Grove Mall

Grove Mall was a community-oriented shopping center located near the southwest corner of Arlington Heights Road and Biesterfield Road in Elk Grove Village. It wasn’t a big regional mall like Woodfield or Oakbrook, but rather a smaller, neighborhood-serving retail strip that was an important local hub before the bigger shopping centers and developments took over.

What It Was Like

Anchor Store: A Jewel Food Store was the dominant anchor tenant for many years, operating in the center from the early 1960s until 1987. After Jewel moved out to a newer location across the street at Elk Crossing, that space sat mostly empty. CaseMine

Other Tenants: The center included a mix of small businesses typical of mid-century suburban retail — a hardware store (Ace), local clothing shops, a barber, a pet store, the Elk Grove Lounge, and later a Walgreens. Academic Dictionaries and Encyclopedias

It was a one-story, strip-style cluster of storefronts with surface parking, built at a time when Elk Grove Village was rapidly transitioning from farmland to suburb. The Guardian

Community Role

For decades, Grove Mall was where local residents did everyday shopping — grocery runs at Jewel, picking up prescriptions or snacks at drug stores, and stopping at independent shops that catered to the neighborhood.

It reflected a pre-big-box, pre-mega-mall era of retail, when communities had smaller, walkable shopping clusters rather than large enclosed malls.

Decline and Closure

The center began declining after Jewel left in 1987, moving to the newer Elk Crossing Shopping Center across Arlington Heights Road. CaseMine

With its key tenant gone and competitive retail developments nearby, Grove Mall gradually lost businesses.

By the early 1990s, the center was mostly shuttered and was eventually closed and demolished to make way for redevelopment as part of what became Elk Grove’s evolving downtown/retail landscape. familypedia.fandom.com

Local Memory

Many residents who grew up in that period remember Grove Mall less as a big mall and more as the local retail heart of the village — a place where you ran errands and bumped into neighbors, anchored by Jewel’s grocery store and surrounded by the kinds of shops that don’t always survive big retail shifts