It took more than three years to transform Muncie’s Sears superstore from proposal1 to reality2. Fifty-six years later, the demolition team needed just a month and a half to reduce the enormous building to rubble. As of yesterday, that’s all that remains of the first store to open at Muncie Mall3. I documented the process from the start to trace Sears’ final chapter.
Sears’ retail presence in Muncie dates to 1928, when the company opened downtown at 225 North High Street. In 1942, the store relocated to 115 South Walnut. That building, plus a warehouse somewhere and an auto center at 1308 South Madison, all closed when Sears’ 129,000-square-foot mall store opened4. I have friends and family who worked there -some for decades, even- but I confess to only rarely darkening its doorstep. Sears under Eddie Lambert was not a millennial hotspot! Because of that, I only took my first photo of the place in 2020, two years after the place was shuttered5.
In September 2025, new mall owner Hull Property Group announced that the vacant store, the empty J.C. Penney, and the old Movies at Muncie Mall cinema would be demolished to make way for new development6. At the time, little had changed outside Sears. Aside from some landscaping, the building looked much as it had for years: sprawling, beige, and looming over a sea of cracked asphalt and empty parking spaces.
Sears has been a frequent target of my iPhone camera ever since. By October, chain-link fencing appeared around the building, signalling, Muncie thought, that demolition was drawing near. Viewed from the northeast, signs of deterioration became harder to ignore. After seven years of sitting vacant, Sears was finally beginning to look like it really was on the chopping block.
The first visible signs of demolition appeared in July, when a mound of broken concrete and masonry rose behind Sears’ former auto center. The mountain grew larger as crews opened up the building’s northeastern entrance to accommodate heavy machinery. Before long, an excavator was working alongside the towering heap of debris. It offered the first real glimpse of the destruction taking place inside.
Despite what was growing behind it, Sears remained intact, at least from the front. Its familiar facade still stretched across the empty parking lot on July 18, but the scene was ominous as a massive bank of storm clouds loomed over the property. The incoming storm made for a dramatic picture that foreshadowed the building’s fate.
The countdown to Sears’ destruction reached a milestone in early September, when its perimeter fencing expanded to swallow a huge portion of the parking lot to make room for the demolition crew. Where fences weren’t enough, lengths of yellow caution tape stretched across the pavement to complete the border.
The end finally began a week later on an otherwise ordinary Sunday. Demolition crews began tearing into Sears’ southeastern entrance, near where it connected to the rest of Muncie Mall, on September 12. On Facebook, Lost Muncie member Blake Edwards was the first to break the news. By the time I arrived, excavators were hard at work. A sizable portion of Sears had been reduced to heaps of broken concrete and twisted metal.
The crew made astonishing progress. In just a week, much of Sears had vanished in a process that left behind a sprawling field of broken concrete, twisted steel, and scattered debris inside the building. Only one of the store’s recognizable features -the tall storefront that stood between Sears’ main entrances- stood awkwardly amid the wreckage. A Volvo excavator stood among the ruins, ready to finish the job.
By September 25, little remained of Sears’ connection to the rest of the mall. Surprisingly, though, that entrance was still open for business! There’s not much to see in that wing unless you have to use the restroom, but a left turn led to some of the remaining retailers still hanging on. Even as Sears was coming down, stores like Books-A-Million, Finish Line, Maurices, Hot Topic, and a handful of local businesses still soldiered on inside.
By October, the connection between Sears and the rest of Muncie Mall had finally been severed. Much of the old store had vanished, despite a portion of its facade that still clinged to existence. Twisted beams dangled from its remaining walls, and heaps of rubble filled the space where shoppers and salespeople once wandered.
Most of Sears was gone by early October. When I returned to take more photos, little remained beyond the old auto center, warehouse, and a few stubborn sections of the store’s main entrance. The demolition exposed walls that hadn’t seen daylight in more than half a century! Catching a glimpse of spaces that had been hidden inside the mall since opening day was eerie.
A week later, Sears’ auto center was gone, too. I appreciated the opportunities I’d had to document the process so far, but I couldn’t help but think how difficult the demolition must have been to watch for people who worked or shopped there over the years. After all, Sears wasn’t some short-lived anchor like Britt’s or Grant’s. Countless people built memories tied to the place.
Crews finally made their way to Sears’ northwest side, where a wall of decorative breeze blocks once screened the store’s HVAC equipment from view. Like so many architectural details from the era when Sears dominated the retail landscape, they were designed to serve a practical purpose without looking entirely utilitarian. They did just that, and remained among the last recognizable remnants of the old department store as late as last Friday.
The last parts of the Muncie Mall Sears tumbled down yesterday, October 27. I’ve been disappointed by the lack of coverage from some of the local news outlets, and that’s a big reason why I decided to document Sears’ demolition myself. Places like Sears were enormously important cultural touchstones for cities like Muncie, and their final chapters deserve to be recorded and remembered.
Today, Muncie Mall’s old Sears is little more than a debris field with mountains of broken blocks and masonry piled high against the rest of the plaza. It’ll all be hauled away soon to make way for whatever comes next. For now, though, the wreckage offers one last look at the store that put Muncie Mall on the map.
Despite the changes underway at Muncie Mall, one familiar piece of the place is sticking around: just four hundred feet from Sears’ ruins, the deep-discount retailer Buyer’s Market continues on in the former L.S. Ayres/Macy’s building. Thanks to separate ownership, the old anchor is the only part of the mall slated to survive. Tuesday evening, it was business as usual at Buyer’s Market.
On the opposite side of the mall, the former J.C. Penney -shuttered since 2020- appears to be the next building headed for demolition. Just like what happened outside Sears and the former cinema, the fencing that’s surrounded the old store for more than a year has recently been pushed outward to make more room for additional equipment.
If the fencing changes are any indication, work on J.C. Penney will soon be underway. I’ll do my best to document the process from the first signs of activity to the final piles of rubble, just as I have with the rest of the mall. To many, Penney’s was as much a part of the zeitgeist as Sears was!
Still, it’s sad to see Sears go. Its demolition may have been inevitable once plans for the mall’s redevelopment took shape, but that doesn’t make watching it disappear any less bittersweet. For generations of shoppers, Sears was part of the familiar landscape of everyday life in Muncie, and its loss is another reminder of how quickly the physical places we once took for granted can become memories. Someday, people will drive past whatever replaces it without realizing how much more of Muncie’s retail history once stood on that expansive patch of ground.
Sources Cited1 Shores, L. (1967, July 9). Sears to Build New Store at Mall on McGalliard Rd. The Muncie Star. p. 1.
2 Sears’ Huge New Store in Mall to Open (1970, August 5). The Muncie Star. p. 24.
3 Huge Colorful Store Is First in New Mall (1970, August 4). The Muncie Evening Press. p. 21.
4 (See footnote 2).
5 Roysdon, K. (2018, June 1). Muncie Sears to close by September. The Muncie Star Press. p. A1.
6 Kramer, R. (2025, September 21). The Muncie Mall is about to change in a big way! Hull Property Group, a Georgia developer that owns 27 [Facebook]. Video.
Ted, it’s sad when places that always were are no longer. The little town I grew up in demolished a whole city block a couple years ago….