What was Harford Mall?

Harford Mall opened in late 1972 on Bel Air's main commercial strip, on land that had held a racing oval a few years earlier. The exact opening date is not settled, and the 1973 you will see on Wikipedia and everywhere that copied it appears to trace back to an accounting placed-in-service date in the original owner's SEC filings.

Its own 1998 website called it what it was: Harford County's only enclosed shopping mall. At its height it ran about half a million square feet between two department stores, with a two-screen cinema and a food court.

The property is five things at once today. The enclosed mall is nearly empty and CBL still owns it. The former Macy's parcel is an active demolition site that SJC Ventures bought. The old Sears land is rebuilt and open as Shops at Harford Mall. Apartments and a grocery-anchored center called Derby Place are approved but not built. The Annex out back is none of those things: it has run continuously since Best Buy arrived in 1995 and sits outside the redevelopment plans.

The county's 1967 aerial survey shows a racing oval on this land, with a grandstand and a row of barns. The 1966 county zoning map draws the same tract as agricultural land, labeled for a county fair association. By the 1971 flight the oval is gone and the building pads are graded.

What the place was called is murkier than you would expect. Local accounts disagree about the track's name and about when it closed, the zoning map names an association the racing histories never mention, and the stories online mostly trace back to one book and to each other.

Montgomery Ward held the west anchor box into 2000, and ran a separate auto accessory store on its own one-acre ground lease outside the enclosed mall. When Wards left, the mall's own 2001 site plan drew the empty box with the label "SEARS (Coming Soon!)", and Sears opened there that year. It stayed almost twenty years, closing in February 2020.

The building outlasted both names. A 2014 repaint covered the old Wards lettering, which had stayed readable on the exterior wall for thirteen years under the Sears sign. CBL sold the building to SJC Ventures in 2021, the Town issued a demolition permit on February 2, 2022, and the structure was gone by March 1. A local headline put it plainly: all of a sudden, it's gone.

That land is Phase I now. Shops at Harford Mall is open there. It is the one piece of the property that already got rebuilt.

The east box is the one being demolished now, and it is the box with the longer, murkier past. Before 1993 the records name Korvette's, Hutzler's, and Hochschild Kohn in ways that contradict each other, including which box Hutzler's actually occupied. There is a photograph of the opening-day crowd outside Korvette's in 1972, and a Baltimore Sun caption dates a new Hochschild Kohn branch to October 1977. The rest of that succession never got sorted out.

From the 1990s the record is clean. Hecht's anchored the east end, expanded in 1994 according to later Aegis coverage, and became Macy's in 2006, when Federated took over the May brands.

Macy's closed in March 2025. SJC Ventures announced its purchase of the building on June 10, 2026, and demolition began that July. What replaces it is the Derby Place retail core, which the tracker follows as Phase III.

Harford Mall ran a store directory on its own website from 1998 until its last captures in June 2026, and it listed the whole property at once: the enclosed mall, the Annex out on Boulton Street, and the outdoor wing the 2007 renovation added. The first archived pages, in 1998, list 43 stores. The 2014 directory lists 89, and the last roster the archive caught, in February 2025, lists 46. The directory never marked a store as closed, so a tenant that left simply stopped appearing, and 36 tenant pages were still rendering in 2026.

Local coverage uses a smaller number, and it counts something narrower. In May 2026 a CBS News reporter walked the enclosed mall the day after Spencer Gifts closed and counted seven stores open. That is one part of the property on one afternoon, not the property. The store list marks nineteen open across all of it today, ten of them inside the enclosed mall by suite number and the rest in the Annex, which never closed, or in the outdoor wing.

The sharpest single drop came with COVID, from 80 listings to 64 across 2020. In 2025 the last anchor and thirteen in-line tenants appear in the mall's records for the last time. The last anchor-scale addition had come in 2013, when Shoe Dept. Encore moved into a junior anchor box. CBL wrote the mall down by $65.7 million in 2021, cutting its carrying value to about $6.4 million.

The mall's website never said anything was ending. It just stopped being updated. No archived capture carries a closing notice through June 2026, and the last press release it ever put out, in March 2025, welcomed the Easter Bunny. On June 22, 2026, three weeks before the demolition fencing went up, the site was saved page by page through the Internet Archive. The homepage was still inviting people in. The events page was empty.

In 1998 the mall opened at 7AM Monday through Saturday for the benefit of mall walkers, and the Harford Hoofers walking club met the third Wednesday of every month at 8AM in the Courtyard. Twenty-eight years later a shopper told CBS, "The only people who are left are mall walkers still walking. It's over."