Drive past 112 Eisenhower Parkway on a Tuesday night and you will find a locked building, dark windows, and a parking lot with more potholes than cars. Barnes & Noble closed its doors there on July 15, the last tenant standing after Macy's cleared out earlier this year. Livingston Mall, open since 1972, is now fully shuttered.
Keep driving two minutes down the same road and you will find something else entirely. At 277 Eisenhower Parkway, inside a 285-seat dining room with a retractable-roof loggia, tables are full by 6:30. Blu Livingston opened in May, the second location for a hospitality group best known for its Weehawken waterfront restaurant, and the bet paid off before the mall's own future had been decided by anyone.
That is the part of the story most people miss. The conversation about Livingston tends to collapse into one question: what happens to the mall. But the more useful question, if you already live here and want to know what your Wednesday nights actually look like, is different. Livingston's evening life did not wait for an answer. It rebuilt itself on the same corridor, under the same zip code, while the anchor building sat empty.
The Mall Stopped Mattering Financially Before It Stopped Mattering Physically
Here is a number worth sitting with. In 2010, Livingston Mall generated close to $5.2 million in property tax revenue for the township. By 2024, before the last tenant even left, that figure had fallen to $1.46 million, about 0.7 percent of everything the town collects in taxes. The mall's financial weight had already evaporated years before Macy's announced its closure as part of a national round of "underproductive" store cuts.
That timeline matters if you are trying to figure out what the closure actually means for Livingston. It is not a sudden hole in the town's finances. It is the final, visible step in a decline that was already priced in. Rutgers economist James Hughes placed Livingston Mall in the bottom tier of New Jersey's roughly 25 enclosed malls in a late 2025 analysis, a category he said has no real future as a regional shopping destination. The Mall at Short Hills, a few miles down the same road, remains in the top tier. Same corridor, same era of construction, two entirely different outcomes.
Sixteen Acres Have A Plan. Forty-Three Don't.
The township designated the mall property an "Area in Need of Redevelopment" back in October 2024, and the only piece of the puzzle that has actually moved is the 16 acres once occupied by Sears. That parcel is approved for 376 housing units, a mix of one and two-bedroom apartments plus up to 81 townhouses, with 20 percent required to be set aside as affordable housing. In exchange, the township agreed not to require housing on the remaining acreage.
That remaining acreage, roughly 43 acres, has no approved plan as of this writing. A planning firm called Topology produced a conceptual rendering after a series of community visioning sessions in 2025, but no site plans have been submitted to the planning board and no hearing date has been announced. If you are the kind of resident who checks in on this every few months expecting news, the honest answer is that there isn't any yet.
The Same Street, A Different Bet
What makes Blu Livingston's arrival worth noting is not the menu, though the house-made pastas and the wine program built around boutique labels are the kind of details Livingston hasn't had much of before. It is the timing. A hospitality group chose to sink real capital into a 285-seat space on Eisenhower Parkway in the exact stretch of road most associated with retail failure. That is not the behavior of a business betting against the neighborhood. It is a business betting that the neighborhood's dinner crowd was never actually tied to the mall's fortunes in the first place.
They are not alone in that bet. A few minutes away on South Livingston Avenue, Vette Ristorante opened inside the longtime Calabria building, adding a fine-dining Italian menu under chef and sommelier Maurizio de Rosa to a corridor that already had Nero's Grille, now in its 55th year, and Panevino, which has been serving wood-fired pizza and running its bocce courts for three decades. The Wonder food hall, which brought nearly twenty different food concepts under one roof on Town Center Way, arrived even earlier and quietly proved the appetite was there before Blu ever broke ground.
None of these businesses needed the mall to be healthy. They needed Livingston residents to keep eating out, which they clearly have.
The Township Calendar Never Waited On Retail
The same pattern holds for how residents actually spend a summer evening here, and it has nothing to do with what's happening at 112 Eisenhower Parkway. The Livingston Recreation and Senior Services Department runs its own calendar independent of any storefront, and this month it is still going. Movie nights at the Oval in Memorial Park continue through the end of August, with A League of Their Own screening this Wednesday, August 19, and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie closing out the season on August 26. Earlier in the summer, the same lawn hosted a Chalk the Walk sidewalk art event, an Asian Cultural Showcase, a Makers Fest built around STEAM projects, and a performance by the Livingston Symphony Orchestra. None of it required a mall to exist.
There is a piece of the old mall that has already found a second life, and it sits somewhere you might not expect. Up at Riker Hill Art Park, a former Nike missile tracking base turned into 38 working artist studios, a pair of whale tail sculptures greet visitors near the entrance. They were donated by Livingston Mall back in 1991, decades before anyone was debating its redevelopment. The park itself opens its studios to the public twice a year, and the next Open Studios weekend falls on the first weekend of November, worth marking down if you have not been.
That detail is a useful way to think about where this is headed. A piece of federal land that once tracked incoming missiles became an arts community because Livingston kept finding new uses for property that had outlived its original purpose. The mall's 43 acres are still working through that same process, just more slowly and with more zoning meetings involved.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
If your mental map of Livingston still has a working mall at its center, it is worth updating. The retail anchor is gone and the redevelopment answer is still months, possibly years, away. But the actual rhythm of the town, where people eat on a Wednesday night, where they take their kids for a free movie, where the summer's cultural calendar happens, was never dependent on that building in the first place. It moved to Eisenhower Parkway's newer addresses and to a recreation department calendar that runs on its own schedule. The mall's next chapter will matter for what gets built on that land eventually. It has already stopped mattering for how Livingston spends its evenings.
If you're weighing what a changing Eisenhower Parkway corridor might mean for your own address, or you're simply curious what your home is worth in a town whose center of gravity keeps shifting, Shannon Xavier knows this stretch of Essex County closely and is glad to talk it through. Schedule your concierge consultation whenever you're ready.
