Livingston's Mall Went Dark This Summer. The Corridor Didn't.

Drive down Eisenhower Parkway on a Friday night this August and the old mall building sits the way it has for weeks now: unlit, doors chained, parking lot empty enough that you could count the light poles without losing track. Keep driving another few minutes, though, and you hit a different kind of crowd entirely. Valet attendants working the lot at Blu Livingston. A wait for a table at Vette Ristorante at Calabria on South Livingston Avenue. Neither of those restaurants existed a year ago. Both are now among the hardest reservations in town.

That contrast is the story, and it is not the one most people assume when they talk about the mall closing. The instinct is to read a shuttered anchor as decline. What actually happened in Livingston over the past year is closer to a relocation. The town's commercial center of gravity didn't shrink. It moved a few hundred yards down the road, and it moved fast.

Fifty-four years, then nothing

Livingston Mall opened in stages starting in 1971, and for more than five decades it was the retail anchor for this stretch of Essex County. That run ended this summer. Macy's, the mall's last major department store, closed in mid-March 2026 as part of a 14-store national closure round the company announced back in January. Then, on July 15, 2026, Barnes & Noble closed its mall location too, and for the first time since the building opened, the mall was left with zero operating tenants.

The path there had been building for years. Sears left. Lord & Taylor left. Smaller tenants left in waves. The township designated the property an "Area in Need of Redevelopment with Condemnation" back in October 2024, which gave officials the authority to pursue redevelopment plans and, if it comes to that, eminent domain. One piece of that plan already has legal teeth: 15.8 acres on the old Sears site are approved under a Fair Share Housing settlement for 376 units of housing, a mix of one- and two-bedroom apartments and up to 81 townhouses. The other roughly 43 acres of the property still have no approved plan. Nobody has filed a site plan for it yet.

So the honest answer to "what's happening at the mall" right now is: nothing, officially, for a while longer. But that answer only matters if you assume the mall was still where Livingston's evenings were happening. It wasn't, and it hadn't been for a year.

What actually opened while the anchors were leaving

Start with Vette Ristorante at Calabria, which opened at 588 South Livingston Avenue in the fall of 2025, months before Macy's even announced its closure. The building has housed Calabria Restaurant & Pizzeria for more than 40 years, a spot residents already knew for its thin-crust pizza and, more randomly, for a Dave Portnoy review that the owners credit with helping the business through a rough post-pandemic stretch. When the restaurant side of Calabria closed during COVID, chef and sommelier Maurizio de Rosa, who had known the building's owners Joe and Dino for years, saw an opening. De Rosa is Naples-born with more than three decades of experience across New York and Buenos Aires, and he built Vette as a fine-dining reinvention of the space, Naples-inspired handmade pastas alongside a wine list that draws on his sommelier background. The restaurant runs three separate dining rooms that can handle private parties from 10 up to 150 guests, which tells you this was built to be a destination for the kind of dinners that used to require a drive into the city.

Then, on May 1, 2026, Blu Livingston opened at 277 Eisenhower Parkway, the same road the mall sits on. This is the Livingston outpost of Blu on the Hudson, the Weehawken restaurant that built a reputation on skyline views, seafood towers, and reservations that are famously hard to get. The Livingston location was designed by Peggy Leung Design, whose portfolio includes Scarpetta and TAO Las Vegas, and the space includes three distinct dining rooms plus a four-season loggia with a retractable roof and floor-to-ceiling windows. It seats 285. The wine program, run by general manager Adam Greer, carries the same Wine Spectator Award of Excellence that Blu on the Hudson earned in 2025.

Put those two dates next to each other and the sequence gets interesting. Vette opened in the fall, quietly, in a building most residents already associated with pizza night. Macy's closed that winter. Blu Livingston opened that spring, six weeks later, in a building purpose-built for date nights and celebrations. Barnes & Noble closed in July, leaving the mall with nothing. In under a year, Livingston went from having its evenings organized around a shopping mall to having them organized around two restaurants that didn't exist before.

The old guard never left, either

None of this happened at the expense of the restaurants that were already doing fine. Nero's Grille is celebrating its 55th year this year, still running on the same formula of familiar Italian-American cooking that's kept it a neighborhood fixture since long before either new arrival broke ground. Mezza Mediterranean is still importing its own pita and making hummus to order. Panevino, thirty years in, still has its wood-burning pizza oven, its Caputo flour shipped from Italy, and its two outdoor bocce courts. Assado Steakhouse is still BYOB.

That matters because it means the story isn't "Livingston traded old restaurants for new ones." It's additive. The town added two significant dining destinations in under twelve months without any of the existing spots losing their footing, which is a different kind of local economy than the one a dying mall usually leaves behind.

The part that ties it together

Here's the detail that makes this more than a coincidence of timing. Barnes & Noble isn't disappearing from Livingston. It signed a lease in January 2026 for a new location in Livingston Shopping Center, a different commercial stretch of town, with an opening targeted for mid-to-late 2027. In other words, the last tenant to leave the mall building did exactly what the restaurants had already done a year earlier: it left the mall for a different corridor in the same town, rather than leaving Livingston altogether.

That's the actual shape of what's happening here. The mall isn't taking Livingston's commercial life down with it. The commercial life relocated first, quietly, to South Livingston Avenue and Eisenhower Parkway, and the retailers are now following the same path out the door. Whatever eventually gets built on those remaining 43 acres, and however long that takes, the town has already answered the more immediate question. If you're wondering where Livingston actually spends its Friday nights these days, it isn't in a dark parking lot off Eisenhower Parkway. It's a few minutes down the road, and you'll probably need a reservation.

If you're watching how a town's day-to-day center shifts like this, it's usually one of the clearer signals of where a neighborhood is headed next, long before any of it shows up in a market report. If you're curious what a shift like this means for home values or timing on the Livingston side of Essex County, Best in Showing puts together a free, no-obligation home valuation that factors in exactly this kind of on-the-ground context. Get Your Free Home Valuation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.