Ford City Mall Faces Forced Shutdown Over Safety Concerns

A Cook County judge gave Ford City Mall’s owner one week Thursday to produce a workable safety plan or face a forced shutdown of the 7601 S. Cicero Ave. property in Chicago’s West Lawn neighborhood.

Cook County Circuit Judge Leonard Murray stopped short of ordering an immediate closure but didn’t hide his frustration. He continued the city’s emergency vacate motion while warning that time’s up for Namdar Realty Group, the New York-based company that bought the mall for $16.6 million back in 2019.

“My expectation is that you will have a meeting of the minds over the next seven days,” Murray said. “Let’s get to the bottom of this if we can, but if not, my job is to save lives, and it may well require the shutting down of this structure in order to prevent loss of life to anyone.”

That’s not a suggestion. Murray also shot down a request from a JCPenney representative who wanted 30 days to respond to the emergency motion. He wasn’t interested.

Chicago filed the emergency motion on April 10, 2026, pointing to a broken fire suppression system as the central threat. The filing described conditions inside the mall as an “imminent health and safety risk to commercial tenants and occupants.” Kristen Cabanban, director of news affairs and administration at the Law Department, went further, warning that unidentified leaks in the fire suppression system could trigger a sinkhole under the building. The concern isn’t just fire. It’s collapse.

Floods. Open wiring. Large vacant stretches gone dark and dirty. The city’s court filing catalogs what Ford City Mall has become since Namdar took ownership.

The mall opened in 1965 and for decades anchored commerce in the West Lawn community on Chicago’s Southwest Side. It doesn’t look like that anymore. Ald. Derrick Curtis, whose 17th Ward covers the property, called it a death trap outright. He said pushing for a vacate order was “the right thing to do” and he didn’t soften the blame.

“If you Google Namdar’s properties, all over the country, they’re doing the same thing, just sucking everything out,” Curtis said.

Namdar specializes in distressed retail properties and has drawn criticism from local officials in multiple cities. Curtis said the company hasn’t put a single quarter into Ford City Mall since acquiring it in 2019. The parking lot, he said, has turned into a spot for street racing and drifting, a haven for crime tucked behind a deteriorating structure.

This case has been building for a while. Chicago’s Fire Department first pushed Namdar to repair the fire suppression system in May 2024, reported by Block Club Chicago. Nothing happened. The city filed a lawsuit in May 2025 after conditions hadn’t changed. Then in April 2026, with the suppression system still broken, the city escalated to the emergency vacate motion now sitting before Cook County Circuit Court.

For the small businesses still operating inside Ford City Mall, the timeline is punishing. They’ve got a week. Whatever agreement Namdar and the city reach in that window, it won’t come without cost to tenants who had little say in how the building got here.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has listed properties like Ford City as part of a broader fight over distressed commercial landmarks, but preservation arguments carry less weight when a judge is warning the building might cave in.

What happens next runs through Murray. If Namdar can’t show a credible path to fixing the fire suppression system and addressing the structural concerns by next Thursday, the judge has made clear what comes after. He’s not bluffing. The court filing, the Fire Department’s two-year effort to get compliance, and Curtis’s public statements all point toward a building that’s been neglected well past the point of quiet remediation.

Curtis put it plainly. He’s seen what Namdar does with its portfolio across the country and he doesn’t expect a different outcome here without intervention. The 04 corridor along Cicero Ave. deserves better than a structure that floods, sparks, and sinks.