Simon Property Group is starting a $13 million renovation at Penn Square Mall, Oklahoma City's oldest mall. In its Oct. 5, 2026 report, The Oklahoman said a Barnes & Noble and a North Italia are among the incoming tenants. The same day, KOCO reported that Athleta and The North Face are coming too. The building permit behind the renovation lists what the money pays for. For Belle Isle and Country Club Heights, two neighborhoods of 1950s and 1960s ranch homes near the mall, it shows Penn Square putting money back into the outside of the building.

The building started out open-air. After 44 years enclosed, it is working on its exterior again.

Built Open-Air, Then Closed In Against The Weather

Penn Square opened as an open-air shopping center with 582,000 square feet of retail on a 50-acre site, at what was then Route 66 and Pennsylvania Avenue. The original tenants were mostly Oklahoma City names: Street's, Rothchild's, Cutchall's, Rosenfield's, John A. Brown, Van Dyke Furs, Peyton-Marcus, Humpty Dumpty and Val-Gene's restaurant. Montgomery Ward also had a store there, the largest in the country at 205,000 square feet. The center was fully leased within a year.

The open-air layout lost ground in the 1970s. Newer enclosed malls pulled away shoppers who wanted to avoid Oklahoma's weather extremes. Penn Square responded in 1982 by enclosing the mall and adding a second floor. It now has more than 150 retailers and covers more than 1 million square feet. Simon bought it in 2002 as part of a multi-center deal worth more than $1.5 billion.

So for the last four decades, Penn Square has been built around its interior corridors. A shopper parked, walked through an entrance and did everything inside.

What The Sept. 4 Permit Pays For

BHM Architects of Charlotte, N.C., filed a $13 million building permit on Sept. 4. The Oklahoman reported its line items:

• New entrances
• Repainting and new exterior signage
• New flooring in the shopping corridors
• New escalators
• A makeover of the mall elevator
• New furniture
• Outdoor landscaping

Half the list is interior work, which is normal for a mall this age. The other half is entrances, exterior paint, signage and landscaping. These are the things you see from a car on Northwest Expressway or from the parking lot before you go inside. Forty-four years after the enclosure, a large share of the budget is going to the outside of the building.

This is also the second round of work, following a smaller one. In August 2025, during the mall's 65th year, the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber's OKCRetail site reported that the upper level had been repainted white and the atrium skylight replaced, with more renovation underway. The 2026 permit adds the entrances, signage and grounds to that interior work.

A Restaurant With Its Own Front Door

North Italia shows this change most clearly. Its address will be 1901 NW Expressway, Suite 1058B. KOCO reported that it will be the chain's first Oklahoma location and will have an outdoor entrance. You will be able to walk in for dinner from outside without passing through the mall.

The opening date depends on which page you check. North Italia's own site says "Opening 12/16." Penn Square's store directory on Simon's site lists an expected opening of Dec. 1, 2026. Either way, it opens in December, during the holiday shopping weeks.

The restaurant had been coming for a while. In December 2025, The Oklahoman reported that North Italia was headed to Penn Square and that the corporate side of The Cheesecake Factory was looking for another dining option at the mall. That means two sit-down restaurants at the same property will draw from the same corporate family's playbook.

A restaurant with its own door keeps a different schedule from the stores inside. Penn Square's regular hours are 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon to 6 p.m. on Sunday. An outside entrance lets a dining room work separately from those hours, the way restaurants did when the whole mall was open to the sky.

The Bookstore Gap, 2011 To 2027

The Barnes & Noble gets the most attention in the announcement, and the reason is a gap of more than 15 years. Penn Square has not had a bookstore since Borders closed its Waldenbooks there in 2011. According to the mall's website, the new store will open in the west wing in May 2027.

The chain's own numbers help explain why it is opening here now. Barnes & Noble said in September 2026 that it was up to 720 locations. In 2023, after two decades of falling sales and closures, it had dropped below 600. The company credits that growth to giving local booksellers control of each store. The chain already has two Oklahoma City locations and recently opened a 15,000-square-foot store in Stillwater. Another store is planned for Yukon Village, in a former Big Lots.

A bookstore suits a mall that wants people to stay longer than one errand. A destination like that also makes more sense once the entrances and landscaping make arriving more pleasant.

The Next Few Months On The Calendar

Here is what the reporting and Simon's own pages confirm, in order. Athleta is planned for the first floor and The North Face for a 4,000-square-foot space, but neither has a published opening date. Simon also lists Oh My Nail, M Beauty Bar and Kawaii Klaws as incoming tenants, again with no dates.

Simon's Santa page describes the arrival as Friday, Nov. 14, but Nov. 14, 2026 is a Saturday, and the page's own schedule table labels it that way. The Oklahoman's Oct. 5 report says the renovation is starting now but gives no completion date. Expect some of the entrance and landscaping work to overlap with the holiday weeks above.

The 2025 tenants are already in place and part of the mix the new stores join. OKCRetail's August 2025 report listed Alo and Offline by Aerie as planned for that October. It said Johnston & Murphy and Garage Clothing were already open, Burger King was new in the food court, and American Eagle and Foot Locker were set to reopen.

Nearby, Belle Isle Station got a new storefront this year as well. Rally House opened its fourth Oklahoma City location at 1710 Belle Isle Blvd. on Aug. 21, 2026, selling licensed sports apparel, gifts and locally themed goods. Penn Square is the larger project, but both shopping areas the neighborhood relies on are still adding tenants.

Penn Square was built in the same postwar years as the ranch houses on the streets near it. In 1982 it closed itself in. The 2026 renovation keeps the roof and the second floor and spends a meaningful share of $13 million on the entrances, the exterior signage, the landscaping and a restaurant with its own outdoor entrance.

Knowing what a building's next renovation will bring is a large part of what we do at Kaiser + Drake Realty. Kaci Kaiser's work is remodeling and new construction, and Kylie Drake's is commercial-to-residential strategy. If you live near Penn Square and want to talk through how projects like this one change the blocks around them, we'd be glad to compare notes. Work with Us.