CEDAR RAPIDS - The arrival of Lindale Plaza 50 years ago on Sept. 15, 1960, sent downtown Cedar Rapids retailers scrambling to reassert their retail dominance.

With its 30 stores on the east edge of Cedar Rapids, Lindale gave shoppers a new one-stop shopping opportunity with 5,000 free parking spaces. Even though it didn’t arrive as an enclosed mall, Lindale advertised the wide building canopies that kept shoppers out of rain and snow.

Lindale was billed as one of the most luxurious shopping centers in America.

Grand opening advertisements in The Gazette featured Hershey’s Kisses for 57 cents a pound, women’s sheer seamless nylons for 57 cents a pound and a Philco phonograph for $19.95.

One of Lindale’s more distinctive features was the rows of huge columns in the center courtyard covered by tiny gold-flecked ceramic tiles manufactured in Japan.

Four mall buildings that surrounded a central concourse that linked end-cap anchors Younkers and Sears & Robuck were landscaped and decorated in richly textured bands of ceramic tile.

A 20-year rivalry with downtown retailers ensued.

“Lindale had the parking, but downtown had the real entertainment options,” said Mark Stoffer Hunter of Cedar Rapids, historian.

Both retail centers tried to shore up their weaknesses.
Downtown retailers upgraded their stores and then pressured City Hall to give them more parking.

The city “acted rather impulsively” to tear down the Union Depot, the city’s landmark downtown train station, to make parking space, Stoffer Hunter said. The city was soon building a new parking ramp on First Street, and making plans for others.

Years later, Stoffer Hunter said city leaders even worked on a plan to make part of downtown a covered mall. The plans were eventually abandoned, due mainly to flood plain and insurance issues.

Lindale decided it needed entertainment to compete, adding the Plaza Theater in July 1967.

The path for Lindale was paved by construction of Town & Country Shopping Center in 1956, only a short distance to the west along First Avenue, Stoffer Hunter said.

Town & Country was widely regarded as the first suburban shopping center in Iowa. It demonstrated the potential for suburban shopping centers in Cedar Rapids and remains successful to this day.

A more immediate trigger for the construction of Lindale was the desire of the Des Moines-based Younker brothers to have a store in downtown Cedar Rapids and the conflicting intentions of entrenched downtown retailers to keep Younkers out, Stoffer Hunter said.

Minutes from the board meetings of Greater Downtown Cedar Rapids Association, a retail group, showed that downtown retailers wanted no part of the Younker brothers’ plan to put a store in the 100 block of First Avenue NE, and tried in subtle ways to block their efforts.

The Younker brothers eventually grew impatient with delays and linked up with Sears & Roebuck, which was cramped in its downtown locations, to make plans for the shopping center, Stoffer Hunter said.

No winner emerged in the battle of Cedar Rapids retail centers until almost 20 years later when Westdale Mall was developed on the city’s west side.

Westdale was the city’s first enclosed mall and began to pull stores and shoppers from both Lindale and downtown.

Stoffer Hunter said the arrival of Westdale, not Lindale, marked the real beginning of the long decline in downtown retailing that continues to this day.

General Growth Properties, by then the owner of Lindale, responded by enclosing Lindale Plaza, adding a food court and renaming the center Lindale Mall.

“It was a master stroke,” said commercial Realtor and developer Scott Byers, one of the developers of the Market Place on 1st retail development near Lindale.

Had Lindale not enclosed, many observers believe Lindale would have been finished. Instead, it sputtered for a few years and then flourished.

Westdale has been in decline since the arrival of Coralville’s Coral Ridge Mall in 1998, which began to sap its vitality.

Byers said Lindale remains the retail epicenter of Cedar Rapids even after the arrival of discount stores, big block stores and open-air lifestyle centers.

“If a new retailer is coming to town, the first question they ask me is, ‘Can you find something close to Lindale?’” he said.

In addition to the sheer variety of stores and shopping comfort, Lindale has offered continued retail excitement.

Longtime Lindale employee Wayne Schilling recalled early promotions like an appearance by the cast of the sitcom “A Family Affair” to kick off the holiday shopping season and a performing dolphin show set up in huge tanks in Lindale’s main concourse.

For a short time, the mall had a children’s train that ran from one end of the mall concourse to the other, Schilling said.

It appears Lindale has passed its retail peak, but is holding up well to the decline in general mall retailing nationwide, Byers said.

Retailers have begun to favor non-enclosed lifestyle centers because in a competitive price environment, they do not want to pay the hefty lease charges malls require to pay for things like heating and cooling common areas and security, he said.

Malls have been forced to become creative in leasing space because demand isn’t sufficient to fill all the mall space. One example seen this summer was when Lindale Mall leased 30,000 square feet in its lower level to the State of Iowa for an IowaWorks job services center.

Byers said malls risk diminishing their retail vitality when they allow such non-retail uses, but the IowaWorks Center isn’t noticeable to the average Lindale shopper because it is in the isolated lower level.

Lindale Mall Senior Marketing Manager Lisa Rowe said the mall will hold a nostalgic celebration on Sept. 15 to thank customers for their loyalty.

Out of all of the original tenants, Sears and Younkers are the only retailers that haven’t changed, she said.

The mall’s online directory lists 105 retailers, not counting kiosks open for holidays.

Lindale continues to evolve.
Recent changes include the redevelopment of the large space formerly leased to The Gap into several smaller spaces.

A seasonal Halloween store soon will open in the onetime Plaza Theater building recently used as the temporary home of Theatre Cedar Rapids after the Floods of 2008.