Richland Mall: Columbia, South Carolina on DeadMalls.com

RICHLAND MALL: COLUMBIA, SC

Craig Nowak's Commentary

User submitted June 20, 2017

The capital of South Carolina has had a very bleak retail scene for the past 50 years. Seven shopping malls have existed in the city and only Columbiana Centre survives to this date. One of these dead malls is Richland Mall, located in Forest Acres. Located at the corner of Beltline Boulevard and Forest Drive, the 48-year old mall (as of June 2017) was once expected to be the "Lenox Square of the Midlands." This was a bit of a stretch for the shopping center.

Richland Mall started out as an open-air mall constructed in 1961. Atlanta's Toombs, Amisano, and Wells firm, which had designed Atlanta's Lenox Square and Jacksonville's Regency Square, were the architects for Columbia's first shopping center of any type. Anchored by Augusta's JB White, the mall also brought Winn-Dixie, Woolworth's, and Colonial to Forest Acres. The wildly-successful mall added a small cinema in the parking lot in 1966. The mall kept rolling until Dutch Square Mall, in West Columbia, came onto the scene in 1969. While not an immediate threat, both malls were trumped by Columbia Place Mall in Dentsville eight years later. Columbia Place Mall brought more of a big-city shopping feel to the area.

The mall's first decline started in 1977 with the opening of Columbia Place. The little-known ice rink in the center presumably closed sometime around 1980. With the decline, BIG plans were in the future for the mall. In 1987, Winn-Dixie closed, a sign of the things to come. In 1988, Atlanta-based Hooker Corp. purchased the mall and terminated all leases of the inline tenants. White's was given a third level, a parking garage and rooftop parking were provided on the small property, and Birmingham-based Parisian and infamous Hooker failure Bonwit Teller joined the anchor lineup. Connecting the anchors was a two-level enclosed mall section containing upscale tenants. Shortly afterward, Hooker was hammered with debts, struggles, and stupid decisions. Dropping upscale stores and malls in retail-saturated markets like Columbia and Cincinnati, OH(Forest Fair Mall)were not great ideas. Parisian was the only store that lasted after Hooker's Bonwit Teller(Richland location closed in 1990), B. Altman, and Sakowitz died off.

Bonwit Teller would be replaced with Dillard's in 1993 after the store's expansion. By 1996, management had changed hands a whopping four times! Later in the 90's, the food court was moved, an entrance was renovated, and Barnes and Noble opened up shop. TGI Fridays was relocated, and lastly, a Verizon call center took up the old food court. Belk took up the former JB White location. Dillard's was replaced with furniture store Blacklion in 2003 and lasted two years. Management switched hands two more times in 2003 and 2005. Finally, it seemed like the mall would finally be revived with a 300 million dollar renovation. Unfortunately, all that came was a name change in "Midtown at Forest Acres." Life only got worse when the Great Recession came. The troubled center was auctioned off in 2007. Tenants trickled out throughout the next ten years.

Today, all that remains at the mall is Belk, the cinema, Columbia Children's Theatre, a ping-pong club, Gymboree, and LensCrafters. Richland has pretty much been forgotten about in the retail scene. Hooker's plans were waaaaay too big for Columbia. Bonwit Teller was equivalent to Saks or Lord & Taylor in prices, while White's and Parisian were similar to Macy's. While Forest Acres is affluent, Columbia as a whole isn't. Another reason in its decline is its constant owner changes. It's hard to improve a mall when you don't have much time and what you get done may be changed by later ownership.

The mall is almost guaranteed to be gone in five years. The land it's on is worth more than the mall. All fountains are off and some escalators are too. Columbia simply has better interests than the mall. Richland's days are numbered.

Chris Edwards's Commentary

Posted January 28, 2006 (user submitted)

Richland Mall, once expected to be the Lenox Square of Columbia, South Carolina, has reached the end of its life. Wrecking balls will hopefully save it from its current sad state and transform it into a mixed-use property.

My first visit to what was then called Richland Fashion Mall was in 1995. The mall's former star attraction, Bonwit Teller, had high-tailed it out of the mall shortly after the mall's opening in 1989, only to be replaced by a Dillard's. There was also a Parisian and a JB White, part of the Mercantile chain. There were only a few stores in the mall, but the ones there were relatively mid-market to upper mid-market national chains, such as TGI Friday's, a movie theater and others. To save the mall from a college dorm-room look due to the omnipresent drywall covering vacant retail spaces, pictures of enthusiastic shoppers spouting positive slogans were throughout the mall. Unfortunately the photos of shoppers far outnumbered the actual ones.

Since then, Richland Mall has spiraled downhill. The mall's owners have apparently given up on running it as a traditional enclosed mall. Rather than continuing futile efforts to fully lease the mall, they turned much of its space over to Verizon for use as a call center, leading to even more white drywall blocking off the call center space. They also sold the mall to dead mall king Heyward Whichard, surely the sign of its demise.

The mall's department stores, except one, have also apparently given up. After the Bonwit Teller closed, the Dillard's that had filled its space in the early 1990s closed about ten years later, only to be replaced by Blacklion, a local chain of furniture and gift stores, and a local department store called a very creative name: "The Department Store". "The Department Store" didn't last long; perhaps its clearance center-type look failed to attract enough business. Even worse, Belk, which bought the JB White store and which has a store in nearly every successful Southern shopping center, has apparently even given up, subleasing part of its space to a semi-anchor that is a sure sign of a dead mall: a fitness center. Of the mall's department stores, only Parisian remains unscathed. Oddly enough, a Parisian at Columbia's dominant mall, Columbiana Centre, is closing, leaving the aging Richland location alive.

Efforts to revive the mall have flopped. About a year and a half ago, investors planned to bring numerous new locally-owned stores to the mall, such as one of the USA's only Anna Nicole Smith stores. None of them lasted. Richland is down to only a few stores left and even lacks a Chick-fil-A, without which many Southern shoppers such as myself refuse to visit a mall.

Richland's mall competitors have shown little sympathy for its struggles. Columbiana Center placed a large billboard outside the exit from Richland's parking garage, flaunting Columbiana's wide selection of stores and convenient location and seeking to attract shoppers disappointed by Richland's dying state. This seemed about as unfair as a football player kicking another one who he had already tackled.

While Richland's life as an enclosed mall is nearly through, developers are trying again by demolishing much of the enclosed part and resurrecting the center as "Midtown at Forest Acres", named after the mall's neighborhood, with housing and limited retail space. Given the mall's location in an affluent neighborhood, this appears to be a wise plan destined for success.