Gurnee Mills: The World's Largest Outlet Mall

Just off the Tri-State Tollway, where Interstate Ninety-Four crosses Grand Avenue near Gurnee, Illinois, sits one of the most audacious retail experiments in American history. On August eighth, nineteen ninety-one, Gurnee Mills opened its doors to the public at eight in the morning. Seventy thousand shoppers arrived before the stores even opened at ten. Nobody came to browse, they came to witness.

The Western Development Corporation had been planning this since nineteen eighty-eight, when it proposed annexing three hundred twenty-four acres of farmland into the village of Gurnee. What they built was staggering: a single-story Z-shaped building containing nearly two million square feet of retail space, advertised to the world as the largest outlet mall on earth. The architecture drew from the Googie-style diners of the nineteen-fifties and the Prairie School aesthetic of Frank Lloyd Wright, an agrarian heartland fantasy built around discount shopping.

The original anchors read like a snapshot of early nineties American retail: Sears Outlet, Phar-Mor, and Reading China and Glass. The problem, from the start, was confusion. Gurnee Mills billed itself as an outlet destination, but it mixed full-price stores alongside discount ones. Shoppers weren't always sure what kind of deal they were actually getting.

Nonetheless, the mall became a regional phenomenon. Lake County, Illinois had nothing like it. For families driving Route Forty-Five and the surrounding tollways, Gurnee Mills became a pilgrimage, a place where you might spend an entire Saturday and still not see every store. It remains today the third-largest mall in Illinois, with ten major anchors anchoring its shopping corridors thousands of feet long.

The story of Gurnee Mills is ultimately the story of the nineties retail boom in microcosm: big bets, big buildings, and the belief that Americans would drive anywhere for a bargain. The farmfields of Lake County didn't know what hit them.