By Matt Russo, Staff Reporter
Onondaga County is two weeks away from finding out who wants to buy the dead body of ShoppingTown Mall, and what they want to do with it. Developer proposals for the 65 acre former mall site on Erie Boulevard East in DeWitt are due May 14 at 3 p.m., the second time the county has put the property on the open market in five years. County Executive Ryan McMahon said he expects to make a decision in June.
The deadline arrives a few weeks after a State Supreme Court judge cleared the last legal obstacle that has frozen the property since 2020. On March 30, Justice Joseph Lamendola signed off on the Onondaga County Industrial Development Agency’s eminent domain petition for the former Macy’s parcel, the final piece of the site that had remained outside county control. Benderson Development, the Buffalo area firm that owned that parcel, has the right to contest the $2.5 million the county offered, but the parcel itself is no longer holding up redevelopment.
That is the headline. The longer story is that DeWitt is trying to redevelop a mall site for the second time in five years, in a real estate market that looks completely different from the one in which the first plan was drawn up.
The site
ShoppingTown opened as an open air shopping center on March 3, 1954 and was enclosed on August 4, 1975. At its peak the building held 988,054 square feet of leasable space across two floors. The current address is 3649 Erie Boulevard East, in the heart of a retail corridor that draws on more than 250,000 residents within a seven mile radius, including the more affluent Fayetteville and Manlius suburbs.
The decline tracked the national mall economy. Macy’s, which had taken over the former Kaufmann’s space, closed its DeWitt store in March 2015. Dick’s Sporting Goods left in October 2015. JCPenney followed on April 8, 2016. Sears went dark on September 2, 2018. Las Vegas based Moonbeam Capital Investments, which had bought the mall at an online auction in August 2013 for over $14 million, was ordered by a judge in July 2019 to pay $9.7 million in back taxes and penalties to Onondaga County. Moonbeam appealed, then filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy that August. The final tenants left in March 2020. The building has been mostly empty for six years.
Onondaga County paid $3.5 million for the main parcel in 2020 through the back tax process. The deal released Moonbeam from the full tax debt and ended the bankruptcy proceeding. That left two anchor parcels under separate ownership: the former Sears, controlled by Transformco, and the former Macy’s, controlled by Benderson Development. Without the anchors, the site could not be assembled.
How the first plan died
The original redevelopment, announced in July 2021, was called District East. The contract winner was OHB Redev LLC, a joint venture made up of DALPOS Architects, Hueber-Breuer Construction, Housing Visions and Redev CNY. The county sold the property to OHB for $8 million. The development plan totaled $300 million in private investment, with mixed use space across five distinct districts, more than 900 dwelling units, and over thirty buildings of up to six stories.
The plan never broke ground. Without site control of the Sears and Macy’s parcels, the geometry of the campus could not be drawn. In November 2024, the Appellate Division of the Fourth Department ruled unanimously that eminent domain was a legitimate public use for the property. Transform Saleco LLC and Benderson Development pushed an appeal to the New York State Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, which declined to hear it in September 2025.
By October 23, 2025, the county and OHB Redev parted ways. McMahon framed the split as the county absorbing the project rather than restarting it. “It’s not a restart, it’s an expansion,” he said at the time. The OHB managing partner said the company would focus on other ventures.
One month later, on November 25, 2025, the county struck a $4.5 million deal with Transformco for the Sears parcel. That deal closed without a court fight. The Macy’s parcel did not, which is what put the case in front of Justice Lamendola.
The new ask
The current request for proposals lists the asking price at $25 million. McMahon has said publicly that the county will consider lower offers if a proposal delivers more value to the community. The property scope excludes parcels that remain in private hands, including the Chili’s pad. KeyBank and Scotch ‘N Sirloin, which has been on Erie Boulevard since 1969, both keep their existing leases.
The RFP language is broader than the first one. Proposals can include retail, housing, hotels, office, commercial space, green space, and now warehousing, industrial, and advanced manufacturing. McMahon told the April 6 town hall in DeWitt that he expects “at least four or five solid proposals” and that he is open to excluding gas stations, chemical operations, and heavy industrial uses.
The phrase that comes up most in his public remarks is “anchor tenant.” McMahon has said the anchor does not have to be retail, “could be a company, and it could be housing to get it going.” High tech research and development is on the list of acceptable uses, a direct callback to the Micron Technology megafab now rising in Clay, fifteen miles north. State and county economic development materials project Micron’s $100 billion buildout will create roughly 9,000 permanent Micron jobs at average salaries above $100,000, plus 40,000 to 50,000 supply chain and supporting jobs across Central New York. ShoppingTown is one of the largest assembled, served, county controlled sites available in DeWitt.
What residents said at the town hall
The April 6 community meeting at DeWitt Town Hall on Butternut Drive ran from 5 to 7 p.m. and drew about 80 people, with some accounts pegging attendance closer to 125. McMahon and District 7 County Legislator Dan Romeo, a Democrat from Eastwood who was reelected unopposed in November 2025, took questions for over an hour. DeWitt Town Supervisor Max Ruckdeschel attended.
Resident Angela DeSantis, who lives nearby, told the room that “all these years, we’ve been held hostage by the county. We see the graffiti, we see the weeds.” She also pressed on Scotch ‘N Sirloin, calling it “an institution around here. We want that business here.” Sam Feldman, another resident, said he wanted “to be optimistic,” then added that he hoped McMahon would “hold himself accountable.” Several residents asked about senior housing options with courtyards and walking paths, traffic generation, neighborhood compatibility, and a desire to be looped into the process earlier than they had been the first time around.
Ruckdeschel told the audience he believes “the county executive has a personal inherent interest in having a project that the community likes.” McMahon, on the question of who carries the project, told residents: “We’ve been trying, unfortunately, for years, to get site control. At the end of the day, the buck’s going to stop with me. I’m the elected CEO.”
The county plans to keep planning and environmental documents available for public review on its economic development site. The Onondaga County IDA confirmed it will not, however, disclose the names of bidding companies, will not disclose the costs it has spent maintaining and securing the property, and has not commissioned a fresh utility survey or an engineering assessment of the aging parking garage on site. Reporting from CNY Central flagged those gaps in early April.
The DeWitt market behind the deal
The town has a population of 26,074 according to the 2020 census, with a median age of 41.4 and a median household income of $123,864. The poverty rate sits at 8.46%. The combined buying power within the seven mile retail draw is the reason the Erie Boulevard corridor still attracts national tenants, even as the mall itself sits boarded up. Marshalls Plaza, half a mile east at 3401 Erie Boulevard, has Marshalls, HomeGoods, Best Buy, Old Navy, and Trader Joe’s. The Erie Canal Centre has Lowe’s, Texas Roadhouse, and Hannaford. ICON Companies’ redeveloped DeWitt Town Center, formerly 90% vacant for nearly a decade under out of state ownership, has slowly recovered.
Public mood is harder to underwrite. A February 2026 CNY Central reader poll asked DeWitt residents whether they expected the next development to succeed. Of more than 400 respondents, 71% said they did not.
What the comparables say
ShoppingTown is not the only dead enclosed mall in New York being repositioned. The Boulevard Mall in Amherst, near Buffalo, sits on 64 acres, almost the same footprint as ShoppingTown, and is being redeveloped by Benderson Development, the same firm fighting the Macy’s parcel valuation in DeWitt. Benderson bought Boulevard Mall for $15 million from developer Doug Jemal and is partnering with the Town of Amherst on a plan calling for at least 1,500 housing units and supporting retail. Governor Kathy Hochul awarded Amherst $31 million for infrastructure work tied to that project. Amherst is using eminent domain on two anchor pads to clear the site, the same playbook DeWitt just ran on Macy’s.
Further downstate, the former Galleria Mall in White Plains is undergoing a $2.5 billion redevelopment. The plan calls for roughly 3,200 multi family units and 229,000 square feet of retail across about 3.7 million square feet of new space. White Plains is denser, wealthier and closer to Manhattan, so the dollar figures do not translate one for one to DeWitt. The point is the model. Enclosed mall sites with assembled acreage and existing utility hookups are being converted into apartment heavy mixed use districts because retail alone no longer fills the box.
What happens next
The May 14 deadline puts the county on a tight clock. McMahon has said he expects four or five viable proposals. Benderson has the right to challenge the $2.5 million valuation in court, but that proceeding can run in parallel with the RFP. The county controls the site either way.
If a developer is selected in June, the next questions are demolition costs, site preparation, environmental remediation, and the parking garage that has not been engineered since the mall closed. None of those numbers are on a public document yet.
For now, DeWitt has a 65 acre piece of dirt, a building that should not be standing, and a deadline.
Sources
- WSYR / iHeart, “Judge Clears Way For ShoppingTown Mall Redevelopment In DeWitt,” April 2, 2026.
- WAER, “DeWitt residents want more of a say in future of former Shoppingtown site,” April 8, 2026.
- Eagle News Online, “ShoppingTown Mall discussion held in DeWitt,” April 2026.
- CNY Central, “Onondaga County wins eminent domain case to buy Shoppingtown’s final hold out,” April 2026.
- CNY Central, “Senior housing a popular candidate for the future of former Shoppingtown Mall in Dewitt,” April 2026.
- CNY Central, “OCIDA answers questions on Shoppingtown Mall redevelopment process,” April 2026.
- CNY Central, “After $4.5M Sears buy, only former Macy’s parcel remains at vacant Shoppingtown Mall,” November 2025.
- CNY Central, “Who is Moonbeam? ShoppingTown’s owner has failed other communities, too,” July 2019.
- Spectrum News, “Judge allows county’s takeover of Macy’s at former ShoppingTown Mall,” April 1, 2026.
- Spectrum News, “ShoppingTown Mall development project can continue, court rules,” September 19, 2025.
- Central New York Business Journal, “ShoppingTown Mall property to soon have a new developer, McMahon says,” April 2026.
- Onondaga County, 2026 State of the County address, March 28, 2026.
- Onondaga County Office of Economic Development and Micron New York project page, supply chain jobs projections.
- U.S. Census Bureau, town of DeWitt 2020 figures.
- Wikipedia, “ShoppingTown Mall,” historical record.
- WGRZ and Buffalo Toronto Public Media coverage of Boulevard Mall redevelopment, Amherst, NY.
- DDW Law and Urban Land Magazine reporting on District Galleria, White Plains, NY.
Photos by Jackson121211 and MikeKalasnik via Wikimedia Commons.
