Lee Fredericks’s Commentary:

I find myself in Salisbury frequently and have visited this mall a few times in the past year. This is most assuredly a dead mall. The anchors are down to a small JCPenney and a small Belk store. The food court has primarily locally owned ethnic restaurants. There are mostly empty stores and about the only national chain in the interior is Books-a-Million and a vintage Bath & Body Works. Of course there is the cellphone, hairstyling, piercing, and other service oriented places both in the inline storefronts and at various carts throughout the mall. Most glaring was the fact that I counted a grand total of 8 people walking around in the mall on a Saturday.

Adam Silverstrim’s Commentary:

Despite previous plans for redevelopment, the Salisbury Mall has once again fallen into the ranks of dying malls. At this point, it is in a slow decline accelerated by the recession, including the closing of at least a quarter of the smaller storefronts, the Goody's anchor, and the closing of the Sports Bar mentioned in the earlier post. (It went bankrupt. However, another very similar business has moved into the location.) The JC Penny's and the Belk's locations both generate a moderate amount of traffic, but not enough to prevent the rest of the mall from being under-used. FYE and Chick-Fil-A have closed, and the Hibbet Sports has moved to a big-box location near the interstate. Radio Shack, Verizon Wireless, Bath & Body Works, The Shoe Depot, Payless ShoeSource, a menswear chain, and a jewlery store are the surviving major chain stores. About 4 local "Mom & Pop" stores also inhabit the mall. Still, it isn't enough to make it seem "bu
sy," except for maybe certain stores at holidays. The mall is also small enough that there isn't much of a reason to go into it for more than one store, much as one would use a strip mall.

These conditions could be temporary, due to the economic recession that has hit the area hard (Currently, the county the mall is located in has unemployment hovering around %12, and many textile jobs that helped sustain the area in the past are gone.) and re-development is unlikely because of the relatively stagnant economics of its city, so the situation described above will most likely remain for a while. In the end, it seems as though it won't ever be a completely dead mall (There's NO chance of a new mall within 15 miles, at least within a 10-year time period. You can't bet against Charlotte's sprawl...) but it will most likely be very underused and out-competed for the foreseeable future.

Griffin D.’s Commentary:

The day has finally come. The Salisbury Mall in Salisbury, MD is finally coming down!! Hooray :) Demolition crews began removing asbestos on 8/17/07.
The mall, which closed in the 90s sat vacant for nearly 15 years.

To see the small story on it, go to:

http://www.wboc.com/Global/story.asp?S=6947559

Elbert Collins’s Commentary:

I found your site while looking for pictures of the mall. They are actually in the process of tearing it down. I've got a blog entry on my blog with links to another local site with pictures of the inside. Anyway, not much information.

Erik Williams’s Commentary:

Salisbury Mall is a decent small-town mall; a recent visit showed it to be a mixed bag, with somewhat dated anchors and a few dated stores (such as a Chick-fil-A with a red "roof" above the mall entrance straight out of the mid-1980s), combined with a few ghetto-type stores and a few nicer, newer ones, such as Books-a-Million, Whitehall Jewlers, the required cell phone store, a Shoe Dep't and Hibbett Sports, which every small mall around the Southeast seems to have. The renovation is also a mixed bag, with shiny tile in the interior hallway just like the floor in the SouthPark Neiman Marcus, combined with an odd color scheme on the dated exterior of the mall.

Salisbury's citizens who want to do serious shopping probably head south on I-85 to Concord Mills, which has every outlet-type store anyone would want (except a Neiman Marcus Last Call and Nordstrom Rack, which probably wouldn't appeal to them anyway), or further south to SouthPark, the most luxurious mall in the Carolinas. Salisbury Mall is the only mall in Salisbury and if it was half-empty and dying a few years ago, that just shows that larger malls in other cities were stealing its business.

James’s Commentary:

Suprised you don't have the Salisbury Mall (Salisbury Maryland) in your listing. It was a large mall that made plenty of bussness for many decades. When a new mall opened up (Center at Salisbury), the owner of the Salisbury Mall refused to lower his rent. Over about 10 years the mall lost bussnes, and eventualy closed down completely about 2 years ago. The building still stands condemed and sold, but no one has decided what to do with it yet. The building will probably stay for a few more years as locals fight over wether or not there will be apartments, homes, or shops in it's place.