A monkey cage and a bird aviary greeted families inside Ford City Center when it opened in 1965, set down in a building that two decades earlier had turned out engines for the B-29 bombers of World War II.
The mall did not replace the old factory so much as move into it. Shoppers parked on fields that had once held wartime production buildings and later rode down to a basement concourse threaded through the tunnels of a vanished defense plant.
For six decades, this was one of the largest enclosed shopping centers in Chicago and the anchor of retail life on the Southwest Side…