Standing on Dixie Highway on the west side of Harvey, Illinois, sits a graded, empty 39-acre lot that used to be an enclosed shopping mall.
Dixie Square Mall opened here in stages during 1966, anchored by Montgomery Ward and JCPenney. By 1970, a discount store, Turn Style, had joined the east side and taken the building past 800,000 square feet.
The mall was renamed Dixie Mall in 1975. The mall kept emptying anyway, and the concourses closed in November 1978. The complex lasted another 33 years, mostly abandoned…