A vintage postcard shows St. Gabriel’s Passionist Monastery, which was built in the 1920s in northwest Des Moines.
By Dave Elbert
Just over a century ago, in 1923, St. Gabriel’s Passionist Monastery was established in northwest Des Moines on 47 acres of serene gardens with a grotto. The city grew up around it over the years, and in 1955 the rector, the Rev. Ignatius Bechtold, got a call from a Chicago real estate developer named Bernard Greenbaum, who was considering seven possible locations for a suburban-style shopping mall.
So begins the story of Merle Hay Mall, the granddaddy of Iowa shopping centers.
Today, as the mall pushes onward with more than 70 stores, restaurants and entertainment options and a new plan to attract nontraditional users, it’s worth examining how the mall started and how it has endured.
Three words explain Merle Hay Mall’s success: focused, consistent ownership. The same family has owned it from Day One. And while that can be a recipe for inaction, that’s not the case here.
A year after that first phone call to the rector, Chicago investors paid $550,000 to purchase the monastery on the northwest corner of Merle Hay Road and Douglas Avenue.
Greenbaum and lead investor Joseph Abbell were recruited by Chicago-based Sears Roebuck & Co. and Des Moines-based Younkers Department Stores to build shopping centers in both Cedar Rapids and Des Moines. But when zoning disputes tangled the project in Cedar Rapids, the team focused on Des Moines, where the monastery property checked all the boxes: developable land, a good location at a major intersection and, most important, proximity to the proposed Interstates 80 and 35.
The original name was Northland Shopping Center. But in 1957, a few months before construction on the $8 million project began, the name was changed to Merle Hay Plaza to honor the young man from Glidden who was the first Iowan killed in combat in World War I.
At opening day in 1959, six buildings offered 615,000 square feet of retail space, with parking for 4,000 cars. The bookend stores were Younkers and Sears with 30 smaller shops and restaurants in between, including Bishop’s Buffet, a Safeway grocery store, a drug store, a dime store, two jewelry stores, three shoe stores and a bowling alley. A retail economist later said it was like someone dug up an Iowa Main Street and transported it to the edge of Des Moines.
The open-air mall was enclosed in 1972. Many evolutions and expansions followed, along with a major tragedy.
On Sunday morning Nov. 5, 1978, before Younkers had opened, a bizarre explosion and flash fire involving mechanical equipment and bad wiring swept through the two-story store and killed 10 employees. Two days later, Abbell, the mall owner, assured customers the store would be rebuilt. It reopened 11 months later.
By then, Abbell, an accountant and lawyer, was the mall’s majority investor and chief spokesman. When he died in 2000 at the age of 89, leadership passed to his granddaughter, a Chicago attorney named Elizabeth Holland.
Her biggest challenge came in 2004, when Jordan Creek Town Center opened in West Des Moines. In all 150 retailers, including 12 anchor stores, filled 1.3 million square feet.
Merle Hay Mall responded and grew to 1.2 million square feet and added new amenities. Today, a $26 million expansion plan includes entertainment and hotel options, along with recreational venues for pickleball, indoor soccer, ice skating and volleyball.
As Holland has explained, the goal is to “massively expand the universe of potential users.”
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