Muncie Mall stood for fifty years, but its anchors are quickly being reduced to rubble. With Sears and the cinema already gone, demolition crews turned their attention to J.C. Penney. The old department store stood largely intact when I drove past on Friday afternoon. By Sunday, though, huge sections of it had vanished.
Back on Friday, the most obvious sign of J.C. Penney’s impending demolition was the gaping hole punched through the building’s east front to allow crews to haul debris from within. Behind the chain-link fence, heavy equipment stood ready next to a massive dumpster, while piles of discarded materials littered the pavement.
Ironically, the biggest visible change at Muncie Mall on Friday afternoon had nothing to do with demolition. Instead, a large section of the parking lot facing the mall’s main entrance and Books-A-Million had been freshly restriped! Elsewhere, crews had filled in some of the mall’s deepest potholes and craters. I’m not complaining about the improvements, but the timing struck me as peculiar knowing what was coming next.
The demolition crew moved quickly. By yesterday afternoon, much of J.C. Penney’s east wall had disappeared, exposing the building’s guttered interior and metal columns. Where a nearly unbroken expanse of beige masonry and stucco stood just days earlier, huge piles of twisted steel, broken concrete, and other debris now stretched across the site! After six years of limbo, J.C. Penney’s destruction had suddenly shifted into high gear.
Even on a Sunday, demolition crews were hard at work bringing down JCP. I captured some brief video of the action, but my timing, the angle of the sun, and some inconvenient machinery conspired to obscure most of the excitement. As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one interested in watching the store come down, either: several cars slowed or stopped long enough to snap photos, and a few pickups sat idling as their drivers watched the destruction.
I drove around to the loading docks on J.C. Penney’s west side, where the extent of the destruction became even more apparent. I could see straight through the cavernous building right into the daylight! Little was visible but bare concrete and rows of steel supports, but the sounds were striking: from somewhere on the other side came the unmistakable crashes, crunches, and metallic groans of the equipment tearing J.C. Penney apart.
Although J.C. Penney wasn’t original to Muncie Mall, its building was. A little more than a year after Mel Simon and Company announced its intention to build the new shopping plaza1, W.T. Grant was named as its southern anchor2. When it opened in 1970, the store was five times larger than Grant’s first Muncie location at Northwest Plaza3.
Grant’s closed in 1975, and J.C. Penney moved to its space in the mall two years later4. It lasted for forty-three years before a combination of factors from bad brand management and the COVID-19 pandemic shut it down for good. Once Hull Property Group bought Muncie Mall, it listed J.C. Penney as first on the chopping block5.
Plans changed, and now all of Muncie Mall will be destroyed, aside from a separately owned anchor once home to L.S. Ayres and Macy’s that’s owned by a deep discounter called Buyer’s Market. The movie theater was torn down in July, and little but rubble remains of Sears. Muncie Mall will look dramatically different when the rest of Penney’s comes down! For those of us who made memories inside, that day will be closer than we think. Oh well- at least its parking lot got repainted!
Sources Cited1 Shores, L. (1967, July 9). Sears to Build New Store at Mall on McGalliard Rd. The Muncie Star. p. 1.
2 Simon Associates Obtain Building Permits for Mall (1968, November 2). The Muncie Star. p. 7.
3 Thursday Is the Big Day for the Big, Big New Grants (1970, September 9). The Muncie Evening Press. p. 32.
4 New JCPenney Store Big Addition to Muncie Mall (1977, January 18). The Muncie Evening Press. p. 17.
5 Wiechmann, S. (2025, June 30). Muncie commission approves money to begin demolishing part of Muncie Mall. Indiana Public Radio. Web. Retrieved October 31, 2026.
