The Centre of Tallahassee, formerly Tallahassee Mall, is a local semi-enclosed shopping center and entertainment venue (formerly a fully enclosed regional shopping mall) located at the intersection of North Monroe Street and John Knox Road in Tallahassee, Florida. Since the official close of the faltering Northwood Mall in 1986 (and subsequent repurposing as a strip mall-styled office complex), The Tallahassee Mall became the older of two surviving enclosed malls in the Tallahassee area, the other being Governor's Square.
The Centre's present anchor stores include AMC Theatres, Belk, Burlington Coat Factory, and Ross Dress For Less within several big box stores including Barnes & Noble and Guitar Center as well as Victoria's Secret and GNC, all of which are carryovers from its previous incarnation as the Tallahassee Mall. Other stores that operated in the mall such as Sam Goody have closed their doors between the initial close of the Tallahassee Mall and its renewal as the Centre of Tallahassee.
Video Centre of Tallahassee
History
Tallahassee Mall opened in 1971 with three anchor stores: Woolco, Gayfers and Montgomery Ward; other major tenants included McCrory Stores and Walgreens. Woolco was closed in 1983 and replaced with Zayre. Seven years later, this anchor became Ames when the Zayre chain was acquired.
A new wing was added behind Montgomery Ward in 1992. This new wing ended in a fourth anchor store, Parisian. As a result of this wing opening, the Montgomery Ward store was bisected by a new mall concourse to connect the new wing to the existing mall. Development was also to have included Kmart moving into the former Ames space, plus the addition of Mervyns. Afterward, then-manager Tom Strauss was fired by the mall's owners, Westinghouse, and the mall's management was sold to Edward J. DeBartolo coroporation. In 1995, a local group took over from DeBartolo.
Despite the opening of Service Merchandise and the first Tallahassee-area Goody's Family Clothing store in the former Ames in 1995, mall occupancy had decreased to forty-five percent by June of that year.
A twenty-screen movie theater owned by AMC Theatres was added to the Parisian wing in 1996. Gayfers was acquired by Dillard's in 1998, followed by the closure of two more anchors: Service Merchandise in 1999 and Montgomery Ward in 2000. Jones Lang LaSalle acquired the mall and then began renovations on it. The former was split between Ross Dress for Less and Shoe Carnival, while the latter became Burlington Coat Factory and other stores. Several new big box stores were added, including Oshman's, Barnes & Noble and Guitar Center.
Feldman Mall Properties acquired the mall from Jones Lang LaSalle in 2005. Belk acquired the Parisian chain in 2007 and re-branded the Tallahassee Mall store as Belk, while Dillard's announced its closure in early 2008. The mall was foreclosed on in January 2011. Later in the same month, a real estate company based in Miami bought its ground lease for $100. It was then announced that the mall was not expected to close, in spite of its increasingly common reputation as a dead mall.
Maps Centre of Tallahassee
Renovation as The Centre of Tallahassee
Renovations on the mall began in September 2014, including a planned demolition of the former Dillard's space, prior to a change of plans that resulted in the continued presence of the big box store so that it could be refitted. At the time renovation began, only 12 stores were open. At the same time, the mall was renamed Centre of Tallahassee. The Centre (formerly mall) was refitted so that a number of its former hallways would resemble the roads and paths of a town square in a traditional Swiss or Austrian burg, including cobbled walkways suitable for both slow-moving automotives and pedestrian foot traffic. Beginning with a liquor bar built into the AMC movie theater, a number of new establishments have found a home in the newly refurbished Centre of Tallahassee, including Urban Food Market, an organic food grocery store, wine bar, and deli, plus a branch campus of the popular Tallahassee charter middle school School of Arts and Sciences (locally known as SAS) soon slated to be located in the Centre of Tallahassee's former Dillard's anchor wing, and an outdoor amphitheater intended for public local concerts. As of 2016, popular and notable music artists such as Steve Miller Band, Dashboard Confessional, Coolio, and Alice Cooper were booked and played successful live shows at the venue, drawing in a respectably sized audience from the Leon County and surrounding areas. In 2017, the Centre of Tallahassee followed up on this success by booking Willie Nelson and blink 182 to play at the venue. Also in 2016, Belk and AMC planned renovations as the mall transformed into the Centre of Tallahassee.
In addition to Ross Dress For Less, Barnes and Noble, Guitar Center, and Burlington Coat factory, other remaining staples of the former Tallahassee Mall in the new Centre of Tallahassee include: Tara's, a hobbyist strategy board game store; Stone Age, a New Age paraphernalia store; and GameScape, a Desktop Computer-based video game arcade and comic book store. All of these stores have remained consistently popular attractions with local clientele during the initial decline of the former Tallahassee Mall and its carefully directed transition into the Centre of Tallahassee. More recently, an upscale hotel-style apartment complex has been planned by the developers to complement and accompany the newly refurbished Centre of Tallahassee.
While the renovation project has been criticized by some Tallahassee locals as a white elephant, the developers hope that the presence of a school as well as a number of new restaurants (including Lemongrass, a Southeast Asian cuisine restaurant, and craft beer bar and a planned brewery plus the first expansion of the Dreamland Bar-B-Que chain into Florida) and entertainment venues (including a seasonal ice skating rink) will allow the new Centre of Tallahassee to thrive as a commercial success. Alex Baker, one of the main developers of the renovation project, died in 2017, although the project of reviving the former mall as the Centre of Tallahassee continues.
References
External links
- Tallahassee Mall
Source of article : Wikipedia
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