Drive past the old Macy's wing at Northbrook Court today and you will see the same thing you saw in the summer of 2023: a cleared lot, a chain-link perimeter, and a lot of open sky where a department store used to stand. Three years is a long time for nothing to visibly change on a piece of property with a $750 million plan attached to it. But the mall has not stalled. It has been quietly restructured, and the reason has less to do with construction delays than with how the deal itself is written.
A Mall That Has Been Turning Over Since Before Most Shoppers Noticed
Northbrook Court opened in 1976 with Lord & Taylor, Neiman Marcus, and Sears anchoring three corners. Sears did not last long. It closed in 1983 because its customer base overlapped too closely with Sears locations at Hawthorn Mall and Golf Mill Mall, and the space became a prototype JCPenney the same year. JCPenney held on until 1992. The building came down in 1995, and Marshall Field's moved in, a much better fit for a mall built around Neiman Marcus, running there until the Macy's conversion.
I. Magnin closed in 1991 and sat empty for five years before General Cinema opened a 14-screen theater there in November 1996. AMC took over the operation in 2002 and converted it into the Dine-In theater that still runs today. A freestanding Crate & Barrel opened on the northwest corner that same year, in the space Arhaus now occupies since 2014.
Even the food court has a history of quiet failure. In 2007, management pulled it out entirely and handed most of the space to Forever 21, leaving four restaurant slots where a full food court used to be: Chinese Gourmet Express, Tony & Bruno's, Subway, and Corner Bakery Cafe. Tony & Bruno's is the only one of the four still standing. Forever 21 itself closed in 2025.
None of that turnover is unusual for a mall approaching its fiftieth year. What broke the pattern was Macy's. The company announced its closure in May 2019 as part of a 13-store national cut, and the building came down for redevelopment. Lord & Taylor followed in 2020, liquidating everything as the company went bankrupt during the pandemic. For the first time in the mall's history, two full anchor wings sat empty at once, and that is the version of Northbrook Court most residents have been looking at ever since.
What You Can Actually Still Buy There This Fall
Despite the empty wings, Northbrook Court has not gone dark. As of a mid-2025 village update, roughly two dozen stores and restaurants remained open, including Chanel, White House Black Market, The Lego Store, and Chico's. Two Hi-Five Sports Zone locations run sports camps and classes for kids from age two through seventh grade, one of the few tenant categories that has expanded rather than contracted. Neiman Marcus, the mall's original anchor, said directly at the time that it had no plans to close, even as the store shutdowns around it continued.
On the dining side, four of the mall's six sit-down spaces are currently occupied: the NM Cafe inside Neiman Marcus, California Pizza Kitchen, Di Pescara, and the outparcel P.F. Chang's. Apple has since closed its store at the mall, another departure from the roster that once made Northbrook Court a genuine draw for North Shore shoppers who wanted to avoid the drive to Old Orchard.
Management has been resourceful about the empty storefronts in the meantime. Visitors have described the old Lord & Taylor space carrying a discount retailer, and some of the vacant units filled with rotating art displays, including pieces from the Glenview Art League and Cove School, alongside overflow merchandise from stores still operating elsewhere in the building. It is not a food hall. It is a way of keeping the lights on in spaces that would otherwise sit dark while the larger plan works itself out.
The Clause Nobody Outside the Deal Noticed
Here is the part that explains why the parking lot still looks the way it did three years ago. When Brookfield Properties unveiled its conceptual master plan in April 2023, the story it told the village board was about retail and dining first: a Great Lawn where Macy's used to stand, flanked by new restaurants, with a high-end grocery store and residential units built around the edges to support the commercial core. The Village approved a redevelopment and economic incentive agreement that October, and it looked, on paper, like retail construction would lead the way.
In March 2025, that sequence flipped. Brookfield asked the village for permission to build the residential portion first, ahead of any commercial redevelopment, and the village board approved it. Village President Kathryn Ciesla explained the request as a way to let the developer respond to current market conditions and build momentum for the larger project. What that means in practice is that the next thing to rise on the old Macy's site will not be a restaurant or a grocery store. It will be housing: a mix of apartments, row houses, and townhomes.
The financial mechanics behind that decision matter more than the announcement itself. According to reporting on the amended incentive agreement, the tax increment financing and sales tax rebates tied to the deal only activate once retail leasing hits specific benchmarks. In other words, Brookfield has no financial trigger pulling it toward building stores before it has tenants lined up to fill them, but it does have a clear, financeable path to build apartments now, in a rental market that has stayed strong for suburban multifamily housing while retail leasing has not. The mall looks frozen because the commercial half of the plan is waiting on a market signal that housing does not have to wait for.
So What Changes Before the Snow Flies?
Not much, at least not yet. As of December 2025, the Village of Northbrook said it continued to have regular discussions with Brookfield about the property, and reporting from earlier this year noted that the site still looked essentially the same as when the plan was first unveiled. The earliest possible groundbreaking for the housing phase was pegged at summer 2026, the season we are in right now, which means the next few months are the window to watch for fencing, grading, or utility work on the west side of the property, where Macy's once stood.
If that happens, it is worth remembering a detail from the 2023 approval process. Residents of the Condominiums of Northbrook Court, whose sole access road is Rudolph Drive, raised concerns during the public hearings about construction traffic affecting their only route in and out. That concern was specific to the original plan, but it applies just as directly to a housing phase breaking ground on the same footprint. Anyone who lives or shops near that stretch of Lake Cook Road should expect the next visible sign of progress to look like construction equipment near the old Macy's site, not a ribbon cutting at a new restaurant.
For everything else, the honest answer is that Northbrook Court in late 2026 will function the way it has for the past few years: Neiman Marcus, a handful of specialty stores, a working AMC theater, and four restaurants carrying a building built for far more. The Great Lawn, the grocery store, and the new dining options that Brookfield described in 2023 are still coming. They are simply behind the apartments in line, and the reason has as much to do with how the deal was financed as with anything happening on site.
Whenever the next phase does become visible, whether it changes how a specific block of Northbrook feels to live near or simply answers a question you have been asking for years, it helps to have someone tracking these changes as they happen rather than after the fact. That is the kind of on-the-ground read Anne Hardy brings to every North Shore conversation, whether you are watching a project like this out of curiosity or thinking ahead to what it might mean for a home nearby. Reach out anytime to schedule a free consultation and talk through what is actually changing in your corner of the North Shore.
