The postwar era was the high point for Downtown Cleveland department stores, but as populations started to move to the suburbs, so, too, did retail, bringing about the era of the shopping mall.
Severance Center opened in Cleveland Heights in 1963. Two years later, Midway Mall opened in Elyria. In 1966, Richmond Mall opened in Richmond Heights. The construction boom continued into the 1970s, with Randall Park Mall opening in 1976, and the Euclid Square Mall opening the following year.
Euclid Square opened to great fanfare on March 2, 1977, with a special hosted by Doug Adair of WKYC. The 687,000-square-foot facility had more than 100 stores, including mall mainstays like Orange Julius, Spencer Gifts, Waldenbooks and Chess King, as well as Cleveland staples like Richman Brothers and its two anchor stores, Higbee’s and May Co., which wasn’t quite ready to open with the mall.
May Co. opened that August, with a ceremonial ribbon cutting kicking off a weeklong celebration.
But the mall’s heyday was short-lived — and May’s days were numbered. The flagship May Co. on Public Square closed in 1993 (it has been adapted and now houses upscale apartments), and the mall stores were rebranded as Kaufmann’s, later swallowed up by Federated a decade later. Gradually, the mall was abandoned, and by 2013, was filled with two dozen different churches. Ultimately, the mall was torn down. Today it’s an Amazon facility — the same fate that befell Randall Park Mall.
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