The Small Story at Hilldale Is the New Stores. The Big One Is Next Door.

If you drive past Hilldale on Midvale Boulevard often enough, you already noticed the old AMC theater stopped showing movies and came back as a string of storefronts, an eyewear shop where the ticket counter used to be, a salad place where the concession stand sat. That part of the story is finished and most of the west side already knows it. What almost nobody seems to notice is that the same city vote that approved turning the theater into shops also approved bulldozing the bank building next door for apartments, a hotel-or-residential tower, and a public lawn built for concerts and ice skating. Only one half of that vote has actually been built.

What actually happened to the theater

AMC Madison 6, the six-screen theater that started life as Sundance Cinemas 608, closed for good in December 2022, when its lease on the space ran out. The city had already cleared the way for what came next nearly a year earlier. In January 2022, the Madison Common Council unanimously approved a plan to repurpose the roughly 40,000-square-foot building into two-story retail once the theater's run ended, part of a larger rezoning that WS Development described at the time as the third phase of Hilldale's ongoing redevelopment. Hilldale's spokesperson at the time, Kate Hagan, framed the theater's fate plainly: the mall remained interested in theater use, but converting the space into small shops and storefronts fit better with the pedestrian-focused direction the property had been heading for years.

The construction itself took time. Vogel Bros. Building Co. did not break ground on the retrofit until January 2024, roughly two years after the city's approval and more than a year after the theater actually went dark, with a completion target of fall 2024. The first tenant to open in the space was Warby Parker, which relocated from its longtime spot on State Street for a grand opening on November 23, 2024. Sephora and Sweetgreen followed, and Jaxen Grey, a Minneapolis-based men's clothing retailer, opened its Hilldale location in February 2025 as its first store in Wisconsin.

That was more than a year and a half ago now. If you haven't walked through recently, the rest of the mall kept adding storefronts on its own timeline too. Back in June 2024, before the old theater space had even reopened, Hilldale welcomed the ear-piercing studio Rowan and the jewelry brand Little Words Project near Lush Cosmetics, a different corner of the property entirely. A directory snapshot from this past July shows the current lineup also includes Faherty and Gorjana. None of that is the old cinema space specifically, it is evidence the mall has been filling storefronts on more than one front at once. Layer that onto Hilldale's longer-running food and retail base, Sur La Table, Kendra Scott, Anthropologie, Café Hollander, bartaco, North Italia, and the property looks less like a mall that lost its anchor and more like one that quietly replaced it with a dozen smaller ones.

The part almost nobody is watching

Here's the part the theater story usually leaves out entirely. That same January 2022 vote that cleared the way for shops to replace the cinema also approved tearing down the former BMO Harris Bank building at 401 North Segoe Road, along with the surface parking lot across from the theater, to make room for new construction on that whole side of the block. The initial plan called for four new buildings: a 20,000-square-foot restaurant and retail building near Price Place, a one-to-six-story building planned as either a 100-room hotel or 100 units of housing overlooking Heather Crest and a new outdoor plaza, a 25,000-square-foot commercial building, and a residential building fronting Vernon Boulevard originally pitched at 130 units.

By the time the council came back in May 2023 to approve the site's final implementation plan, the proposal had been trimmed from four buildings down to three, and the residential count on Vernon Boulevard had dropped from that original 130 units to a specified 100 units in a six-story building with ground-floor commercial space. That is not a rounding difference, it is a real cut in scale between what got pitched and what actually got locked into zoning, the kind of detail that only shows up if you read the two council votes side by side rather than a single press release. The finalized plan also specified a circular lawn along Kelab Drive as the anchor of the whole expansion, built as open space for concerts and ice skating and ringed by two commercial buildings, plus a three-story, roughly 54,000-square-foot commercial building on the south side of Heather Crest. The city's own writeup at the time noted the project was meant to complement the neighboring Madison Yards development, a 21-acre, $300 million project that has since added roughly 500 apartments just west of the mall. Put the two side by side and this stretch of the west side looks less like a shopping center getting a facelift and more like a district being built for people to live in, not just drive to.

The most recent public timeline for this piece, laid out when the council approved the final plan in 2023, pointed to construction on those three buildings starting in 2025. Whether ground has actually been broken by the time you read this is worth checking next time you pass the fenced-off lot across from the old theater, because as of this writing there is no public record of a groundbreaking or completion date beyond that 2025 target.

Why the bank building became a fight

Not everyone welcomed the plan quietly. The BMO Harris building at 401 North Segoe Road turned out to be more than just an aging drive-up branch. An October 2021 finding from the city's Landmarks Commission determined it was a contributing structure to a nationally recognized historic district covering much of the Hill Farms neighborhood, the same district Hilldale itself sits inside. That finding gave the Madison Trust for Historic Preservation grounds to formally object to the demolition, and longtime preservation advocate Bob Klebba spoke against the plan at the Plan Commission meeting.

The objections didn't stop the project. The Plan Commission approved the demolition permit, and when it came to a full council vote in January 2022, the review was brief, with no registered speakers and no floor discussion. Hilldale's general manager at the time, Nanci Horn, called it a win after months of working with the city and neighborhood groups. But the friction is worth knowing about if you live nearby, because it tells you this stretch of Segoe Road isn't just getting new construction, it's losing a piece of Hill Farms' recognized architectural history to get it.

What this means if you're driving past it every week

The theater conversion is the clearest preview the west side has of how long these approvals actually take to become buildings you can walk into. Nearly three years passed between the January 2022 council vote and the November 2024 grand opening, and that was for the smaller, simpler half of what got approved that month. The bank-building block is the more complicated project of the two, with more square footage, more units, and a historic-preservation fight already behind it, so there is no reason to expect it to move faster.

What the timeline does tell you is that the empty lot across from where the movie theater used to be is not just sitting there waiting for a developer to notice it. It is already zoned, already designed down to the lawn and the building heights, and already positioned as the next visible chapter of what Hilldale becomes. The mall you drive past today for Metcalfe's Market or a coffee at Crescendo is not finished changing. The same vote that gave you the theater's new storefronts also queued up apartments, a plaza, and possibly a hotel for the block next door, and only one of those two projects has actually broken ground.

If you've lived near Hilldale for a while, this is worth knowing not because it changes your Tuesday but because the next time the fencing goes up around that old bank building, you'll know exactly what's coming and why it took this long to get there.

If you're weighing a move to this part of the west side, or wondering how a project like this affects property values on the streets closest to it, Erika Haar has been tracking Madison's west side market long enough to put changes like this in context. Let's Connect.