioning Gurnee Mills for another 20 years of relevance". The upgrades mirrored those being done by Simon at the dozens of other Mills malls, as part of a nationwide strategy to remake them into "timeless" shopping centers. Bed Bath & Beyond and Buybuy BABY opened a combined store in 2012.
Dick's Sporting Goods
Floor & Decor opened on January 14, 2017, replacing Shoppers World that replaced JCPenney in 2011. Another round of renovations, with a budget of $6 million, began in September 2017. A new theme is planned for the Dine-O-Rama food court. The Rink Side Sports ice rink had been closed since April 15, after a series of "catastrophic" equipment failures, but a plan to reopen the rink under the new management of the Tilt arcade was announced in October. Dick's Sporting Goods opened at Gurnee Mills in April 2018 in the former Sports Authority which closed in 2016, a plan which was inadvertently revealed early by a Gurnee village trustee.
On May 31, 2018, it was announced that Sears Grand would be closing as part of a plan to close 72 stores nationwide. The store closed on September 2, 2018.
On April 23, 2023, it was announced that the Bed Bath & Beyond-Buy Buy Baby combo store would close and liquidate along with all stores remaining due to Bankruptcy. The store closed Sunday, July 30th.
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