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Salem Mall was the first enclosed shopping center in the Dayton, Ohio area. It was located at the intersection of Shiloh Springs Road and Salem Avenue, in the northwest Dayton suburb of Trotwood. The mall was built on the site of the former Roscoe Filburn farm; Filburn was a party in the famous Wickard v. Filburn case dealing with the growing of wheat and its effect on interstate commerce. The center opened in 1966, and in its early stages had 60 retailers. The original mall was anchored by the Rike's and Sears department stores. There was also a Liberal supermarket, a smaller department store called The Metropolitan, and a multi-screen cinema.
A large-scale renovation was completed in 1981 with the construction of a two-story concourse capped by a new J. C. Penney anchor store (relocated from the nearby Forest Park Plaza). The supermarket, which was closed by 1979, had its space subdivided into inline stores. While the expansion included a food court, it was pretty much an afterthought and had limited seating. So when The Metropolitan closed in the mid-80s, its space was extensively reworked to form a much larger food court adjacent to the center court. The mall, which by that time featured over 110 retailers, was prosperous throughout the remainder of the 1980s.
By the mid 1980s poor mall management affected the Salem Mall's ability to attract new tenants, renew existing leases, and most importantly, attract serious shoppers. By the mid-late 1990s, the Salem Mall was officially considered a dead mall. In 1998, anchor store Lazarus left the mall, and later that year J. C. Penney also closed. The restaurants and the Loews Cinema also went out of business, leaving Sears and a newly built Home Depot (in a separate building) as the only anchors.
Demolition of the Salem Mall began on May 15, 2006. Sears is the only part of the original structure that remains, but it was announced in October 2013 that the store would close in mid-January 2014, with no word on the fate of the Sears building. As of January 2014 Sears is officially closed The city of Trotwood purchased the mall site, with the exception of Sears and Home Depot, in 2004, and began working with General Growth Properties (GGP) to redevelop the area as the Landmark Town Center, an upscale, open-air, "lifestyle" complex, intended to resemble the Easton Town Center in Columbus. The new center suffered delays, with GGP leaving the project in 2007, and its completion date was repeatedly extended. By 2010/2011, Trotwood had reinvisioned the mall site as the TechConnection Business Park, a mixed-use technology campus. As of October 2013, no physical progress had been made on the business park.