Randhurst Mall - Origins

Origins

Randhurst was born out of a desire by Carson Pirie Scott to expand their business into Chicago's northwest suburbs, an untapped market at the time. Spurred by Marshall Field's expansion into Skokie at the new Old Orchard Shopping Center, in 1958 Carson Pirie Scott secured an 80-acre (320,000 m2) lot in Mount Prospect for purposes of building a shopping mall. Studies showed the mall would have a service area of 300,000, with another 100,000 expected by 1965. By 1959, the department stores Wieboldt's and Montgomery Ward had created a joint venture with Carson Pirie Scott, named the Randhurst Corporation. Instead of using the Montgomery Ward nameplate, however, Montgomery Ward would use the nameplate of their subsidiary brand, The Fair Department Store (aka "the Fair"), on their anchor store.

Randhurst was designed by Victor Gruen, a pioneer of modern shopping mall design. Unlike most shopping malls of the time, which were built in a straight line between two anchoring department stores, Gruen's design was shaped like an equilateral triangle, with an anchoring department store at each angle. Additional stores lined the sides of the triangle on two levels: a conventional level (termed the "mezzanine" level), continuous with the first floors of the anchor stores, and a level located half a floor below the first level (termed the "bazaar" level), located down a flight of stairs facing the first level. A floor of offices occupied the level above this "subfloor" of stores. A ring of clerestory windows was mounted in a domed area over the center of the mall; mounted just inside these windows were numerous stained glass windows in various oval and round shapes, oriented in such a way as to cast beams of colored light into the mall itself. As the mall was built at the height of the Cold War, it included a fallout shelter big enough to hold every citizen of Mount Prospect.

Thus, at the time of its 1962 opening, the 1,000,000 sq ft (93,000 m2) Randhurst had three major department store anchors: Wieboldt's, Carson Pirie Scott, and the Fair. All three anchors had two above-ground floors and a full basement. Of the three anchors, the Carson Pirie Scott anchor was the most distinctive, featuring turquoise-colored accents at the entrances and multi-colored lights around its perimeter. Other stores included Baskins, Charles A. Stevens, Jewel Food Stores, S.S. Kresge, and Woolworth's. In 1963, the Randhurst Fair store would be the first Fair store to be renamed as a Montgomery Ward store; Montgomery Ward also built an auto service center at the perimeter of the mall. Randhurst would retain this configuration well into the 1980s.