Cookeville Mall: Cookeville, TN

Cookeville Mall at over 47,000 square feet is one of several tiny malls located in small cities throughout Tennessee. Sadly, Cookeville Mall is near closure and probable demolition since the last time I saw it in 2005. In 2005, the mall was about half full and featured anchors JCPenney and Peeble's. Today, ONLY JCPenney remains. All other stores have either left or were forced out due to a rumored redevelopment plan that might not have been necessary if the mall had ever been renovated, expanded or upgraded in its entire history. JCPenney closed its mall entrance, and the mall was completely void of any stores or life but was still open when I visited four years after last seeing it.

Center court is a classic 1970's-style with planters, steps and linoleum tile treatments.

Information on Cookeville Mall is strangely non-existant, not even in the community of retail history fans. There is no Wikipedia page, photo streams or mention on any of the other sites, so I am featuring this for the very first time. It is impossible to tell exactly when it was built, but by design it was built probably between 1975 and 1980. From what I understand, the mall was originally anchored with the same JCPenney on the west end and had a Harvey's on the east end. Harvey's was sold to Peeble's in 1988, which is why the last anchor there was a Peeble's. The mall also apparently had a now long-closed Cracker Barrel on the south end of the mall that ended up being a very locally run clothing store at the last. Having Cracker Barrel as an anchor makes sense considering the next city over is Lebanon: headquarters of the company.

Harvey's/Peeble's mall entrance.

Harvey's south entrance outside with mall entrance in background.

Looking inside empty Harvey's from mall entrance.

Another look inside Harvey's toward the south entrance.

The hold-out of JCPenney on an otherwise deserted mall is a real fluke. Unless the mall has a very solid redevelopment plan, it is unlikely that JCPenney will want to remain on a decaying piece of real estate no matter HOW appealing the terms. JCPenney historically tends to flee malls before they die instead of holding out to the bitter end like Sears. Nevertheless, it looks to me that the mall pretty much emptied out all at once in 2008. The mall was not in disrepair when I visited, and while the air conditioning appeared to be down or off, I did not detect any foul odors or any major decay other than a few signs of roof leaks.

Penney's mall entrance - sealed off.

Most of the stores that left Cookeville Mall did not leave for another mall...or even a lifestyle center! The majority of the malls tenants instead left for a two-phase strip mall known as Jackson Plaza, which oddly is anchored with mall tenants. The Peeble's as well as most mall stores bolted for Jackson Plaza, which is also anchored by Sears, Belk and Food Lion. The center also had a Goody's, which leaves a very clear vacancy that JCPenney could very easily fill.

Most stores - including Maurice's - left for loaded strip mall Jackson Plaza.

The funny thing, though, about Jackson Plaza is that unlike Cookeville Mall, it is quite far from I-40 or any freeway. The only thing it has to offer, quite frankly, is that it is a "newer" side of town. At this, Cookeville Mall still has the advantage of a high visibility location, and a proper redevelopment could reverse its fortunes completely. In fact, it is rather peculiar how none of this development steered towards the area where I-40 and TN 111 (an eventual future interstate) crosses. Furthermore, the condition of Cookeville Mall in my opinion is sheer marketing failure, and it did well to last as long as it did considering the lack of interest by the mall's owners of keeping it attractive and competitive. It is hoped that Penney's hangs on and the center really does sprout the city's first Target and what comes is better than what they have had.

Looking at the old Cracker Barrel: the ONLY one I've ever known attached to a mall. The former mall entrance for this is somewhere near the Chuck-E-Cheese looking entrance below.

The aboved mentioned mirrored mall entrance off of center court close to where Cracker Barrel once entered the mall. Perhaps this was the entrance prior to the subdividing of the restaurant.

Mall entrance corridor closest to Penney's.

North entrance at center court. The store on the left looks like a restaurant.

Winding mall corridor approaching Harvey's.

Penney's outside entrances north and south, respectively. Note the ambulance in front of the north entrance. Ironic?

More views of center court. The last photo is facing the Penney's.

"The Beef People" got Leaner and Meaner: Winn-Dixie Today

Alas we hear today that Winn-Dixie is still yet alive, but at least not in my parts. In fact, today they only exist in five states: Georgia (south of Atlanta), Alabama, Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana. In a recent trip to Anniston, AL, a store was noted in that area off of US 431. Winn-Dixie was once the leading grocery store in North Georgia pretty much from the 1950's to the 1990's. Essentially the Wal-Mart of deep south supermarkets, its range was far and wide from large cities such as Atlanta to smaller towns such as Franklin, NC, pictured here.

These three photos above show a perfectly preserved specimen of a 70's-style Winn-Dixie in Franklin, NC on April 16, 2005. Winn-Dixie completely left North Carolina in 2005.

In the late 1980's, Winn-Dixie started a major upgrade of their stores to the "Marketplace" concept. It was quite showy at first, but encroachment from Publix into most of their markets along with way too many dated-looking stores led to declining traffic at too many of their stores. This led to them suddenly having difficulty competing with the as well as Kroger on the high end and Ingles on the low end. The toughest blow came when Wal-Mart and Target began to sell groceries, making the competition even stiffer. It was just too many players for the once dominant chain without a real niche.


The Marketplace concept obviously worked for us, because throughout the 1990's, it was very convenient and at first a pretty decent store. Unfortunately, this was also one of the first locations to close as the area around it became less profitable and traffic dwindled to none. That store today is now a Goodwill.

The above three pictures are of the Gainesville Winn-Dixie Marketplace in original late 1980's form. This was shortly before it closed in 2005.

Winn-Dixie's greatest trouble was that they catered to the lower-end of grocery customers. While this market is reliable with less competition, they are not shopping for an image or a specialty item...only the lowest prices. Winn-Dixie was basically undersold and squeezed out of many, many markets from the near fatal blow of Wal-Mart and Ingles combined. Winn-Dixie was also strained for another reason, and that was a desperate attempt to modernize and relocate stores. A store near Hiram, for instance, moved three times within a span of less than five years. First they left their 70's-style store for a new store in a more remote location only to move it again a short time later to a sleek new store in a lonely intersection removed from all other retail. Needless to say, this store closed within a year of opening. It seemed at that point, the store was finding itself in increasingly inferior locations, which did not help.

After the Atlanta area Winn-Dixies closed, Winn-Dixie tried something very strange...resurrecting the more profitable of the Atlanta area stores into a warehouse grocery concept called "Saverite". Saverite was hardly a hit, but their mascot in their slogan was quite amusing featuring a comical, bug-eyed man in a cape who was going to save you from high prices. Honestly it looked like the cape was on too tight causing his eyes to bulge through them! In real life, such a character would be hauled off to the psych ward and likewise this crazy and rather dated attempt at advertising wasn't enough to disguise (pardon the pun) that it was Winn-Dixie's last gasp in the Atlanta market. They all closed less than a year later.

This Saverite is shown here on Cobb Parkway (US 41) in Kennesaw. It replaced a Winn-Dixie Marketplace that opened in 1989, which replaced an older Winn-Dixie on Old US 41. The original Winn-Dixie is now country-western bar "Cowboys".

Despite this, most of these stores held out until the big retail purge of 2004-2005 and from what I understand the company is now much leaner and meaner. In fact, discussion I have heard lately about the chain is that it is coming back quite nicely in their remaining markets and has greatly improved on the quality and appearance of their stores. Gone are the sloped metal fronted 70's stores in dated shopping centers. Gone are the ridiculously offbeat locations in saturated markets. The battered company is refueling itself where it stands today. Will it come back bigger and stronger against the tough competition that mauled them in the first place? All of us who ever grew up shopping there hope so.

Also, check out a more historical piece on Winn-Dixie featured at Pleasant Family Shopping.

Lakeshore Mall: Gainesville, GA

One of the updated mall entrances (Kevin Hicks: photo).

North Georgia's small town malls tend to be overlooked, especially those located within 30 miles of insurmountable competition down a 70-mile/hour freeway. Thus is the case with Lakeshore Mall in Gainesville. Gainesville itself has had a stormy history (pardon the pun) considering its downtown was flattened in 1936 by what was obviously an F4 or F5 tornado that caused much death and misery and left the downtown area nowhere like it once was. While the city has long since recovered, it sits in a rather odd position. First, it is located near, but not on, a major interstate. Travelers can get to and from I-85 to the south, but to get to I-85 to the east requires travel along surface roads, all which were two lanes until very recently. I-85 was once planned to go through the city but politics of the era directed it southward, resulting in compromise GA 365, which eventually became I-985. Second, the city is a city to itself, but has become a fringe suburb of metro Atlanta with countless new subdivisions constructed to the south and west since the 1990's. These problems have created a dubious position where the city went from a small North Georgia city far removed from Atlanta to a city blending in with the metro...not a good shift for its local mall.

Photos of classic 1968 Penney's. This one undoubtably had the old logo with the blue "P" when it opened (Kevin Hicks: first photo).

Lakeshore Mall was constructed in 1968 and named for nearby Lake Lanier completed 11 years earlier. It was also relatively close to when GA 365 was completed to Gainesville located along GA 53 Connector. As one of the older malls in the state, it faced no immediate competition considering the nearest mall at that point was in Dekalb County over 50 miles away...a situation that remained for 15 years. A town built around agriculture, namely poultry, the mall catered to a more rural demographic from the start meaning more value-priced stores.

Close-up photos of the carousel on the Sears wing (Kevin Hicks: photos).

When first opened, the mall contained three anchors: Belk, JCPenney and Rose's Discount Store. It was a typical late 60's mall with high windows in lieu of skylights, a one story simple design, lots of brick and earthtones and very small. A later expansion resulted in a new addition on the other side of JCPenney with a Sears. This new addition resulted in mall patrons being forced to walk through the JCPenney to get to the other side of the mall...similar to what happened to Macon Mall in Macon. This addition was likely done this way because of the extremely hilly terrain...meaning that no other direction of expansion was possible without enormous cost.

The mall's food court. I found it a bit of a disappointment in its lack of any major chain restaurants (Kevin Hicks: photo)

Anchor changes were slight over time. Aside from the Sears addition, the Rose's eventually closed and was replaced with a second Belk store that allowed an expanded footprint in the mall. It is interesting that the old Rose's Garden Center area is still intact, but basically is just a place for light storage today. Lakeshore Mall is not located in an impoverished area. Despite many typical urban issues facing the city today, the mall has one of the highest demographics near the mall which would seem to support a higher-end mall than what is there. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

Photos of the center court. This is one of the most attractive contemporary center courts I have run across. Note the Belk Home & Kids (Rose's) behind the first photo.

Lakeshore Mall since the 1980's has struggled due to much larger, far superior malls coming ever closer to the simple mall. This began in 1984 when population growth fueled by white flight from DeKalb resulted in the construction of Gwinnett Place Mall in 1984, only 35 miles south. Gwinnett Place today is facing creeping urban blight, but at the time of its construction was a showplace featuring two floors and four anchors including Rich's and Davison's. Lakeshore didn't have either of those stores, and those who had the money to shop at Gwinnett headed south for more stores and selection. This was even further complicated in 1999 when Mall of Georgia...the state's largest mall and tourist attraction, trumped Gwinnett Place and was built five miles closer! In most circumstances, this would have spelled doom, but the mall has had some help from the huge Hispanic immigrant population. They have done a nice job keeping the mall viable, though this has very obviously reduced traffic from the otherwise predominately non-Hispanic county.

JCPenney is not just a mall anchor: it is PART of the mall. To get to the Sears wing, patrons have to walk through the Penney's. Since the mall is on a hillside, this is likely the reason for this design.

In 2006, the mall saw its first major renovation in quite some time. Looking rather run down before, the mall got a huge facelift inside and out, and despite the rather grim outlook presented here, the mall has not lost a single anchor store. The problems with the mall or more of an in-line issue...an issue that has resulted in so many other malls being demalled. That issue is where the anchors do good business, but the stores in the mall are increasingly mom and pop and not commanding the rents and traffic that nationals chains offer. When I visited during the renovation, the food court lacked most national chains and I failed to see many of the trendy clothing stores present in other malls throughout the rest of the mall. Most chain stores were more of the non-clothing variety. The Books-a-Million, however, seemed to be doing well and the Ruby Tuesday continued to attract business. Unfortunately, the Ruby Tuesday there has since closed. The author is guessing the Ruby Tuesday originally started as a Morrison's Cafeteria...both once owned by Shoney's.

Looking back along the Sears wing with Sears behind me. It is very odd how a mall so little known by most of the people in this region is so viable, but the scene here proves it is. This was the middle of a weekday!

Today, I honestly could not predict the future of the mall. The mall is in a strange location pretty far from I-985. The retail corridor around it remains viable, however, and to me the unfortunate thing is that it has become more of an ethnic mall than a mainstream shopping destination. Nevertheless, if that is what it takes to keep the mall viable, then what works should be done. It is nice this day in age to see a few classic-era shopping centers still functioning when the average mall built prior to mid-1980's has either been radically modified, demolished or de-malled.

Mom n' pop perfume store. Photo by Kevin Hicks

Looking along the Belk wing towards Belk Women's

Sears mall entrance. The Sears was built later than the rest of the mall.

Belk (Women's) mall entrance.

Belk Men's, Home & Kid's (Rose's) mall entrance.

Belk Men's, Kid's and Home. This store opened as a Rose's, but this fact is only noticeable on the outside. The inside has been completely remodeled to a typical department store. Note the former garden center on the second photo.

Original Belk store. Stores built in the late 60's and early 70's by Belk had this arch design typically. This store was previously white and painted tan in the last renovation.

Rich's at Brookwood Village in Birmingham

Russell Wells contributed these photos of the Rich's, one of two anchors of the radically transformed Brookwood Village in Birmingham. Generally deemed as one of the more upscale malls in the city, this two-anchor mall was wedged in a narrow valley between Shades Creek and a mountain, giving Rich's a very unusual hillside backdrop in contrast to the Atlanta piedmont stores in much flatter terrain. The Rich's here opened in 1975 as the north anchor with Pizitz as the south anchor. Anchor changes shuffled so that today the mall is anchored by Macy's and Belk. Belk had previously been Parisian and McRae's before the changeover. The mall itself was also radically transformed since it opened.


The Rich's at Brookwood is significant, because it spelled the end of the Rich family era. This was the one of the two last stores (the other Century Plaza) built by the family before Dick Rich suddenly died in 1975. The family-owned company had overextended themselves with the Birmingham move along with rapid expansion of Richway and the company found itself in debt before his death. Not only that, but Rich's entered a pretty saturated market in Birmingham in competition with Pizitz, Loveman's, Parisian and Blach's, which makes it amazing it survived in the city. Shortly after, the company was sold to Federated which is today now part of the Macy's monopoly.

Eckerd Drugs 1898-2007

One thing you can be certain of, I wasn't about to let Eckerd slip away without a post on Georgia Retail Memories about it. Eckerd was not native to Georgia, arriving in the early 1980's upon acquisition of the faltering Treasury Drug chain owned by JCPenney. Ironically, JCPenney ultimately purchased Eckerd later on, leading to its demise.

Night shot of the most updated Eckerd prototype, built in 2005. Note the neon "Welcome to Eckerd" inside the store. I believe this is still up at that location.

According to the history, Eckerd was the oldest chain drug store, founded in Pennsylvania in 1898. It was its expansion into Florida (yes, even store chains are snowbirds) that led to its eventually wide coverage along the eastern seaboard. In its final days, Eckerd was a major player against CVS, but lost the battle as the weakest contender against the return of Walgreen's after an almost 40 year hiatus in the Peach State.

This store came full circle. Rite-Aid originally built this store in Woodstock in the late 1990's, then abandoned their expansion plans in Atlanta. The store sat abandoned for awhile until Eckerd bought it and made it theirs. Not long after, here comes Rite-Aid about to take it back!

This store in Dahlonega was a typical late 1990's design built at the intersection of the by-pass and business routes of SR 9.

The final days of Eckerd were a rash of mergers after JCPenney had pretty well wiped out the chain. JCPenney seems to have been notoriously bad at managing off-store concepts, judging from their earlier failure with Treasure Island and Treasury Drugs. Eckerd survived for awhile under ownership of Jean Coutu Group, owner of the Canadian Brooks chain. It was noted that many store brands in Eckerd were actually labeled as Brooks/Eckerd.

Rite-Aid had been a strong player in the South, but was held out of the major markets by too stiff of competition. While very common in the smaller towns, it did not exist in the Atlanta market. In the late 1990's, Rite-Aid attempted to expand into the Atlanta area, but after building several free standing locations, instead ironically sold them to Eckerd after they sat vacant for several years. Rite-Aid came back in full force, however, in late 2007 with the change official in June and the conversion completed by the end of summer, and Eckerd is now a memory, ending a wild rash of consolidations that started in 2004.

These days, the future of Rite-Aid looks shaky from the purchase of Eckerd's. Rite-Aid's acquisition did not exactly turn around this white elephant of a drug store chain from what I have heard. Let's hope that is not the case, because the retail scene is already looking to be one full of carcasses with the current state of the economy.

Oak Ridge Mall: Oak Ridge, TN

Back on our out-of-state march, Tennessee is a hotbed of small malls that anywhere else in the country would have been dead and long forgotten. This time, I'm going to do a feature of the "downtown" of Tennessee's nuclear city, Oak Ridge. Indeed, it has not fallen flat on city leaders that a dying mall hardly looks like people's image of downtown much like a lot of the country that fell to the post-WWII tax policies that led to the suburban sprawl of America and the retail behemoths that have dominated the landscape since the 1970's.


Originally opened in 1957, Oak Ridge Mall was known for 30 years as Downtown Shopping Center, a large strip center anchored by The Knox/Proffitt's, JCPenney, Sears, Loveman's (of Chattanooga), Miller's and GC Murphy.  The mergers that occurred in the 1980's that resulted in Loveman's, Miller's and Proffitt's all becoming the same store are why the later mall did not end up with five department store anchors.  Oak Ridge Mall followed the course of quite a few malls in the country that started out as a mere 1950's strip and were enclosed and expanded into a full-scale shopping mall. The only difference was, this one was a strip mall all the way to 1987 instead of the 1970's...not exactly the best timing for such projects as new malls were already proving to find it more difficult to compete in contrast with previous decades. Indeed, Oak Ridge Mall never really took off and was largely vacant aside from the anchors as recent as my March 2005 visit. I had heard a couple years before it was dying, so this is why I came by to visit just to see what this place was all about.


I do not know a whole lot about Oak Ridge Mall other than this, and the fact that it always had Sears as an anchor. The original Sears anchor was abandoned in what was left of the strip in my 2005 visit and did not connect to the rest of the mall. The anchors, however, appeared healthy and successful with a cheery, but very vacant corridor tying them together. In all, the anchors in 2005 were Proffitt's, Sears, JCPenney and a stadium-seating movie theater on an outlot.  Proffitt's was added in 1987 as Hess's while the fourth vacant anchor in the middle of the mall was the original Proffitt's, originally known as The Knox.  They once operated as a double-header Proffitt's, but it's unclear when it closed.  At least one mall corridor was sealed off to the general public on the visit as you will see below, which looked to be the food court.  A combination of the completion of TN 162 creating access to better access to malls in Knoxville and poor management caused the mall to to fail.

In allover layout, the mall was an L-shaped mall with JCPenney on one end (a strip attached to the other-side), Proffitt's (formerly Hess's, now a Belk) on the other, Sears off to the side of Proffitt's and the former The Knox/Proffitt's in the middle. The mall seemed difficult to access on the side that was once the back of the strip mall, and it was sealed off when I visited.

Vacant Hess's/Proffitt's in center court area.

In 2008, the project that was promised to start in late 2005 right after I visited seems to be permanently on hold. (Note 7/24/2016: demolition has now begun on the long-abandoned mall).  The mall itself has since been sealed off to the public with some "physical activity" occuring at the site. While I was hardly bowled over by the place, fanatics of late 80's architecture should be very excited about this view of a once-strip mall, then mall and now...nothing.

Looking down the entire Sears wing.

Something seems VERY ironic about the "shopoakridgemall.com" banner.

Proffitt's entrance...note the holes for what was formerly Hess's.

Another view of center court.

This was the original Sears store sitting abandoned on the JCPenney end of the mall on a small strip mall wing.

This appeared to be the entrance to the food court, and the food court area is very visibly sealed off from the rest of the mall.

Rack Room Shoes finally realized the party was over and it was time to leave.