Gary Tolowitzki still drives out to Great Northern Mall. He just doesn't go inside anymore. Asked by a local news crew earlier this year whether he still shops there, he said he visits the area but not necessarily the mall itself, adding that it's the outlying stores that get his business now, not the enclosed corridors he used to walk as a kid. Another longtime shopper, Jim Klann, put it more bluntly: the place is pretty empty compared to what it used to be.
Both men were talking about a building that's about to become the most consequential piece of real estate in North Olmsted, and neither of them was talking about Homecoming.
A Festival Three Days Long, Not Four
If you live here, you already know Homecoming happened last weekend. The opening ceremony hit the bandshell at 6 p.m. on Friday, August 14, with the Citizen of the Year presentation, a beer tent from Laughing Bomb Brewery & Winery, a car show, and Johnny Elvis & The Crown Electrics playing while the splashpad and pickleball courts stayed open late. The Midway ran 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Saturday, Westside Flea set up its Homecoming Flea with vendors selling everything from small-batch bakery goods to plants and pet accessories, and the parade stepped off Sunday at 1 p.m. to close it out.
What's different this year is that it was three days instead of the usual four, a change the North Olmsted Community Council attributed directly to a park refurbishment project reshaping the Midway layout inside Community Park. That's the kind of scheduling detail only someone who actually follows city recreation updates would catch. It's also, this year, the least important thing happening in North Olmsted.
The Building Everyone Recognizes and No One Enters
Six minutes from Community Park sits a shuttered department store that has been empty since Sears closed there in 2020. It's sat that way for six years now, ringed by acres of parking lot that used to fill up on weekends and mostly don't anymore.
That's changing, or at least the paperwork behind it is. Earlier this year, North Olmsted City Council moved toward a development agreement with R6 Motors Inc., the entity that now holds the parcel containing the old Sears building, covering roughly 16 acres on the mall's east end. Under the proposal, crews would demolish the vacant structure and replace it with a grocery supercenter of more than 100,000 square feet, along with a gas station and convenience store. City officials have said demolition could start sometime in 2026, with the new store potentially opening in late 2027 or early 2028.
Mayor Nicole Dailey Jones has been direct about why the city wants this specific kind of tenant. Everyone needs to go to the grocery store, she said, and that volume of regular traffic tends to pull more investment in behind it. She's also been clear that this isn't a sudden idea. The city has been laying groundwork for this kind of opportunity for a number of years, she said, framing the grocery deal as the first domino rather than the whole project.
Which retailer actually takes the space is still unconfirmed. Cleveland.com reporting has floated Meijer as a name in talks for the site, but city officials have stayed tight-lipped, and it's worth remembering that Walmart, Target, and Giant Eagle already operate nearby, which makes a duplicate big-box grocery less likely for any of those three specifically. Adding a layer of uncertainty, Max Upton, the city's director of economic and community development who was steering the negotiations, left the administration for a private-sector role at the end of February 2026, right as the deal was moving through council.
The Zoning Change That Already Happened
Here's the part that's easy to miss because it isn't a ribbon-cutting. The city already changed the rules that govern what this whole property is allowed to become. Working with the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission, North Olmsted adopted a Mall Area Mixed-Use Overlay District that lets the mall site carry apartments and townhomes alongside retail, something the old zoning didn't permit. The overlay grew out of the city's 2023 Lorain Road Corridor Study and a 2024 Urban Design Concept, and the county's own project page describes the goal plainly: turning an aging enclosed mall into a walkable, transit-supportive hub for jobs, entertainment, and housing.
In practical terms, that means the conversation happening right now isn't just "will there be a grocery store." It's whether the empty parking fields around the old Sears eventually carry housing too, which would put a different kind of daily foot traffic on Lorain Road, Great Northern Boulevard, and the stretch near Brookpark Road and I-480 than anyone driving through today is used to.
What's Already Different, Not Just Proposed
None of this is hypothetical waiting-room speculation. Some of it has already opened. Great Northern's own leasing team pointed to the recent arrivals of Phoenix Theatres, Kids Empire, Build the Pho, and Texas Roadhouse as evidence the property is filling in even before the Sears question is settled.
Build the Pho, a build-your-own-bowl Vietnamese concept, debuted at 400 Great Northern Boulevard. Down the road, Burntwood Tavern chose the site for something the chain hasn't done anywhere else in its footprint: a from-the-ground-up build. The North Olmsted location seats 200 inside and another 55 on an open patio, with a private Harvest Room for smaller gatherings and full catering for larger ones. That's not a chain slotting into an existing storefront. That's a company deciding this particular corner of North Olmsted was worth building from scratch.
Two Food Scenes, Six Minutes Apart
What makes this interesting for anyone who already eats here regularly is that North Olmsted has quietly been running two separate dining identities that rarely overlap. Down on Lorain Road, the old guard holds steady: Gunselman's Tavern carrying on a Cleveland diner tradition after its longtime downtown location closed, Fathead's Brewery pouring beer with its brewing operations on full display, Big Egg stacking its diner-style Monte Cristo with ham, turkey, eggs and Swiss, and Imperial Garden running a full sushi bar next to General Tso's lunch specials. These are places built one storefront at a time over years, not delivered as a leasing package.
A few minutes away at the mall, the newer cluster runs on a different rhythm entirely: chain-scale, purpose-built, and arriving all at once as part of a coordinated redevelopment push rather than organic neighborhood growth. Right now those two commercial strips coexist without much overlap. If the mixed-use overlay eventually brings apartments to the old Sears footprint, that's the first real test of whether North Olmsted ends up with one blended commercial corridor or keeps its two dining identities running in parallel.
None of this shows up on a festival calendar. It shows up in council minutes, a county zoning overlay document, and leasing announcements that get a few paragraphs in the local news and then disappear. But it's the actual story of what North Olmsted looks like in two years, and it's unfolding right now, a few minutes from wherever you watched the Homecoming parade go by.
If you're curious what any of this means for what your own home is worth as the mall corridor changes, or you just want a straight answer about the market around you, reach out to Iconic Partners Group for an honest, no-pressure conversation. Get Your Instant Home Valuation any time you're ready to see where things stand.
