With Black Friday only a few days behind holiday shoppers, this suburban mall announced Monday they will be closing up shop, though anchor stores will remain open for the season.
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All interior shops of the Charlestowne mall in St. Charles will close their doors on Friday, Dec. 1, in favor of a new residential plan which will take over the space, according to NBC. Access to the mall’s anchor stores such as Von Maur, Carson’s and Classic Cinemas will remain open from their outside entrances, according to the Chicago Tribune.
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While theKrausz Companies Inc., owners of the mall, only recently announced the closing, the city approved the proposal to replace the shopping center back in May. The proposed plan will provide 155 townhouses and 256 apartments on the shopping center’s east side, according to the Daily Herald.
Chuck May, the project’s manager, said the shopping center had to be town down because it would cause trouble keeping tenants in the residential living spaces to be built. He said with retail stores being torn down all across the country, tenants are being attracted to malls, particularly enclosed malls like Charlestowne.
When the idea to turn this commercial space into a residential area presented itself, many of the town’s aldermen loved it and urged the progress of the demolition forward. Some suggested the entire mall be torn down, but preexisting land laws are currently preventing that from being a possibility.
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“I would be a big proponent of taking the whole thing down,” Alderman Todd Bancroft told the Daily Herald. “Why keep 150,000 square feet when you could have none? At the end of the day, a successful exit of this deal involves taking that whole center down.”
May said he has engineers working on finding a solution to this problem so that he can hopefully move forward by tearing the entire mall down, but until then those anchor stores will cling to life. Stores surrounding the perimeter, such as Cooper’s Hawk, Starbucks and Verizon, will also be unaffected by the demolition plans.