Claudia Pieske and Phil Giglio set up their Gift Tree store at Lakehurst Mall in August 1971, about a month before the mall opened to the public. Late last month, the sublings turned off the lights and pulled down the security gate for the last time.
Four other tenants–their friends and neighbors, really– also closed their shops. And when the five merchants left the building, the mall closed its doors behind them.
“In the beginning, it was tough,” Giglio said. “But the business matured and got to be pretty good. We really peaked around 1988-89. We’ve hung in the last few years, too.”
He and his sister have made arrangements to move into the Country Faire strip mall at Illinois Highway 120 and U.S. Highway 45 in Grayslake.
The last gasp of Lakehurst Mall has been a long time coming.
The general westward growth of Lake County in the 1990s spread out shopping dollars that were once concentrated near the lake, where the jobs were.
The rise of cut-rate Gurnee Mills and upscale Hawthorn Center in Vernon Hills left Lakehurst with neither the practicality nor the panache of competitors.
The departure in 1997 of anchor stores owned by J.C. Penney Co. and Montgomery Ward & Co. accelerated the slide. Of the anchors, only the Carson Pirie Scott & Co. store remains.
“Our kids worked here when they were teenagers,” said Marcia Warren of Waukegan, taking a slow stroll around the almost-vacant mall. “Our daughter was the Easter Bunny one year. This mall has a comfortable neighborhood feel to it.”
Carson’s, which has maintained that it has no plans to leave, has not been affected by the mall’s closing because its store, like most anchors, is in what is essentially a separate building attached to the main mall.
The same can’t be said for Mike Rutkowski’s Barbary Coast hair salon. Another Lakehurst tenant from the start, Rutkowski said that although his business has drifted downward along with the mall, he has maintained a solid core of loyal customers.
“It would be business as usual if they weren’t closing the mall,” Rutkowski said.
Rutkowski has sold the salon’s fixtures, and he has taken a job with CR Ltd., a salon and spa in Libertyville.
The mall closing was ordered by the Richard E. Jacobs Group, a property management firm based in Cleveland.
With only a handful of tenants paying rent, the mall was kept alive for most of the past year by Martin Tuohy, a developer who wants to turn the building and surrounding property into a development known as University Station.
Tuohy’s plan calls for the main mall building to be revamped into a college campus to be shared by several schools. Surrounding the main building would be a community of homes, offices and shops.
Tuohy said his option on the mall with the Jacobs Group, for which he paid thousands of dollars per day, expired in November. He is still pursuing his plan and continuing to sign up schools, housing them in a building on Greenleaf Avenue in Park City, he said.
“We have the financing,” Tuohy said as he and his staff bustled about their space in the mall, preparing to move to new quarters in a building on the ring road around the mall.
“We need more equity to make the deal. We’re committed to Waukegan, and we’re committed to providing equal access to educational opportunities in Lake County. We’re not giving up.”
The plan to redevelop Lakehurst has been seen for years as part of an effort to spur a renaissance in Lake County’s largest city.
Plans to revitalize downtown Waukegan recently were given a boost when the City Council approved a $20 million bond issue, $12 million of which was earmarked to pay for restoration of the Genesee Theatre.
A thriving redevelopment project at Lakehurst, on the other side of town, would bracket the city between two heady projects, said Russ Tomlin, director of planning and zoning.
Although Tuohy’s plan is the only detailed proposal presented to the city, other potential buyers have inquired about Lakehurst’s availability, Tomlin said.
