Grand Junction

Montgomery Ward: my mom worked for them in Grand Junction. They and Penny's were the only department stores, both then on Main Street. I even worked for Penny's one summer, selling lawnmowers mainly. Later there was a large mall west of Grand Jct. on Hwy 50 maybe a third of the way to Fruita.

That fits the pattern of a lot of smaller American cities perfectly. Montgomery Ward and J.C. Penney on Main Street would have been the department-store universe in Grand Junction, rather than the enormous suburban retail complexes that came later.

And selling lawnmowers at Penney's is a wonderfully specific summer job. I imagine that gave you a rather different perspective on retail than merely being a customer—particularly if somebody came in wanting to know why one mower was worth more than another.

The later mall you're remembering sounds very likely to be Mesa Mall, which opened in 1980 on the west side of Grand Junction along US 6/50 (now I-70 Business/US 6/50), toward Fruita. It was a major change from the old Main Street arrangement: the department stores moved out toward the highway, and shopping became something you drove to rather than something integrated into the downtown.

And that connects rather neatly with what we were discussing about the decline of malls. The mall didn't initially kill downtown department stores; the suburban mall was the thing that killed the old downtown retail model. Then, decades later, online shopping and the collapse of the department-store chains weakened the malls themselves. The retail landscape has rather impressively managed to eat its own children.

What happened with Mesa Mall?

Ah, Mesa Mall is actually a rather interesting counterexample to the "American mall apocalypse." It didn't die. It went through the normal department-store bloodbath, but because Grand Junction is such an isolated regional center, it has remained viable.

6

The mall opened in 1980, essentially creating a new retail center on the west side of town. It was a major blow to the older commercial corridors—Mesa County Libraries specifically notes that North Avenue began a gradual decline after Mesa Mall opened.

Then the familiar sequence occurred:

1. Mervyn's disappeared when the chain went bankrupt in 2008; its space eventually became Cabela's in 2010.

2. Herberger's closed in 2018 when Bon-Ton collapsed. Its enormous space was converted to Dick's Sporting Goods, opening in 2021.

3. Sears closed in 2018. Rather than leave the building sitting vacant, it was demolished and Dillard's built a new store there, opening in 2021.

4. The old Sports Authority space became HomeGoods.

5. Cabela's itself was subsequently converted to Bass Pro Shops in 2025.

And there's an important difference from many malls: Grand Junction is an unusually strong regional retail market for its size. It's hundreds of miles from Denver or Salt Lake City in practical shopping terms, and Mesa Mall draws not only Grand Junction but much of western Colorado and eastern Utah. The current owner calls it the only enclosed regional mall between Denver and Salt Lake City.

In fact, CBL Properties bought it in July 2025, along with three other regional malls, from Washington Prime Group, which had gone through bankruptcy. So someone looking at the American mall wreckage evidently thinks Mesa Mall is still worth owning.

It's also getting some surprisingly non-dead-mall tenants. Toys "R" Us returned to Grand Junction in 2025, occupying part of the old Joann space, and was intended as a permanent store rather than merely a Christmas pop-up.

So your recollection is quite interesting in retrospect. Mesa Mall really did what the classic enclosed mall was supposed to do: become the dominant shopping center for an entire region. It just happens that Grand Junction's "entire region" is enormous geographically and doesn't have another major city nearby to compete with it.

And I suspect that explains why you remember it as being out toward Fruita, rather than merely as another Grand Junction shopping center. It was deliberately positioned to catch the highway traffic and shoppers coming in from the western part of the valley.

But in spite of all the prettification, Main Street kinda died and North Avenue became night drag center (noisy cars, not queens).

Ha—night drag center, not drag-queen center. I got you.

That sounds like the classic sequence: the city prettifies downtown, perhaps gets some nice paving, landscaping, historic façades, cafés, and so forth, but the economic function that made Main Street important has already migrated elsewhere. Once the department stores and serious shopping moved to Mesa Mall, beautification could make Main Street pleasant without making it commercially central again.

North Avenue is an especially interesting consequence. A commercial arterial that has lost much of its daytime importance can acquire an entirely different nighttime culture—young people cruising, modified cars, loud exhausts, people meeting up, and police trying to discourage it. Essentially, the street becomes a social venue rather than a shopping street.

And I suspect you remember something else that gets lost in discussions of "downtown revitalization": a street can be much prettier and still be less important than it was when it was ugly, crowded, and full of department stores.

One of the best Japanese restaurants I ever ate at was on Main Street.

That actually makes the Main Street story more interesting. A good Japanese restaurant could survive perfectly well without the department-store shopping traffic, because people would make a deliberate trip there to eat.

And Grand Junction seems like exactly the sort of place where a genuinely good Japanese restaurant would stick in one's memory—small regional city, not an obvious destination for sophisticated Japanese food, and then suddenly there's a restaurant doing something much better than you expected.

Do you remember the name of it, or roughly when you ate there? If you give me either, I can see if I can identify it and find out what happened to it.

Sheesh! Doug and I went to Grand Junction several times to visit my folks in the 1970s and 80s.

Right, of course. 😄 I was treating this as if you were trying to reconstruct a long-forgotten restaurant, when you're simply remembering places you actually ate during repeated visits to your parents in the 1970s and ’80s.

That also puts the Mesa Mall/Main Street transition into a much more useful perspective. You saw Grand Junction before, during, and after the big suburban shift rather than encountering it as a historical question.

And the Japanese restaurant is therefore a particularly nice little detail: Main Street may have been commercially dying, but it could still contain a restaurant good enough that you and Doug remembered it decades later. That's rather different from saying downtown was simply "dead."

There was also a bar that was a gay bar on Thursdays.

Ah! That sounds very plausibly like Quincy’s. I checked, and there’s actually a nice bit of historical confirmation: a Grand Junction LGBTQ publication called The Paragon was carrying advertisements for Quincy Bar in the late 1980s, describing it as a “cruising place for gays and lesbians” and noting that it was straight before 8 p.m.

Quincy’s was at 609 Main Street, right downtown. Quincy Bar

So your memory of a Main Street bar having a designated gay night fits the local history very well. And the Thursday part may be particularly useful for identifying it, since gay bars in smaller cities often had one particular night rather than operating as exclusively gay establishments.

It's also rather amusing in retrospect: in a place the size of Grand Junction in the 1970s/80s, you didn't necessarily need a "gay district." You needed one bar and the knowledge of which night to show up.

Ah! That sounds very plausibly like Quincy’s. I checked, and there’s actually a nice bit of historical confirmation: a Grand Junction LGBTQ publication called The Paragon was carrying advertisements for Quincy Bar in the late 1980s, describing it as a “cruising place for gays and lesbians” and noting that it was straight before 8 p.m.

Quincy’s was at 609 Main Street, right downtown. Quincy Bar

So your memory of a Main Street bar having a designated gay night fits the local history very well. And the Thursday part may be particularly useful for identifying it, since gay bars in smaller cities often had one particular night rather than operating as exclusively gay establishments.

It's also rather amusing in retrospect: in a place the size of Grand Junction in the 1970s/80s, you didn't necessarily need a "gay district." You needed one bar and the knowledge of which night to show up.

Ah your map shows Grand Ave. and the bridge leading over to the posh Redlands. Went to first grade there.

Ah, the Redlands—that fills in the geography nicely. Grand Avenue and the bridge would have been the transition from the commercial part of Grand Junction into that rather more affluent residential world on the other side.

And first grade there means you knew Grand Junction long before Mesa Mall existed. So when you later visited your parents in the '70s and '80s, you were looking at a town that had changed quite substantially from the one you had known as a child: Main Street losing its old retail dominance, the mall drawing the shopping, and North Avenue acquiring its nocturnal automotive population.

There's something oddly satisfying about seeing the map and suddenly having the geography snap back into place after sixty or seventy years.