Staunton, Virginia. Home of the country-gospel singing group, The Statler Brothers, former President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, and the infamous Western State Asylum, which garnered much negative attention over its treatment of patients, as well as the eugenics and racist mindset of its former director, one Joseph DeJarnette. Western State became a popular destination for urbexers in later years when it sat vacant for several years before being converted to condominium living sometime around 2008. In paranormal circles, it was said to have been haunted.
Situated in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley, Staunton VA has an absolutely rich and diverse history. An incredible landmark, the Stonewall Jackson Hotel, with its prominent neon signage and fully restored Wurlitzer organ still hosts guests to this very day, since its opening in 1924. The area's proximity to the cities of Harrisonburg, Waynesboro, and Charlottesville has both helped, and hindered some aspects of Staunton.
One such instance where its proximity may definitely have been a liability, is the Staunton Mall. 1966 would usher in the construction of a new retail center which would open two years later in 1968. Formerly an open-air shopping center known as Staunton Plaza, it was anchored by JC Penney, Montgomery Ward, a Woolworths, and the grocery store, Safeway. Staunton Plaza was originally developed by the Rosenfeld Realty Co.
Another notable tenant would be Virginia-based Peoples Drug store. It would go on to be enclosed as an indoor shopping mall in the mid-80s, and would include an expansion that saw another Virginia staple, South Boston-based Leggett department store enter the mall, which had its grand opening in 1987. It would then be known as the Staunton Mall, owned then by the Covington Co.
Safeway's space, having been closed along with its location in nearby Waynesboro back in 1982, would be transformed into a Sears Outlet store by 1984. However, by 1989, the Sears store would shutter due to faltering sales figures. Enter Goody's, which would open in Sears' void by 1993. One closing at the Staunton Mall which would sadden me, personally, was the 1993 closure of the Woolworths store, as a result of company restructuring at the time.
After this sequence of blows, I guess it was decided it would benefit the mall to undergo some renovations around 1996, under the guidance of the mall's new owners, Steven D. Bell & Co. A Stone & Thomas department store opened in the Woolworth's space that had been vacant 3 years. The food court would relocate to be strategically closer to the movie theater, and the original food court space consolidated into the rest of the mall. Sadly, this round of renovations would see the removal of the center court fountain, yet another change I was not happy to see. As you can see, things were beginning to change, and not necessarily for the better. Some exterior embellishments would also be added during this time. Leggett would also become Belk in 1998.
Two years after these big changes to Staunton Mall, it would once again change hands, signaling a new era for the property. Colonial Properties Trust would step in as the new owners, and resulted in an eponymous name change to Colonial Mall. During this time, the Stone & Thomas store would vacate, and Lawrenceville VA-based Peebles department store would fill the space.
In 2001, Montgomery Ward would close, as the entire chain would file for bankruptcy, closing every single store nationwide. Yet another devastating blow to the mall, and for me personally. Target, a full-line Sears, & Old Navy were tossed around as possible replacements, but ultimately Steve & Barry's would win the space, as it was having its meteroric rise at that time, in 2004. Expanding rapidly would be the folly in that company's business plan, as we will explore later.
PHOTO FROM SICKMALLS
2006 would see a Gold's Gym come into the Goody's spot, as that store, seeing the writing on the wall, I suppose, decided against renewing its lease. Things were declining hard and fast at Staunton, as I could see with my own eyes, as one of the final times I visited the mall before leaving Virginia for Pennsylvania was in the summer of 2005. Hardly anything in the food court, multiple empty storefronts, damage & decay starting to set in, and foot traffic almost nonexistent. My childhood mall was now a dead mall. It was a tough pill to swallow.
I had been coming to Staunton Mall on family vacations to the Shenandoah Valley since the 80s. We would spend summer weekends, staying overnight in nearby Waynesboro, and enjoying yard sales, shopping, relaxing by the motel pool, and enjoying the fresh mountain atmosphere... a welcome diversion from the boredom of country life in rural central Virginia, my childhood home.
Saturday nights would usually mean a trip to the mall, as we were not fortunate enough to have one in the small town in which I grew up. In the weeks leading up to our trips to the mountains, I would save up money from babysitting, odd jobs, or housecleaning, and in addition to the money my mom would give me, I spent many happy hours browsing the Record Corner, Books-A-Million (and before that, Waldenbooks), Woolworths, and the host of other fun and kitschy shops the little mall had to offer. It was never a big mall; it never was "thriving" in all the time I ever went there. But the times I did spend there were happy. I spent way too much money in the Record Corner and buying books and trinkets throughout the mall, and had a perfectly marvelous time doing all that. Times really were simpler back then. I still pine for many aspects of that time of my life.
Incidentally, across the street from the mall, up until 1989, was a Zayre store, which I fell instantly in love with upon first shopping there as a kid. Not surprisingly, that store would end up as Ames, then a thrift store, and now, full circle, it exists as a TJ Maxx (TJ's, Home Goods, and BJ's Warehouse club are part of what's left of the remnants of the Zayre company, which dissolved in 1989, leading to the Staunton store's closing.)
Generally, the last summer weekend we would spend in the Shenandoah Valley would be one in August, and between the mall, Zayre, and the Kmart in Waynesboro (combined with a trip to Lynchburg VA, to River Ridge Mall and Hills on a different weekend) I got all my back to school shopping needs met. It was fun, taking the scenic drive up to Waynesboro, driving through the Afton Mountain area, and occasionally taking either the Blue Ridge Parkway or Skyline Drive as a Sunday drive, before sadly heading back home. I always hated the ride home, because it meant the end of those idyllic summer days, shopping, swimming, and just enjoying all the Valley had to offer.
I would move away from Virginia in 2006 to live with, and eventually marry my husband, Pat, who is the other half of Raw & Real Retail. Settling in the Philadelphia suburbs meant that it would be a very long time before I would go back to Virginia in general, and it would be even longer before I would return to the Shenandoah Valley for any reason. I continued to keep tabs on Staunton Mall, from afar, via a blog site a woman from Virginia ran called "That Mall is sick and that Store is Dead!" Occasionally the subject of Staunton Mall would come up later in the dead mall community as well, and people would share their accounts of the status of the place.
Shortly after I exited Virginia, in 2007, Colonial Mall would again find new ownership, in First Republic Group Realty. They would return the mall to its former name, Staunton Mall. I mentioned earlier that Steve & Barry's had an explosive rise, quickly opening store after store. Eventually that business model would fail... HARD. Steve & Barry's would succumb to the recession of 2008 and shutter every single one of their stores nationwide. Books-A-Million would exit, moving to a power center in Waynesboro. Major blows to a property which was already floundering badly.
2009 would bring probably the worst news of all for Staunton Mall. First Republic, its owners for only two short years, would go bankrupt, putting the mall up for sale. In perhaps the saddest moment in its history, Staunton Mall would be purchased by mall slumlords, Kohan Retail Investment Group which would oversee further decline of the mall, both in terms of tenants, and the disrepair the place was beginning to fall into.
In a rare move, Kohan would even give up on the property, as in 2014, the mall fell into the hands of an entity calling itself Staunton Mall LLC. Peebles packed up and left in 2018, leaving only Belk & JC Penney as anchors.
A good friend of mine, and fellow YouTuber Doomie Grunt visited the Staunton Mall in November of 2018 to do a video, and me, a solid, by checking in on the place since, at that time, I had no idea when, or if, I would ever set foot in the place again. Especially since I did not know when the bomb would drop that maybe the place might be closing for good. I knew it was getting really bleak there.
You can see Doomie's video of Staunton Mall HERE:
Mall Walk Summer 2019 would have us at RRR carving a path that would take us to Pittsburgh, out and around that neck of the woods, down through Virginia, to North Carolina to spend a few days derping with Doomie on his turf, and down to one of our summer hangouts in Myrtle Beach. This path, thankfully, allowed me to finally have the opportunity to return to my childhood mall, steeling myself for the heart-wrenching visit that it was inevitably going to be.
Stopping over in Staunton with the sole purpose of going to the mall would definitely be an emotional visit. After taking a few external photos of the mall, we entered through the JC Penney. Stepping out into the mall concourse was the moment I was dreading. I was met with empty storefront after empty storefront. The cinema, remarkably, is still there and open for business. I think only a Hot Wok Chinese restaurant remains in what's left of the food court, and an arcade just off the food court. A visit to the women's room served as a stark reminder of how far the mall has fallen.
Walking through what used to be the center court area of the mall was sobering. More empty storefronts and an alarming lack of anyone around, including security, as I suspect they peaced out a long time ago, as there's nothing really to secure there.
One lone soul, a local, who saw me taking photos actually asked me if I worked for the newspaper and asked if I was going to do something about the mall. I had to tell him that I was there because it was my childhood mall and I had heard it was struggling, and had to come see it, perhaps one last time. I also told him I was documenting the mall for historic purposes, which was also the truth. He seemed glad that someone was at least taking an interest in the place.
As you move away from the center court and start progressing towards the Belk wing... an eerieness takes over. ALL you can hear is the buzzing of the lights, and it's a very overpowering buzz... the kind you generally ONLY hear in a dead mall. I've heard the sound several times, being a seasoned dead mall explorer by this point. It's a sound you hear in your sleep when you find yourself in a dead mall dream. In our video, that buzzing is all you hear, as we left that portion of the video raw, as we found it, because it was such a striking way to let the mall tell its own story.
The Record Corner that had been a childhood favorite in Staunton Mall for me, had long since closed. It's location just before you reach the end of the mall where Belk is, sat lonely and vacant. It looked like it had been quite some time since anyone darkened its doors. One more sad kick in the stomach for me, as our visit to the mall was drawing to a close.
All those happy memories were dashed away in a tide of emotion that hit me, and I just had to stand there and let it wash over me, as a combination of heartbreak and nostalgia filled both my head and heart to overflowing. But, I had done what I had come to do... to essentially say goodbye and pay my respects to a place that had meant so much to me.
Staunton is too close to places like Harrisonburg and Valley Mall, Waynesboro and its thriving lifestyle centers and power centers, and Charlottesville, which for years boasted its Fashion Square Mall... which is now, incidentally, beginning to die, also. Times have been tough all over in recent years, not being kind to the retail environment as a whole, so that even once-thriving properties like Fashion Square are now in trouble, also.
You can take a look at Doomie Grunt's Fashion Square video HERE:
Spring 2020 has just passed, and we all know the subject that has been on everyone's mind. The COVID-19 health crisis has dominated the news, and has dealt some serious blows to the nation and its retail climate. This would bring a serious gut punch to Staunton Mall, once again, as the JC Penney company, faced with a potential bankruptcy, would be closing a whopping 154 locations nationwide. This time, the Staunton location would NOT be spared. I am not sure when the liquidation process will begin.
This leaves Belk as the sole anchor, to carry the mall. I can only imagine it is a matter of time before even the current owners have their fill of a property that cannot in any way possibly be profitable, and wash their hands of it. In this current climate, I have NO idea who may have the money to foolhardily sink any capital into this money pit.
It hurts me to have to speak of a place that once held place in my heart so callously and frankly, but alas, I am a realist. I have seen the writing on the wall for this mall almost all my life, if I am being honest. I have absolutely no idea how it has remained swimming for as long as it has. I suppose there are forces in the community who are reluctant to see a place that has been part of it for so long, going back to its days as an open-air plaza in the late 60s, simply vanish from the landscape.
Small malls of its type are a dying breed, and were only ever designed to serve the communities in which they existed. Sadly, between online commerce, and other brick & mortar options, like big box stores and lifestyle centers, these dinosaurs of retail are quickly going extinct.
This is why we, at Raw & Real Retail, do what we do. We're capturing these places, in some cases, right before they are given last rites and shutter for good. We want to preserve the history and memories of these places. In the case of Staunton Mall... those memories are intensely personal.
THANKS FOR TAKING A LOOK!
You can view our video of Staunton Mall HERE:
Here are a bunch more photos I thought I would include, just because!
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Raw & Real Retail
One can really tell from this post that you're invested in this mall and its fate, so I'm sorry to see that the mall has been declining for many years now. Do you think that its continued survival up to this point has a lot to owe to the anchor stores remaining open? If so, I worry about what will happen once Penney's closes. Glad you got to see the mall in person again before that liquidation began.
ReplyDeleteMississippi has a lot of small town malls like this; you make a great point that they were only ever meant to serve their communities. Sadly, small communities are all but ignored by the chain retailers these days, especially those chains that would locate inside malls. That leaves the inline spaces to falter, and eventually the anchors to pull out, too. In the case of Penney's, for example, the rationale often seems to be that the store is too small and old to keep around. The small can't be easily helped, but if they had put money into these community stores over the years, perhaps they wouldn't have become so outdated by present day. AFB and I have been talking about this phenomenon recently, and I'm convinced that the argument that these small town stores "aren't profitable" is just an excuse. As the only department store option(s) for miles around, the people in the area will shop at these stores. It seems that the stores themselves just don't want to be there. And this, of course, is heartbreaking, to so many people.
JCPenney already left a majority of the small town MS malls years ago -- prior to 2010, even, the way I understand it (though I admit I'm not well-versed in malls!) -- the majority of the holdouts falling in one group in the 2017 closure round. The present list clears out one more small town mall, in Laurel, as well as a standalone store in Starkville. Some remain vacant, but there are multiple examples of Mississippi malls replacing Penney's with Hobby Lobby (even more examples of this exist in other MS malls, except in those cases Hobby Lobby is backfilling shuttered non-JCPenney anchors). But Hobby Lobby doesn't open to the interior of the mall. In your experience, does it still help a mall's survival to have an anchor present even if it doesn't open to the mall corridor? Or in that situation, would it be just as well, effectively, to have the box remain empty and vacant?
Thank you for the thoughtful and insightful comments. Right now we can just wait and see what happens with other properties that are troubled, but as for this one I think it may be done for. There's just not enough in it to be worthy of whatever astronomical amounts of money to revitalize and rehab the property, let alone trying to woo tenants back. I think its days are almost over. Time to put a mixed use or lifestyle center there, or at least, that's what developers or local officials would say. However, that will depend on when the local entity who owns the mall finally throws in the towel. Wonder if bills are even getting paid?
DeleteYeah, I can tell this was an emotional visit for you just from the way this was written. I like to think positively myself, but I acknowledge that sometimes my optimism is just unrealistic.
ReplyDeleteBeing a rural person myself, I just don't understand how or why these smaller rural stores aren't profitable. Sometimes it may truly be they aren't profitable, but as Retail Retell mentioned, it seems companies are shying away from rural areas. The thing I just don't understand is why. When your shopping options are limited, you are bound to spend money.
However with that being said, I can honestly understand JCPenney closing this location. It is really isn't far from other locations in Harrisonburg and Charlottesville.