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.

Del Taco

Del Taco is a staple in the southwest, and more than once attempted to gain the
national exposure of Taco Bell. Unfortunately, this did not seem to work out so well for the company, which has retracted completely to its core market with a few exceptions. Today, the only Del Taco remaining in Georgia is on St. Simons Island, which as of recent still looks exactly the same as its initial entry into Georgia.


Del Taco's grand entry into Georgia came in 1980 where it opened many, many locations across the state. While it was initially quite successful, its fortunes began to wane across the state by the end of the 1980's. In 1992, after only 12 years, every single Del Taco closed with exception to St Simons, meaning lots of vacant restaurants and an end to an era where Georgians were offered an alternative to Taco Bell for fast-food Mexican.


Alas! Del Taco wasn't through with the Peach State yet! In 1995, it came back but this time with a different logo and all new locations. The new locations were almost all joint locations with Mrs. Winner's, which to those not from Georgia is a local chicken restaurant. The only free-standing one to knowledge was in the Food Court at North Point Mall, which actually may have been there longer. Unfortunately, this new concept of two in one lasted even less long than the previous, and the locations all fell into poor management by the end of the decade. By late 2001, Del Taco was removed from all the Mrs. Winner's restaurants that it shared, now all just Mrs. Winner's.


Today, unless you're visiting St. Simons Island, Del Taco is not on the menu in Georgia. Nevertheless, a few of its scars remain including this notable one in the photos here in Cedartown, GA. Until recently, this location looked like it had just closed despite being closed over a decade. In fact, the sign continued to read "Closed. Thanks For 12 Great Years" with absolutely no vandalism or missing letters for at least a decade. Most of the others have been converted to other uses or demolished.

Georgia Square Mall: Athens, GA

Athens is best known for University of Georgia, the oldest university in the United States, and the small city that grew around it. While not a major city, the sheer size and economic impact of UGA gives the entire city in the northeastern part of the state a big city feel. While not located on or even very near any interstate, the city is ringed by a major freeway (Loop 10), features a vibrant urban scene and has created a relatively fast growing metro area that has spilled into neighboring counties outside of the consolidated Athens-Clarke County. Such growth and the encroaching Atlanta area has recently pushed a plan to upgrade its major link to Atlanta, GA 316, into a freeway or toll road.


The impact of the university and the money that came with it was not lost on retailers. The City of Athens had its very own branch of Davison's in downtown alongside much larger Augusta and Macon, and in 1981 Athens got its very own Atlanta-style mall with Georgia Square. Georgia Square, needless to say, was a mall of its time. It was so outlandishly 70's/80's modern that it was jokingly referred to as the "Disco Mall". Even to this day and subsequent renovations, this is not lost on the center. It's latest renovation actually seems to very successfully take it actually back to its roots as a mall that paid its reverences to the era of polyester, disco music, skating rinks and Atari.


Georgia Square was also responsible for the end of the downtown retail era in Athens. When the mall opened, all of the stores formerly in downtown including Davison's and Belk packed up and staked their claim in the large two-story mall. It is rather easy to see why this happened, as travel in downtown is very difficult on a normal day and parking was impossible. In finding the original Davison's store, I found that it was impossible to get a parking place near the store, which is now part of UGA. Nevertheless, at the time the mall was built there was concern the mall was too large for its market considering that Athens was not a very large city and that the surrounding market was all rural. Nearby Barrow County and Jackson Counties were remote farming eras when the mall opened while today they are dotted with many new subdivisions. That has not held back the mall, though, in that not only the help of college crowds but also its super-regional status have made the center more than successful...especially for shoppers weary of chaotic Atlanta traffic to the west.

Disco-style bulbs hang over the lower level entrance to JCPenney

Also, the mall's opening brought out a plethora of retail onto what was then US 29/78. Nearly every retail chain came into the area including one of the most remote locations of Richway, even though there had never been a Rich's in that city up to that time period. While the Richway is gone, the area around Georgia Square both to the west and east along Atlanta Highway (US 78 Business) remains the premier retail corridor in the city. Little changes have occurred to the mall either beyond cosmetic. All of the original anchors remain to this day with exception to the Davison's. Its wild name changes took it from Davison's to Macy's in 1986, Rich's in 1998, Rich's-Macy's in 2003 and back to Macy's in 2005.

A rare look at the short-lived Rich's at Georgia Square. Note the classic Davison's/Macy's exterior of the era. It's just as classic inside!

The mall itself has a slightly distinct layout in that it is not entirely a two-story mall. In fact, the mall shrinks to one level on the west end just before the Sears, accessed by escalators that climb beside a wall that leads to bathrooms under the esclators and a very peculiar truncation of the structure at that. The Sears is also the only one level anchor at the mall. In contrast, the Belk is one of very few original two-story Belks in Georgia. The Davison's/Macy's is what is really the experience of the mall, though. The store is completely in a time warp and has never been updated at all since the mall opened. Both inside and out, the store looks like it would have fit right in with the "Dynasty" era chocked full of women with short hair wearing silk blouses with padded shoulders. The Belk is slightly more modern looking, but what stands out is the outlandish copper-foil mall entrance sign and the very dated skinny escalators in an octagon court with tarnished brass and brown rubber railings. In the mall itself, the planters, fountains and brown tiles are long gone but yet the funkiness never quite left the place. It should be noted that the pictures are at the end of of a brand new renovation done this year. Nonetheless, many of the store signs in the mall still pay ode to the era.

Escalators in the mall take shoppers on the bottom level up to the upper level single story Sears wing.

Photos of the Belk inside and out. Note the extremely retro look both inside and outside the mall

More shots of the Rich's

Enjoy these pics of the disco mall. I'm sure many of you Athens fans and UGA grads have seen this place as well, so this should be a rather unique view of Georgia's own Athens.