Read time: 6 min.

The interior of Marion’s Five Points Mall has been closed since 2019¹, but yesterday, city officials declared Planet Fitness -the mall’s last remaining tenant, which featured an exterior entrance- permanently shuttered due to hazardous structural conditions². The building had deteriorated to the point that closing the gym was necessary for public safety³! With Planet Fitness gone, Five Points Mall is now completely vacant for the first time since the complex burst onto the scene as North Park Plaza in 1961⁴.

I’ve written about Five Points Mall before. When the open-air North Park Plaza was enclosed and transformed into North Park Mall in 1978, the impact was immediate. The mall’s influence stretched far beyond Hills, J.C. Penney, Meis, and its dozens of inline stores: about eight hundred area residents found jobs at the booming retail hub⁵ as license plates from Wabash, Miami, and Huntington Counties showed up in the parking lot⁶. North Park Mall grew from a neighborhood shopping center into a regional destination.

The mall continued evolving over the following decades. A new Sears⁷ wing arrived in 1989⁸, and North Park was rebranded as Five Points twenty years later⁹. Unfortunately, things slowly unraveled from there: after the interior was boarded up seven years ago, only Applebee’s, Roses, and Planet Fitness hung on thanks to their outside entryways. Ambitious plans to turn the mall’s vast interior into a veterans college¹⁰ went nowhere, while a roadmap to reinvent Five Points as an enormous sports center¹¹ appears to have stalled as well.

By the time 2026 rolled around, the mall’s surviving tenants stopped waiting around for another grand plan. Last March, Applebee’s -a thirty-three-year Five Points tenant- packed up and moved to a brand-new location about three miles south¹². Roses, which had occupied the old Hills anchor space since 2012¹³, followed in August. Roses’ closure came after a long-but-temporary shutdown blamed on the decrepit building’s condition¹⁴.

The loss of Applebee’s and Roses left Planet Fitness as Five Points Mall’s last holdout. The gym opened in four former storefronts¹⁵ -including, I think, spaces once occupied by KB Toys, Hallmark, and Finish Line- in 2017¹⁶. For a while, Planet Fitness seemed almost insulated from the decay surrounding it! Unfortunately, not anymore: with the workout space now shuttered, the mall itself has nothing left.

Several businesses, including Buffalo Wild Wings, STAR Financial, Ruler Foods, Dollar Tree, and Subway, continue to operate around Five Points Mall in outparcels, but the building proper -about 435,000 square feet by my estimation- is now entirely vacant. What was once one of Marion’s busiest gathering places has become an enormous empty shell situated along some of the city’s most visible commercial real estate.

I don’t use the word blight very often. Abandoned places are most of what I write about, and I find the literal concept of an eyesore -a place or thing so ugly that it physically makes your eye ache- to be hilariously over-the-top. Usually, even the ugliest abandoned building has enough history, architecture, or weirdness to make me want to see it preserved! I’m sad to say, though, that Five Points Mall is getting harder to defend.

As I’ve documented the destruction of my hometown mall in Muncie, plenty of Marion people have told me that they wish the same thing would happen to Five Points. I used to look at those comments through the eyes of someone fascinated by dead malls and wonder why anyone would be so eager to erase one. Now that the Marion Mall has lost its final tenant because of hazardous conditions, I’m beginning to understand.

Maybe another developer will eventually find a workable future for Five Points. I hope so, but Planet Fitness was the final thread connecting the property to its original purpose, and now even that has been cut. At this point, the question isn’t whether Five Points Mall can ever be a mall again. How much longer should Marion have to live with its increasingly hazardous, abandoned behemoth? What finally might replace it?

Sources Cited
1 Cox, H. (2019, January 9). Shoebilee leaves Five Points Mall. The Marion Chronicle-Tribune. p. 1. 
2 City of Marion, IN – Local Government (2026, September 14). IMPORTANT NOTICE Planet Fitness, located at 1129 N. Baldwin Ave., Suite 40, Marion, IN 46952, is permanently closed due to hazardous structural [Status]. Facebook.
3 (See footnote 2).
4 North Park Plaza Opening Starts Thursday (1961, October 4). The Marion Chronicle Tribune. p. 4. 
5 People should like what they see in the new mall (1978, November 15). The Marion Chronicle-Tribune. p. 10. 
6 (See footnote 5).
7 Borowski, G. (1990, February 15). Old store, new digs. The Marion Chronicle-Tribune. p. 1
8 (See footnote 7).
9 Experience (2009, June 9). The Marion Chronicle-Tribune. p. 14.
10 Winowiecki, C. (2019, February 27). Timeline for vets college still unclear. The Marion Chronicle-Tribune. p. 1. 
11 Morrell, Jr., R. Ronald Morrell Jr. (2025, December 15). IGenerational [Status]. Facebook.
12 Tipple, K. (2026, March 21). Marion Applebees moves to a new location. Grant Connected [Marion]. Web. Retrieved September 14, 2026. 
13 Wright, M. (2012, March 24). Coming up Roses for shoppers. The Marion Chronicle-Tribune. p. 1. 
14 Channel 27 News and Entertainment, Grant County (2026, August 14). ROSES DISCOUNT STORE SAYS IT IS CLOSING FOR GOOD IN MARION. For a while, many in the community have been [Status]. Facebook.
15 Smelser, A. (2017, November 12). Planet Fitness creating optimism at Five Points. The Marion Chronicle-Tribune. p. 25.
16 Watson, N. (2017, September 16). Planet Fitness work begins. The Marion Chronicle-Tribune. p. 1.