Walk the upper level of Northbrook Court on a weekday afternoon and you will pass more closed gates than open storefronts. The escalator still runs. The directory kiosk still lists brands that left months ago. Somewhere above what used to be the Apple store, a 14,000 square foot sports facility called Hi-Five Sports Zone is packing up basketball hoops sized for six year olds, the latest tenant to confirm it's out.
A few minutes away on Shermer Road, none of that shows. The sidewalks in front of Sunset Foods are full on a Saturday morning. A new coffee shop is mid-buildout at 1290 Shermer. The Wednesday farmers market has been running since mid-June and won't stop until mid-October. Northbrook Days, the five-day festival that has funded the Northbrook Civic Foundation's scholarships since 1950, just wrapped its 2026 run in Village Green Park.
Same town. Same summer. Two completely different stories about what's actually alive here.
The exits keep coming
Hi-Five Sports Zone told families in July that it will leave its Northbrook Court space this fall, more than seven years after it opened there in January 2019 with two basketball courts and a turf field built at kid scale. The company says it's opening new locations elsewhere on the North Shore. It did not need to say why it's leaving the mall. The mall has been telling that story on its own for a while.
In 2025 alone, Northbrook Court lost Apple, which closed on April 26 after two decades in the building, along with Lululemon, Sephora, Forever 21, Auntie Anne's and Louis Vuitton. Macy's had already gone in 2019, and the building itself was torn down afterward, leaving a cleared lot that has sat through years of planning without a shovel in the ground. As of this past July, the tenants still hanging on included Neiman Marcus, White House Black Market, Gap, AMC Theaters and DiPescara, according to reporting from NBC Chicago. That's roughly two dozen stores left inside a mall built in 1976 to anchor an entire regional shopping trip.
Neiman Marcus is worth pausing on. It opened at Northbrook Court on March 17, 1976, and it has never left, not through the Sears closure in 1983, not through the Macy's demolition, not through the wave of 2025 departures around it. Fifty years in the same spot makes it the single most stable thing left in the building. Everything else has turned over at least once, and most of it has turned over more than that.
The plan that keeps almost starting
Brookfield Properties has owned Northbrook Court since 1995, and the redevelopment conversation has been public since April 2023, when Brookfield presented a conceptual master plan to the Village Board calling for a mixed residential and retail district across the roughly 100-acre site. The Village and Brookfield signed a pre-development agreement that May, the Village Board approved zoning changes that fall, and by October 2023 the two sides had a formal Redevelopment and Economic Incentive Agreement on paper.
Then the order flipped. Rather than start with the retail overhaul Brookfield originally pitched, the company asked to build housing first, apartments, row houses and townhomes, and hold the commercial rebuild until later phases, once retail leasing hits agreed benchmarks tied to the incentive package. Village trustees signed off on the change.
Village President Kathryn Ciesla explained the sequencing this way when the shift was announced:
"The village gives the developer the opportunity to better respond to current market conditions and build momentum for the overall redevelopment."
That's a reasonable read on how a developer manages risk. It's also a fair description of a plan that has now spent three years being amended, resequenced and talked about in terms of momentum it hasn't yet visibly built. As of early 2026, the property still looked essentially the same as it did when the plan was first announced. You can read the Village's own project timeline, and it's a lot of dated milestones stacked one after another without a groundbreaking photo among them.
What's actually gone versus what's actually arrived
| Northbrook Court, 2025 to 2026 | Downtown Northbrook, 2024 to 2026 |
|---|---|
| Apple closes, April 26, 2025 | Hometown Coffee signs incentive deal for 1290 Shermer Rd, announced Nov. 2024 |
| Lululemon, Sephora, Forever 21, Auntie Anne's, Louis Vuitton close, 2025 | Sunset Foods anchors the Shermer & Church shopping plaza |
| Hi-Five Sports Zone confirms fall 2026 exit, announced July 2026 | Wednesday Farmers Market runs June 17 to Oct. 14, 2026 |
| Residential-first redevelopment still without a public groundbreaking date | Northbrook Days runs Aug. 5 to 9, 2026, nets funds for local scholarships |
Look at that table and the pattern is not subtle. One column is a list of departures with a plan attached that keeps not happening. The other is a list of things that opened, or are already running on schedule, without anyone needing to sign a business district incentive agreement to make it happen.
The mall was never the point
It's worth remembering that Northbrook Court was, at various points, the largest commercial contributor to the Village's tax base. Village officials noted in 2023 that it still generated about $5 million a year in property taxes even after a reported 20 percent drop in sales tax contribution between 2012 and 2021 and a 20 percent vacancy rate. That context matters for understanding why the Village has stayed patient through three years of resequencing. A property that size doesn't get abandoned lightly, even when it's clearly struggling.
But patience with a landlord's timeline is a different thing from watching a neighborhood's actual daily life. Sunset Foods didn't need a business district designation to draw a Saturday morning crowd. The farmers market didn't need a TIF agreement to start on time in June. Northbrook Days didn't wait on Brookfield's phasing decisions to put five nights of live music in Village Green Park, the same park that's known around town as the home of Little League Baseball and the Fourth of July celebration.
Hometown Coffee's arrival is a small example of the same pattern at a smaller scale. The company opened its first North Shore location in Glencoe in 2019, added Winnetka in 2021, and Lake Forest after that, before signing on for Northbrook in a deal the Village Board approved unanimously. That's four towns choosing to build in, one storefront at a time, while the biggest commercial property in Northbrook keeps waiting on a groundbreaking date that hasn't arrived.
What August actually shows you
If you wanted a single month that captured both threads at once, this is it. Hi-Five confirmed its exit in mid-July, one more name added to a list that already included some of the mall's most recognizable tenants. The farmers market is deep into its 2026 season, running every Wednesday through mid-October. Northbrook Days just closed out its five-day run, one more year of a tradition that's been part of downtown summers for decades and has quietly funneled close to $4 million back into the community since 1950.
None of that required a developer's master plan. None of it is waiting on a housing phase to unlock a retail phase to unlock the version of the mall everyone keeps describing as the eventual goal. It just happened, on schedule, the way it does most years.
The mall was built as the reason to drive to Northbrook. These days, the reason is a few minutes down Shermer Road, and it never asked anyone's permission to show up.
If you're watching how this part of the North Shore is actually changing, not just what's been proposed for it, the Northbrook neighborhood page has more on what the area looks like right now, and the North Shore overview puts Northbrook's shifts next to what's happening in Winnetka, Glencoe and Lake Forest. Matt Laricy and the team track these changes block by block, not because a mall's fate makes headlines, but because the towns around it don't wait for that fate to be decided.
