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In 1932, the Duff Building was leased to Montgomery Wards, who purchased it in 1939. [2] To contain the Montgomery Wards store, the Duff building was combined with the Grow Block and a third building to create more space. Montgomery Wards remained in the building until the early 1980s. It was rehabilitated in 1983. [2]
The original Montgomery Ward & Co. was a mail-order business and later a department store chain that operated between 1872 and 2001. The current Montgomery Ward Inc. is an online shopping and mail-order catalog retailer that started several years after the original Montgomery Ward shut down.
[5] [9] Plans were also made to divide the former Montgomery Ward space into smaller shops. [10] Eventually, occupancy at Universal Mall rebounded to 75%, [5] although by 2007 it had declined to 48% (in part due to the closure of Mervyns' Michigan operations in 2006). [11]
A mezzanine level with a food court was added in 1987. The Cunningham Drug Store was demolished for a wing featuring a Mervyns in 1993, Montgomery Ward was also added. These additions brought the mall to 1,300,000 square feet (120,000 m 2) of gross leasable area, making it the largest mall in Michigan north of Detroit. [6]
Montgomery Ward and Steketee's closed in 2000 and 2003, respectively. [4] Without the draw of its anchor stores, the mall lost customer traffic and many inline tenants. Several big-box tenants were opened in the late 1990s and early 2000s to fill the increasing number of vacancies, including Office Max and Marshalls .
Steve & Barry's, a discount clothing retailer, opened on the first floor of the former Montgomery Ward store in 2004. At the time, the Eastland Center store was the second-largest Steve & Barry's in the chain. [12] [13] Shopco continued to manage the mall until selling it to Ashkenazy Acquisition Corporation in 2005.
Forty feet north of the Administration Building is the 2,000,000-square-foot (190,000 m 2) Mail Order House, also known as the Catalog House, that was the heart of Montgomery Ward's operations. Completed in 1908, the eight-story building was painted white and capped with a flat roof, with an interior that contained miles of chutes, conveyors ...
At the time of opening in September 1959, the Montgomery Ward store at Wonderland Center was the largest in the chain. [2] One month later, Federal's opened for business as well. The store was the 31st in that chain. [3] In 1983, Schostak converted Wonderland from an open-air complex to an enclosed shopping mall.