Forest Fair Mall: The Mall That Failed on Opening Day
Ohio
The story of Forest Fair Mall is one of the more spectacular retail disasters in American commercial history, and it unfolded in a remarkably compressed time frame. In the mid-nineteen eighties, the developer LJ Hooker chose a site at the junction of Interstate Two Seventy-Five and Winton Road in suburban Cincinnati, planning to build the second-largest mall in Ohio. The project attracted three prestige anchor tenants: B. Altman and Company, Bonwit Teller, and Sakowitz, names that carried genuine cachet in American department store culture.
The mall opened in phases between nineteen eighty-eight and nineteen eighty-nine. Within three months of the full opening, all three anchor stores and the original developer had filed for bankruptcy. LJ Hooker, the Australian real estate company behind the project, collapsed as part of a broader corporate implosion. Those three anchor stores were liquidated in nineteen ninety. The building stood, enormous and half-filled, while creditors sorted through the wreckage.
Over the next three decades, the mall changed ownership and names repeatedly. It cycled through identities as The Malls at Forest Fair, The Shops at Forest Fair, Cincinnati Mills, and Cincinnati Mall, each rebrand an attempt to shed the reputation of its predecessor. Different tenant mixes came and went: a NASCAR-themed entertainment concept, outlet stores, a massive Ikea, value retailers. None of it cohered. The mall never achieved the critical density of foot traffic that retail requires.
The last tenant of note, Arcade Legacy, closed in August of twenty twenty-two, leaving the building entirely vacant. Bass Pro Shops and Kohl's held on in detached structures until twenty twenty-four and twenty twenty-five respectively. Demolition of the main structure began in September twenty twenty-five. The site is being redeveloped as an industrial park. Forest Fair opened bankrupt, lingered for thirty years in search of a purpose it never quite found, and has now been removed from the landscape entirely.
