A little over six months after new owners announced plans to demolish Muncie Mall, the wrecking crew has finally reached one of its most important pieces. Sears, an original anchor that stood at the mall for more than half a century, is coming down. After months of waiting, wondering, and watching work creep around the edges, the demolition of Muncie Mall is suddenly very real.
Sears was the first place to open in Muncie Mall when it came online on August 5, 1970. The 129,000-square-foot superstore featured fifty departments and consolidated three Muncie operations -warehousing, an auto center, and the company’s downtown retailer- into a single location1.
Sears’ grand opening was a major event, emceed by former Cincinnati Royals star and ABC sportscaster Jack Twyman. Joining him were Sears executives Culver J. Kennedy, Leland E. Stalker, Rembrant C. Hiller, Jr., William G. Thal, Clarence Kron, George Trotter, and John Comoford. 1970 Miss Indiana Debbie May, Muncie Mayor Paul Cooley, and Congressman David Dennis also appeared at the festivities2.
When it opened, Sears at Muncie Mall featured things Muncie hadn’t seen before from the Sears, Roebuck and Co., like a snack shop, garden and lawn areas, a home accessories spot, a candy store, and a vitamin and drug department3. A drive-in catalog pickup area made ordering and collecting merchandise more convenient than ever. Twenty-five years after it opened, the store received a $1.7 million makeover as part of a $4 billion nationwide modernization effort.
Ultimately, Sears lasted forty-eight years at Muncie Mall before its beleaguered corporate parent announced plans to shutter more than sixty stores in 2018. The tally including other Indiana stores in Lafayette and Castleton4, but the local closure left Muncie Mall without an original anchor. J.C. Penney and Carson’s started as W.T. Grant and Britt’s soon after the mall opened, while Macy’s -now Buyer’s Market- began life as L.S. Ayres in 19965.
Sears’ destruction follows the June 30th demolition of the old Movies at Muncie Mall three-screen cinema as the first visible signs of Hull Property Group’s plan to redevelop all of the mall property aside from Buyer’s Market. In an Indiana Public Radio story published in February, Hull’s Senior Vice President of Government Relations, John Mulherin, said that “all we know is it’s not going to survive as it is. It has to be demolished completely6.”
Unfortunately, J.C. Penney appears to be next and, eventually, almost everything between the two anchors will follow. Muncie Mall has been slowly dying for years now, but demolition makes the loss permanent. Today, only nine stores fill the fiftiesh spaces inside the place.
It may be easy for some to see Sears today as an empty concrete box standing in the way of whatever comes next. For forty-eight years, though, it was a fixture in Muncie and a place where people I know spent twenty or thirty years of their working lives! Watching it disappear feels different from watching it close eight years ago.
Now, for the first time in 1970, there won’t be a Sears at Muncie Mall- not even an empty one.
This post will be updated.
Sources Cited
1 Sears’ Huge New Store in Mall to Open (1970, August 5). The Muncie Star. p. 24.
2 (See footnote 1).
3 Shores, L. (1967, July 9). Sears to Build New Store at Mall on McGalliard Rd. The Muncie Star. p. 1.
4 Roysdon, K. (2018, June 1). Muncie Sears to close by September. The Muncie Star Press. p. A1.
5 Penticuff, D. (1996, July 2). L.S. Ayres to offer sneak peek before reopening. The Muncie Star Press. p. 16.
4 Weichmann, S. (2026, February 26). IPR: Muncie Mall to be fully demolished. Indiana Public Radio [Muncie]. Web. Retrieved February 26, 2026.
I could almost hear the John Cougar song The Walls Come Tumbling Down as we stood there taking pictures of it.
I could too!
The internet isn’t the enemy but it’s the primary tool of the uncaring. Mounds is dead because locals found they could look on line and buy by mail what these stores stocked. They didn’t know OR care what impact online purchases have on local businesses that relied on in-store sales to cover the overhead.
Good point.
Who would have believed in 1970 or 1980 that some of the old shopping plazas that predated malls would outlive them.
Right? The one across McGalliard from the mall is still humming away, albeit with a Planet Fitness instead of Marsh and U-Haul instead of K-Mart.