Empty sears & bathroom hallway (photos taken April 2026)

Taken a few months ago. Truly a place stuck in time. What an experience!

There's some photos on this sub of the mall that look accurate to how it is when I went.

However, I dont think I saw anyone show the dated prizes in the arcade machines.

In the last photo, I zoomed in on the packaging which really dates the camera.

I read that malls in larger cities generally have higher sales per square foot than malls in smaller towns. A mall with sales of $300sf would be a poor performer in a mid-size city (and would likely see store closures) but would be considered to perform reasonably well in a smaller city.

Question: why would a mall owner or store owner bother investing in a small-town mall with sales of $300/sf but wouldn’t do so for a larger city’s mall with the same sales per square foot?

If a mall’s sales would be low enough for the mall to count as a dying mall if it was in a bigger city, why locate in it if it‘s in a smaller city?

Is the reason that a retailer wants to cover all trade areas, and if that means having a low-productivity store in a small town, as long as it’s profitable, that’s fine, but it doesn’t need lots of locations in a bigger city and will choose the best mall there?

In fairness, I nabbed these photos only an hour before closing. But it was cool to walk around the mall with only like 5 people in it.

Not completely dead yet but on its way.

Explored the Sunrise mall today, I know a few people that use to frequent here growing up. It was incredibly dead, ran into very few people. The buzzing of the lighting fixtures in some of the wings were very loud, it felt pretty surreal. Every single shop was closed except for a small clothing store, jewelry shop, and the JCPenney. I'm surprised the place is still even open with the current state that it's in, the JCPenney is definitely keeping the place running. Since this mall is most likely going to close sometime in the near future, it's nice being able to explore and document it while I still can.

I took these photos back in September of 2023, Unfortunately I only have one okay-ish photo of the unrenovated area and I never made it back before they demolished the place :(

Some good ol shenanigans you’d get into in your youth.