The Bookstore Moved in Three Weeks. The Mall It Left Has Waited Two Years.

Barnes & Noble had a novelist lined up for the ribbon cutting. Harlan Coben, whose thrillers regularly anchor local library talks and book club picks around Essex County, was slotted to headline the grand opening of the store's new Route 10 location. The signing never happened. The relocation moved too fast for the calendar to hold, and the store opened quietly on August 7 instead, three weeks after locking the doors on its old space inside Livingston Mall for the final time.

That gap between what was planned and what actually happened is a decent way to understand what's gone on in Livingston's retail map this year. The headlines have all been about the mall dying. The more useful story is how fast everything around it already moved on without waiting for a resolution.

Three Weeks, Twenty-Three Months

Macy's closed its Livingston Mall doors in April 2026, part of a national round of roughly 150 store closures the company had been working through since announcing its "Bold New Chapter" strategy two years earlier. Barnes & Noble held on a few months longer as the mall's last operating tenant, then left on July 15. It reopened on Route 10 at Livingston Shopping Center on August 7. Three weeks, start to finish, for a 25,000-square-foot bookstore to pack up one location and open another.

Meanwhile the mall property itself, all 43 acres of it once you set aside the parcel already approved for housing, has been sitting under a "redevelopment" label since the Township Council designated it an Area in Need of Redevelopment with Condemnation in October 2024. That's 23 months and counting with no site plan submitted to the planning board and no hearing date announced. The former Sears parcel, a separate 15.8 acres, got its own approval back in March 2025 for 376 apartments and townhouses, a fifth of them affordable. The other 43 acres, the part most people mean when they picture the empty mall, hasn't moved nearly that fast.

Here's the quick version of who went where and when:

Why One Corner of Route 10 Moves Fast

The difference isn't really about e-commerce or changing habits, even though those forces get blamed most often. It comes down to who's actually signing the paperwork.

Livingston Shopping Center on West Mount Pleasant Avenue is owned outright by Kite Realty. One landlord means one decision when a tenant wants in. That's how Barnes & Noble's 24,740-square-foot lease came together in a single deal announced in January 2026, backfilling a former Buybuy Baby space, with the store's co-tenants at that address already including Nordstrom Rack, T.J. Maxx, Ulta Beauty, DSW, and World Market. None of those five needed a public hearing to open. They just needed a signed lease.

The mall never had that luxury. Ownership there has been split for years between Kohan Retail Investment Group, which bought the property from Simon Property Group in 2022, Macy's own real estate interests tied to its building and roughly 10 acres in the south section, and Transformco, which inherited Sears' stake after that chain's bankruptcy. Getting three separate stakeholders to agree on a single redevelopment plan takes a lot longer than getting one landlord to sign a lease. That's the actual mechanism behind the different speeds, not some abstract story about malls falling out of favor.

The Other Corridor Nobody's Watching

While Route 10 was absorbing the mall's departing anchor, a second stretch of town kept adding names without any of the drama. The South Livingston Avenue corridor, tracked locally by the InTown Livingston business district, has been filling in steadily:

• Sugar Tree Café
• Nana's Bistro
• Trendset Boutique
• Blu Ale
• Alloy Personal Training

None of those openings required a redevelopment hearing or a township resolution. They required a lease, same as Route 10, just on a smaller scale and without a bookstore's name recognition to make headlines.

A few blocks over, Livingston Town Center has been picking up its own tenants through Azarian Realty. Dupï Studio, a Korean scalp-treatment spa founded by a licensed esthetician, opened there in May 2026. Stretch Zone signed on around the same time. Small additions, but they add up to the same pattern: wherever ownership is simple, storefronts keep turning over, quietly and on schedule.

For anyone who's lived here a while, the mall's slow unraveling has felt like the main event. Carla Harrilal, a longtime Livingston resident, put it plainly to NJ.com back in December 2025, describing those final months at the mall.

It was almost like looking at a sinking ship because you knew it was gonna close down soon.

That sense of watching something familiar wind down is real. It's also only half the picture, because while the mall was sinking, the rest of town's retail map had already quietly rerouted around it.

What's Actually Sitting on Eisenhower Parkway Right Now

If you drive past 112 Eisenhower Parkway today, the building is empty. No Macy's, no Barnes & Noble, nothing operating inside what used to be a two-level, nearly 970,000-square-foot regional mall. The 15.8-acre former Sears parcel has its housing plan on the books, but construction hasn't visibly started there as of this writing. The remaining 43 acres, the bulk of the property, still has no submitted site plan and no scheduled planning board hearing. Topology, the redevelopment consulting firm the township retained, produced a conceptual aerial rendering based on community input gathered during visioning sessions back in 2025, but a rendering isn't a filed application, and there's a real difference between the two.

Livingston Township has said it wants resident input on what eventually replaces the site, and that process is still open. For now, the honest answer to "what's happening at the mall" is: less than what's happened everywhere else in town over the same stretch of time.

The Errand Map Already Redrew Itself

None of this is really about mourning a mall. It's about knowing where things actually stand, since the mall's slow-motion ending has made it easy to assume the rest of Livingston's shopping and errands are stuck in the same limbo. They aren't. Route 10 absorbed the anchor tenants within weeks. South Livingston Avenue and Livingston Town Center have been adding names on their own timeline the whole time. The only piece of Livingston still waiting on a plan is the one everyone already stopped expecting anything from.

Knowing which parts of a town move fast and which ones move slow, and why, is the kind of detail that only comes from paying attention to a place over time rather than reading a single headline about it. At The Wright Group, that's the same lens we bring to every conversation about Livingston and the towns around it, whether someone's asking where to grab dinner tonight or wondering what their own home might be worth in a market that's still sorting itself out. If it's the latter, we'd be glad to talk. Request a complimentary home valuation whenever you're ready.