Google the phrase “dead malls in New Jersey” and you’ll be hit with a few contenders — but a standout in North Jersey is Livingston Mall.
With the Macy’s anchor store closing sometime in 2026, and Barnes & Noble expected to leave sometime in 2027, Livingston Mall is on its last breaths.
It opened on Eisenhower Parkway in western Essex County in 1972 as downtowns and urban centers became hollowed out and the dominant spenders moved to the suburbs.
Malls are not necessarily dead — data from ICSC, a worldwide commercial real estate trade association, showed that during this past holiday season, 72% of shoppers bought something at a suburban shopping center or mall.
But analysts interviewed by NorthJersey.com all agreed that Livingston Mall is a “dead mall.”
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“People would spend their Saturday afternoons and Sunday afternoons strolling the mall, looking at new goods, figuring out what’s fashionable and the like,” said James Hughes, a professor of urban planning and policy development at Rutgers University in New Brunswick.
Everything went wrong. Including a pandemic
But everything that could go wrong for a mall managed to hit Livingston Mall.
Big-box stores such as Target and Walmart rose, siphoning away dollars.
And Livingston Mall faced intense competition from just 4 miles away in The Mall at Short Hills, a luxury shopping center that had opened in its enclosed format in 1980.
The two shared tenants, including Lord & Taylor, Sears and Bamberger’s, a department store that later became Macy’s.
Then online shopping rolled out in force around 2007 and 2008, Hughes said.
Urban centers like Newark and Jersey City, as well as downtowns like Ridgewood and Westfield, rebounded in the past decade and drew back dollars that had gone to malls, Hughes said.
By themselves, any one of those factors could have caused malls to struggle, other than the top-tier ones in New Jersey like Garden State Plaza and American Dream…
“Sort of the perfect storm hit,” Hughes said of Livingston Mall.
Sears closed in April 2020 and Lord & Taylor in August that year. Developers of the nearby Livingston Shopping Center announced this January that the Barnes & Noble store would be moving out of Livingston Mall property and going less than 2 miles down the road to the shopping center.
Most recently, Macy’s announced in early January that it would close its location at Livingston Mall later in the year…
Last year, the township designated Livingston Mall as an “area in need of redevelopment” and drew up potential plans for what could go at the site.
“The town — if it’s a redevelopment area — is in the driver’s seat,” said Hughes, of Rutgers. “They could acquire the land and totally control it.”