Last I checked in on Elkhart’s old Pierre Moran Mall, the future of what’s now known as Woodland Crossing seemed to be shifting: city officials announced plans to purchase the stagnant site for $5 million. The plan intended to transform the property into a new “neighborhood hub” with expanded healthcare and job training services through a partnership with Heart City Health and Goodwill Industries1. Back in April, I drove up to Elkhart see what the site looks like today.
Although Pierre Moran was the first enclosed mall to open in Michiana, most of its storefronts sat vacant by the time I first visited in the early 2000s. Unfortunately, its later conversion into Woodland Crossing did little to reverse that decline: the redevelopment stripped away the enclosed part of the mall but failed to bring the influx of new tenants developers had hoped for. In 2004, the 400,000-square-foot Pierre Moran Mall housed just eighteen stores and five outparcel businesses2. By 2022, the reconfigured 302,000-square-foot Woodland Crossing contained only thirteen stores and six stores on outparcels.
Things weren’t always that dire. In fact, they were promising! In 1960, Pierre Moran started as a regular strip mall with stores like Kroger, W.T. Grant, Hook’s Drug, Luke’s Jewelers, and others3. The shopping center was enclosed and expanded to 420,000 square feet in 1971 and officially became the Pierre Moran Mall4. The expansion created a concourse shaped like an upside-down letter T that spanned the rear of the original strip and extended north to terminate at the entrance to a brand-new Sears.
Unfortunately, tenants came and went before many -including Target, Kline’s, and G.L. Perry simply left for good. Shortly after the turn of the millennium, the mall’s owners began exploring a series of ambitious plans to save a place that had become terminal. What wound up happening was a combination of two options: in 2005, the entire mall, except for Sears and the original strip, was demolished to convert the property into the Woodland Crossing power center. The $10 million project, spearheaded by Southern Management and Development of Florida, was intended to feature a Kroger, Sears, CVS, and “a number of other local and regional specialty shops5, much like the old mall had failed to support.
It didn’t really work. Sears closed in 2017, which left Kroger and Big Lots as Woodland Crossing’s primary draws. We all know what happened to Big Lots, but Kroger’s still there, and busy. Still, my main focus on my recent trip was the gorilla in the room, the abandoned Sears. As was previously announced6, Goodwill Mission Services renovated the shuttered structure to bring a variety of services under one roof- the Excel Center, the Academy, a Nurse-Family Partnership, and something called Second Chance7. Unfortunately, all of that only took up half of the 109,000-square-foot building8.
The reuse of half an empty big-box store is certainly better than letting the whole thing sit and rot. For a moment, I felt cautiously optimistic about Woodland Crossing’s future! Unfortunately, I saw little evidence that the project’s other major partner, Heart City Health, had expanded beyond a tiny storefront I didn’t even bother to take pictures of. That was discouraging. Beyond the partially revived Sears building, Woodland Crossing looked even rougher than it had during my last visit in 2022, with more empty storefronts, more dead space, and even less energy than before.
Visiting Woodland Crossing feels like wandering through three different eras of retail history at once. For starters, pieces of the old Pierre Moran Mall still linger at the surface through the surviving strip stores from 1960. A parking lot on the site of the enclosed mall remains empty, and the awkward early-2000s new build ointended to save everything only has a handful of tenants. None of those versions fully disappeared, and none of them fully succeeded, either.
Still, I don’t want to end on a pessimistic note. The old Sears building at least has life in part of it again! That’s more meaningful than another Spirit Halloween or liquidation outlet ever could have been. At the same time, though, Woodland Crossing is caught in limbo: the parking lots are too empty, too many new storefronts remain dark, and the grand vision announced a few years ago seems only partially realized. For now, what’s left of the old Pierre Moran Mall survives in a strange halfway state: it’s not entirely dead, it’s not truly revived, and the property seems to still search for its next identity more than sixty years after the first stores opened along West Hively.
Sources Cited
1 Grohowski, J. (2023, October 4). Possible plans to redevelop old Pierre Moran Mall, city says. ABC57 [South Bend]. Web. Retrieved October 8, 2023.
2 Welcome To The Pierre Moran Mall (2004, May 12). The Pierre Moran Mall. http://www.pierremoranmall.biz. Web. Retrieved December 11, 2022 via the Wayback Machine.
3 Request For Sub-Contract Bids (1959, March 10). The William P. Neil Company, LTD. The South Bend Tribune. p. 20.
4 Cooke, W. (1970, December 3). New Wyman’s Store In Plan. The South Bend Tribune. p. 17.
5 Woodland Crossing to replace Pierre Moran (2005, June 15). The South Bend Tribune. p. C8.
6 (See footnote 1).
7 Hankins, C. (2024, December 16). Goodwill Nears Completion of Transformative Mission Services Hub in Elkhart. GreatNews, Ideas in Motion Media [Valparaiso]. Web. Retrieved May 20, 2026.
8 (See footnote 7).
