Drive past RiverTown Crossings on any given Tuesday and you'll pass three struggling anchor spots along the way. Macy's sign came down after the store's last day of business at the end of March. Sears has sat empty for years, and its old auto center is now a construction zone. Younkers, which left before either of them, is down to half its old footprint. If you judged the mall by its anchors alone, you'd assume RiverTown Crossings is fading the way a lot of American malls have faded.
That assumption would be wrong, and the reason it's wrong tells you something real about what Grandville is becoming.
The Anchors Are Emptying. The Mall Isn't.
RiverTown Crossings has room for 110 inline tenants, the smaller shops that fill the space between the big department stores. As of this year, 77 percent of that space is leased, which puts the mall above the national average for occupied shopping center square footage. That number matters more than the anchor count, because the anchor count is what a driver sees from Rivertown Parkway, while the 77 percent is what actually determines whether the mall functions as a place people go.
Here's the local wrinkle almost nobody mentions: the current Macy's slot has never really been anchored for long. When RiverTown Crossings opened in 1999, that spot belonged to Marshall Field's, which arrived in 2001 and later got absorbed into Macy's after the two chains merged. So the space going dark isn't really a first-time event. It's a department store slot that has changed hands before and is doing it again, this time without an obvious successor waiting in line.
One longtime shopper, Peggy Mata, told Fox 17 how the closure landed for her. "I was disappointed, because it's another store that's closing, and I'm concerned about the longevity of the mall," she said, adding that she just doesn't want to see the building sit empty. That's a fair worry if you're only counting anchors. It's a harder worry to hold onto once you look at what's actually filling the rest of the building.
What's Moving Into the Empty Spaces
The activity isn't concentrated in one corner of the mall. It's spread across food, entertainment, and small retail, and most of it has landed in just the last twelve months.
Celebration Cinema finished the first phase of a $5.8 million renovation in July 2025, adding 4K laser projectors, Dolby Atmos sound, and heated recliners, the last Grand Rapids-area location in the chain to get the upgrade. In January 2026, the theater announced phase two: a full redesign of the lobby paired with Oscar's Restaurant & Bar, a sit-down kitchen and bar built into the movie complex itself. The old Harrison's West space became Inspire Marketplace last October. And the former Sears Auto Center is now under construction for a Raising Cane's, approved by the Grandville City Planning Commission last fall and expected to open by October.
Then, on August 19, mall management announced six more small businesses on the way, including a global snack shop, a comic store, a claw machine arcade spot, and a dirty soda bar. None of these are the kind of retail that anchors a mall in the traditional sense. All of them are the kind of retail that keeps a food court and its surrounding walkway worth visiting on a Saturday afternoon.
The food court itself picked up a new tenant this year too. Only Pans Cafe, run by Alecia Winters, who has operated the business as a specialty cake and pastry bakery since 2021, was aiming to open its comfort food concept by early August, which puts its debut right around now if the timeline held. Winters is both a chef and a real estate agent, which is its own small sign of how many people in this market are building something on the side of their day job.
The Restaurants Skipping the Mall Entirely
None of this is contained inside RiverTown Crossings, either. Two of the more talked-about food openings in Grandville this year happened outside the mall's doors completely.
Sweet Racks & Smokin' Butts BBQ spent years as a food truck before opening a brick and mortar location at 2996 28th St. SW in May, serving smoked meat and mac and cheese in sandwich, burrito, and platter form. And earlier this year, Mr. and Mrs. Crab opened its second West Michigan location at 4505 Canal Ave. SW, taking over the former Hong BBQ & Hot Pot space. The seafood boil concept made its Michigan debut on Burton Street in Grand Rapids back in 2022, and Grandville is now home to the only other location in the state.
Put those two openings next to the mall's food court turnover and a pattern shows up. Grandville isn't losing dining options as department stores close. It's gaining them, just not from the businesses that used to define the retail center.
The Same Pattern, Outside on the Trails
That shift from big anchor to smaller, more frequent activity isn't only happening indoors.
Grandville sits on the Kent Trails, a 15-mile paved route built jointly by Kent County Parks and five municipalities, including Grandville itself, running along old rail lines and easements from John Ball Park and Millennium Park down to Byron Center. Inside Grandville, Kent Trails connects to the Grand River Pathway, which in turn leads to the Buck Creek Trail, giving anyone starting from town a car-free route into three separate trail systems without ever crossing back through downtown Grand Rapids.
That network is getting bigger, not smaller. Kent County has committed to a $150 million investment through 2026 that will add 31 new miles of connected trail and close long-standing gaps in the Grand River Greenway. Part of that money is going to Johnson Park, the county's designated west Greenway trailhead and a stop reachable via Kent Trails, where an adaptive mountain bike system originally planned at six miles grew to eight after additional fundraising, with trails expected to be rideable by late summer, which is to say right about now.
So while the mall trades department stores for restaurants and small format shops, the trail system Grandville sits on is trading gaps for connections. Both changes point the same direction: toward more places to actually spend an afternoon, and fewer single large destinations that used to define the town's retail and recreation identity by themselves.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
If you've been reading the anchor closures as a decline story, it's worth recalibrating. RiverTown Crossings isn't shrinking. It's reorganizing around food, entertainment, and small-format retail while the department store model that built it in 1999 keeps losing ground nationally, the same way it has at malls everywhere. Grandville's version of that national story happens to come with a new seafood restaurant, an expanding barbecue spot, a dirty soda bar, and eight miles of adaptive bike trail landing in the same twelve-month window. That's not a coincidence so much as it is what a town looks like when it's replacing its old center of gravity with several smaller ones at once.
None of this shows up if you only glance at the empty Macy's storefront on your way to Kohl's. It shows up if you've eaten at four different places in Grandville this year that didn't exist eighteen months ago.
Cheryl Grant Real Estate Team keeps a close eye on changes like these because they shape what it actually feels like to live in a place, long before they show up in any market report. If you're curious what a shifting local landscape of restaurants, entertainment, and trail access means for your own home's value, request a free home valuation and we'll walk through it with you.
