Overgrown ShoppingTown Mall grass hurts Loud Pack Exotics sales

Tall, unmowed grass at the vacant ShoppingTown Mall has been doing more than making the site look neglected. Managers at Loud Pack Exotics say it has been driving away customers from the cannabis dispensary at 6606 Kinne Rd. in Syracuse-DeWitt, putting a visible business cost on a property that has sat empty since 2020.

Loud Pack Exotics sits right in front of the former mall, where the overgrowth and long-standing decay are hard to miss. The dispensary, led by owner Jonathan Maxim, opened after receiving a provisional New York State Office of Cannabis Management license under the Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary program. It has also described itself as the first Black-owned cannabis dispensary in Onondaga County, making the business one of the newer commercial tenants trying to build traffic beside one of the county’s most troubled properties.

The condition of the ShoppingTown site has been a recurring complaint for years. CNY Central reported overgrown landscaping at the county-owned mall in 2021 and later said the grass was mowed after that coverage. Even so, the property has continued to draw criticism for weeds, broken glass and boarded-up doors, all of which feed the sense that the area has been allowed to slide while businesses nearby try to survive.

For Onondaga County, the mall is not just an eyesore. It is a major redevelopment puzzle. County officials have spent years trying to assemble the full site for a large mixed-use plan, and in 2026 they moved closer to controlling the property. The county won a court ruling in April that cleared the way to move ahead on the mall’s last holdout parcel, then bought the former Sears store for $4.5 million in February. County officials have also said they are seeking new developer proposals for the ShoppingTown site.

That larger effort now carries a small but telling local test: whether basic upkeep can be maintained while the county tries to transform the property. ShoppingTown was once a thriving retail center in the 1980s and 1990s, but today its condition is affecting neighboring businesses like Loud Pack Exotics and reinforcing the decline around a site that still sits at the center of DeWitt’s commercial future.