Two weeks after demolition started on the Muncie Mall Sears, crews are making quick work of the cavernous old store. It’s weird to watch a fifty-year institution get reduced to rubble in a matter of weeks, but that’s exactly what’s happening as Hull Property Group clears the way for whatever it insists will make the property viable again.
Around these parts, outside of politics, I can’t think of a local story as monumental as the demolition of Muncie Mall. Strangely, though, you wouldn’t know the magnitude of what’s happening from local coverage. The Star Press has barely touched the story, which isn’t especially surprising after years of cuts stripped away its resources and reduced its reporters to a skeleton crew.
Indiana Public Radio has done a good job, though, and the Ball State Daily News even sent photojournalists out when the mall’s old three-screen cinema came crashing down.
Beyond that, the destruction of one of Muncie’s most significant commercial landmarks has unfolded with little documentation. Weekly trips to watch it happen have been fascinating in their own right, but lately I’ve found myself serving as a one-man archive as I chart the mall’s disappearance.
I still can’t believe that! For more than half a century, Muncie Mall practically defined shopping in East-Central Indiana and parts of West-Central Ohio. Generation bought clothes there, ate there, worked there, saw movies there, and wandered its corridors with nowhere in particular to go. Now the place is disappearing piece by piece.
I’ve seen several suburban Sears stores whose architecture made sweeping statements. The locations at Valley View Center in Dallas (since demolished), Livingston Mall in New Jersey, and even Fort Wayne’s Glenbrook Mall were genuine mid-century treasures. The Sears at Trotwood, Ohio’s old Salem Mall was even listed on the National Register of Historic Places1!
Muncie Mall’s Sears would never make anyone’s list of architectural treasures, but it’ll still be a sad day when the tall wall framed by its two front entryways finally comes down. That event can’t be far away: heavy equipment now occupies the pavement where rows of new garden tractors and appliances once sat on display.
By yesterday, demolition had progressed far enough that the remains of that cavernous old sales floor were visible through an empty entrance just west of Sears’ former auto center. The service bays -along with the store’s connected 80,000-square-foot warehouse will be next.
Meanwhile, a towering mass of broken concrete and masonry has been growing along the north side of Sears since early July. The pile of debris served as evidence that interior demolition was already well underway before the exterior walls started falling.
For fifty-six years, this enormous Sears building was part of Muncie’s landscape. Now, every trip past the mall reveals another wall missing, another opening exposed, and another piece of something that seemed immovable suddenly gone. That’s especially apparent since the rest of the mall remains open!
Whatever Hull Property Group eventually builds here will hopefully prove more useful than the space it replaces. Still, once Sears and the rest of Muncie Mall are gone, there’ll be no putting them back. That’s why I’ll keep showing up for pictures while there’s still something left to see.
Sources Cited
1 Sears building at former Salem Mall site added to National Register of Historic Buildings (2023, September 14). WHIO [Dayton]. Web. Retrieved September 25, 2026.
