Find excellent shopping in Westchester County. Westchester, NY is home to some of the best department stores, discount clothing stores, women's clothing and men's clothing stores, stores featuring 'back to school sales' for kids and great shopping for children of all ages.

The shopping centers and malls in Westchester, New York offer a wide range of shopping opportunities. Shop at medium to high-end department stores, upscale clothing shops, discount clothing stores, specialty retail stores, brand stores, and one-of-a-kind mom and pop shops. Find kids clothes, school uniforms, shoes, and great buys on toys, clothes, and more at stores in Westchester. Shop at Westchester malls and shopping centers located in Southern, Middle, and Northern Westchester County. Go shopping for

Women's clothing in Armonk, NY
Women's clothing in Bedford Hills, NY
Women's clothing in Hartsdale, NY
Women's clothing in Katonah, NY
Women's clothing in Mohegan Lake, NY
Women's clothing in Mount Kisco, NY
Women's clothing in New Rochelle, NY
Women's clothing in Rye Brook, NY
Women's clothing in Scarsdale, NY
Women's clothing in White Plains, NY
Women's clothing in Yonkers, NY
Women's clothing in Yorktown Heights, NY

Visit Westchester Malls & Shopping. Find a fabulous selection of brand name stores, women & men's fashion stores, boutiques, department stores and your favorite specialty store.

For the best in upscale shopping, visit The Westchester and have a fabulous shopping experience. With total sky-lighting above, marble and carpeted floors below, sculptures and unequaled customer service, The Westchester is home to New York State's first Nordstrom, Neiman-Marcus, and more than 150 fine upscale stores offering Accessories, Cards, Books, & Stationery, Children's Fashions, Home Furnishings, Jewelry, Luggage, Men's & Women's Fashions.

Enjoy shopping in the quaint River Towns of Westchester, New York. Visit specialty shops in Hastings-on-Hudson, Dobbs Ferry, Irvington-on-Hudson, Tarrytown, Sleepy Hollow, and Peekskill all offering unique shopping opportunities.

Plan a getaway weekend and spend a day shopping in the boutique clothing stores, furniture stores, galleries, and one-of-a-kind stores located in quaint and charming villages. If you love antiquing, find

Antique stores Chappaqua
Antique stores Larchmont
Antique stores Mamaroneck
Antique stores Mount Kisco
Antique stores Rye
Antique stores Scarsdale

Ardsley-on-Hudson, NY
Briarcliff Manor, NY
Croton-on-Hudson, NY
Dobbs Ferry, NY
Hastings-on-Hudson, NY
Irvington-on-Hudson, NY
Katonah, NY
Jefferson Valley, NY
City of Peekskill, NY
Sleepy Hollow, NY
Tarrytown, NY

Visit malls and shopping centers in Westchester. Find a fabulous selection of shopping centers, malls and department stores in White Plains and Yonkers located in the lower-Hudson Valley. White Plains, NY is home to malls, fabulous department stores and shopping centers. White Plains shopping includes The Westchester Mall, Galleria Mall and Bloomingdales, and White Plains City Center, offering 1.1 million-square-foot retail, entertainment and residential complex.

For upscale shopping, visit The Westchester and have a fantastic shopping experience. With total skylighting above, marble and carpeted floors below, sculptures and unequaled customer service, The Westchester is home to New York State's first Nordstrom, Neiman-Marcus and more than 150 fine upscale stores offering Accessories, Cards, Books, & Stationery, Children's Fashions, Home Furnishings, Jewelry, Luggage, Men's & Women's Fashions. Find all of your favorite shops at The Westchester in White Plains.

Stop by for lunch at one of White Plains many excellent restaurants; or pamper yourself at the Salon & Spa. Shopping in White Plains, Westchester's premier shopping area, will not disappoint.

Southern Westchester County offers the largest shopping center in Westchester County. The Cross County Shopping Center with over 1 million square feet of retail space, is Westchester's largest mall. Cross County also offers Multiplex Cinemas featuring stadium seating and digital sound. Anchor stores at Cross County include: Sears, Macy's, and a Super Stop & Shop.

For fabulous designer brands at bargain prices, visit Marshalls at the Mall at Cross County. Buy women's clothing at a discount at

Marshalls in Bedford Hills
Marshalls in Hartsdale
Marshalls in New Rochelle
Marshalls in Pelham Manor
Marshalls in Yonkers

Brief History of Shopping Malls, Shopping Centers, and Factory Outlets
Northgate in Seattle, Washington was the first regional shopping center to officially be called a mall. Northgate opened on April 21, 1950 and was the first regional shopping center in the United States to be described as a mall, due to its double row of stores facing each other across a covered pedestrian walkway. Northgate was also the first mall to have public restrooms.

The evolution of shopping malls, factory outlets, shopping centers, shopping plazas . . . have evolved and grown for more than half a century. Today, many of these malls are far larger than many towns and cities in the world.

Today, in 2009, Asia is home to seven of the world's 10 largest malls . . . South China Mall, Dongguan, China opened in 2005. South China Mall's the gross leasable area is 7.1 million square feet. The space includes wind mills and theme parks, plus a replica of the Arc de Triomphe.

SM Mall of Asia opened in 2009 and is located in Pasay City, Philippines. The gross leasable area is: 4.2 million square feet. This mall includes the first Olympic-sized swimming pool and first IMAX theater in the Philippines. The mall is spread over four buildings and visitors can move throughout the mall on a 20-seat tram.

Mall of America opened in 1992 and is located in Bloomington, MN. The mall is 2.5 million sq. feet and has earned a national reputation for entertaining guests. From musical acts to celebrity book signing to fashion show, Mall of America is the Hollywood of the Midwest. Mall of America has been described as a city within a city. Along with an extensive range of retail, restaurants, and entertainment, there are many unique features in this mall that may be found in any American community. This mall offers education classes, fitness training and more.

Let's go back to a brief history of the Northgate Shopping Mall. "On April 21, 1950, the Northgate Shopping Mall opens at NE Northgate Way at 5th Avenue NE in Seattle. Planned by developers Rex Allison and Ben B. Ehrlichman (1895-1971) and designed by John Graham Jr. (1908-1991), it is the country's first regional shopping center defined as a "mall" (although there were at least three predecessor shopping centers). The stores face "a wide shopping walkway, probably to be known as the Mall or Plaza, in which no vehicles will be permitted" (The Seattle Times) . . .

"Northgate was the brainchild of Rex Allison, president of Bon Marché. Before World War II, he envisioned a suburban shopping center. The economic boom following Allied victory in 1945 allowed Allied Stores, the firm that owned Bon Marché, to involve developers Ben B. Ehrlichman and W. Walter Williams (1894-1983), who formed the Suburban Co. (later The Northgate Co.). They retained architect John H. Graham Jr. to design the project and announced their plans in February 1948. In 1949, Allied bought out Ehrlichman and Williams and appointed James B. Douglas (1909-2005) to run the project as president."

The above information about Northgate was sourced from David Wilma, August 02, 2001

Evolution of the Shopping Center
"The antecedents of the modern shopping center were the ancient agoras and medieval piazzas of European cities. The industrial revolution of the nineteenth century produced the department store but made cities crowded and dirty, and the desire to improve life by moving away from the city gave birth to the suburb and shopping mall . . .

1916 Chicago architect Arthur Aldis persuaded wealthy residents of Lake Forest, Illinois, and investors such as Cyrus H. McCormick, Jr., to form the Lake Forest Improvement Trust to build Market Square, an integrated shopping complex of 28 stores, 12 office units, 30 apartments, gymnasium, clubhouse and landscaping. According to Richard Longstreth, "The automobile was a central factor in this planning, since most Lake Foresters had cars at an early date. Market Square was perhaps the first business district to be laid out specifically to accommodate motor vehicles." (p. 152) The National Register of Historic Places has listed Market Square as the first planned shopping district in the United States.

1922 J. C. Nichols created Country Club Plaza on the outskirts of Kansas City, Missouri, as an automobile-centered plaza built according to a unified plan rather than as a random group of stores, owned and operated by a single entity who leased space to tenants. Nichols would make the term shopping center popular . . .

. . . 1928 Don M. Casto opened Grandview Avenue Shopping Center in Columbus, Ohio, with 4 supermarkets (Piggly-Wiggly, A&P, Kroger, Polumbos) and 20 other stores and parking for 400 cars. Grandview became a model for the auto-accessible strip mall. In New Jersey, Radburn was built as a planned city with parks and walkways and decentralized shopping areas.

1929 Westwood Village opened as a shopping center for the "second Hollywood" of Westwood built on the site of the 3300-acre Rancho San Jose de Buenos Aires between Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, purchased in 1919 by department store owner Arthur Letts (Broadway, Bullocks), and developed by his son-in-law Harold Janss as a housing tract after 1922, including the sale of 384 acres to UCLA in 1926 for a university campus that opened 1929, and a shopping center of 34 stores in 1929 that grew to 452 stores by 1939.

1930 Strawbridge & Clothier department store in Philadelphia built a branch store at Suburban Square in Ardmore on the Main Line. In many cities, department stores became the leading force in building suburban shopping centers.

1931 The Highland Park Shopping Village designed by Hugh Prather in Dallas was a Mediterranean-style shopping center with storefronts facing an inner parking lot.

1935 Greenbelt, Maryland, was built by the New Deal as a planned community including stores, but not organized as a shopping center.

1938 - Silver Spring Shopping Center in Silver Spring, MD, was an early neighborhood center of 19 stores anchored by a grocery store and the Silver Theatre, with an off-street parking lot, designed by John Eberson.

1939 The Wisstein Brothers and Surval project opened on South Broadway in Los Angeles, a neighborhood center that appealed to chain stores such as the drugstore (Owl, Sontag, Thrifty) and the supermarket (Von's, Ralphs) and the variety store (Kress, Woolworth, Newberry) seeking to build away from urban congestion on well-travelled streets accessible by automobile, each center providing a small parking lot for 100-300 cars.

1943 Linda Vista Shopping Center in San Diego was built by the Department of Treasury for the government housing project that served Reuben Fleet's Consolidated Aircraft workers in World War II, and it was one of the first shopping centers designed as a unique space, separate from the streets and the houses, using a hollow square design for 82,000 sq. ft. on a block of land with landscaped green and pedestrian walks, but limited parking space for only 216 cars. Similar shopping centers would be developed in World War II for defense housing projects, such as Westchester in Los Angeles and Willow Run in Detroit.

. . .1949 Don M. Casto opened the Town & Country in the suburb of Whitehall east of Columbus. "Nighttime shopping was inaugurated at Town & Country Shopping Center in Columbus, Ohio, when developer Don Casto hired Grandma Carver (a woman who dived from a 90-foot perch into a 4-foot pool of flaming water), to perform her act in the lighted parking lot, bringing shopping center promotion to a new level." (ICSC 2000)

1950 Northgate opened near Seattle on April 21, the first regional shopping center defined as a mall. Anchored by a Bon Marche department store, it provided 800,000 sq. ft. for stores arranged in a linear pattern along a 44-foot wide pedestrian walkway, or "mall" that would become the center spine of all future regional shopping centers. The word came from the British game of pall-mall, or "ball and mallett" combining elements of croquet and golf, played since the 1500s on a wide fairway green.

1950 The drive-in grew in popularity as cars and suburbs shifted population away from center cities; the Campus Drive-In near San Diego State University featured a 50-foot-high neon majorette.

1951 Valley Plaza opened as the first shopping center designed to be built near major freeways, anchored by a Sears store, located in the rapidly growing suburbs of the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles.

1952 Lakewood Center opened 7 miles north of Long Beach near a Douglas Aircraft factory as one of the largest shopping malls in Southern California, with 100 stores and parking for 12,000 cars on 154 acres, anchored by a 350,000 sq. ft. May Co. department store with 2 supermarkets at each end of the linear center. In the next 8 years, 13 other regional malls would be built in the Los Angeles area.

1953 Cherry Creek Shopping Center in Denver opened, planned by architect Temple Buell since 1946, under construction since 1950, anchored by Denver Dry Goods on one side of First Avenue and in 1954 by Buell's metal-trimmed Sears Roebuck store on the other side of First Avenue.

1954 Austrian-born Victor Gruen designed Northland, near Detroit, with 110 stores in 1,192,000 sq. ft. on 2 levels, in a cluster arrangement surrounded by parking lot, modeled on the agora, the town squares of ancient Greece. "Gruen, a refugee who had fled the Nazis and arrived in New York in 1938 with $8 in his pocket and little more than his T-square in his luggage, had worked on some of those early open-air shopping centers. Then Detroit's J. L. Hudson department store chain commissioned him to design a center 8 miles away from its flagship downtown store to take advantage of the recent suburban developments spawned by the city's postwar expressways. In 1954, when it opened, the Northland Center was the world's largest shopping mall." (US News 12/27/99)

1956 Victor Gruen's 95-acre two-level Southdale Center Mall opened Oct. 8 in Edina, MN, near Minneapolis, the first fully enclosed shopping center, with a constant climate-controlled temperature of 72 degrees, inspired by the design of the Galleria Vittoria Emanuele designed and built by architect Giuseppe Mengoni 1865-77 in Milan, Italy. In Maryland, James Rouse opened in October the Mondawmin Mall west of Baltimore.

1957 International Council of Shopping Centers was founded with a membership of 36. The first chairman of the ICSC Board was Leonard L. Farber who had developed suburban strip centers from his New York company headquarters. Albert Sussman was elected the ICSC president 1958-86 . . .

. . . 1962 - Victor Gruen designed the downtown Midtown Plaza for Rochester, NY, opened April 1962, on 7 acres with 2 department stores, McCurdy's and Forman's, at a cost $35 million, "the single largest private investment in America's downtown retailing since World War II " (Hardwick p. 201) Gruen's Randhurst Shopping Center in Mount Prospect near Chicago also opened this year, considered at that time the world's largest shopping center with 1 million sq ft and 3 department stores under a giant dome . . .

. . . 1967 Ernest W. Hahn opened his first regional shopping center, La Cumbre Plaza in Santa Barbara, California. In Maryland, the Rouse Company built the planned community of Columbia and made it the headquarters of the company. The Rouse Company became one of the largest mall builders in the East, as the Ernest Hahn Company would become in the West .

. . . 1972 After 20 years of steadily expanding construction, the United States had a total of 13,174 shopping centers.

1973 The Hahn Co. built the Parkway Plaza shopping center in El Cajon that included a three-screen United Artists theater (closed in 1989).

1974 Westminster Mall opened south of Los Angeles, the last regional mall built with a huge central court.

1975 Fox Hills Mall opened in Los Angeles, the first 3-level mall in Calfornia. Westwood Mall opened near Houston. . .

. . . 1977 - Roy Ramond founded Victoria's Secret lingerie store in San Francisco, and after being sold in 1982 to The Limited corporation, expanded rapidly into shopping centers, with 1000 stores by 2005. . .

. . . 1990 The decade of the 1980s saw the construction of more than 16,000 shopping centers. A Gallup poll showed Americans averaged four trips to a regional or neighborhood mall per month.

1992 Sara Donovan, founder of WalkSport America, began promoting "mall walking," later wrote book "Mall Walking Madness" in 2002.

1993 Shaheen Sadeghi built The Lab in Costa Mesa CA as an "anti-mall" from a former canning factory; and he built The Camp in 2002 in Costa Mesa for outdoor shoppers with five buildings and landscaping simulating a desert and meadow and forest, called "a shopping playground."

1994 The Westfield Company of Australia purchased CenterMark for $1 billion, giving it ownership of 19 regional malls, adding to its American properties that included the purchase of Macy's shopping centers in 1986 for $363 million. In 1998 Westfield purchased TrizecHahn to become the largest owner of regional malls in California, Maryland, and Connecticut.

1995 The first megaplex theater (defined as 14 screens or more) opened in May in Dallas with a 24-screen AMC palace; in November, Edwards opened a 21-screen megaplex at Irvine Spectrum Center, at a cost of $27-million for 158,000 square feet with 6,400 seats and a 3D IMAX.

1996 AMC opened the largest megaplex in the nation, a 30-screen, 5,700 seat theater in Ontario CA. "At the 200-store Ontario Mills Mall, a new concept called "interactive shoppertainment" specifically targets parents, dating couples, families and kids. The lure; do everything from ogling bobcats and lizards at an on-site museum to skiing in virtual reality video game." (Sun-Times 3/21/99)

1997 Pacific Theatres opened a $15 million, 15-screen multiplex theater near Horton Plaza in the Gaslamp Quarter of San Diego. Gene Kemp completed the renovation of the Fashion Valley mall in San Diego, originally built in 1969 by Ernest Hahn, increasing its size to 1,700,000 sq. ft. and 205 stores, adding 5 parking structures to accommodate 8000 cars.

2000 Factory outlet centers became one of the fastest-growing segments of the shopping center industry in the 1990s. Anderson-Little in 1936 began the first factory outlet store for its men's clothing overstock . . . By 1987 there were 108 factory outlet malls, by 1999 there were 278 outlet centers.

2005 According to Emil Pocock, the largest shopping center in the world was the Golden Resources Shopping Mall in Beijing, China, with 7,300,000 square feet total area. The largest mall in North America was West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada, with 5,500,000 sq. ft. and 20,000 parking spaces. The largest shopping mall in the United States was Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, with 4,200,000 sq. ft., parking for 12,500 cars, and a seven-acre amusement park, nightclubs, restaurants.

2006 - Otay Ranch Town Center will open in October on 85 acres off Olympic Parkway in the boomtown of Chula Vista. As a "lifestyle mall," it will combine some aspects of a regional mall with an old-fashioned town square. In its first phase, it will have 80 specialty stores, mostly upscale; possibly a Nordstrom department store; and several restaurants, including P.F. Chang's China Bistro and The Cheesecake Factory. In its second phase in 2008, it will add an additional 20 specialty stores and possibly another upper-end department store . . . The developer is Chicago-based General Growth Properties, who have calculated that an estimated 70,000 people cross the border each day, and 63 percent of them come to shop.

Source: Timeline history Schoenherr, Steven E. Evolution of the Shopping Center [Feb. 17, 2006]