- Margaret D.
- Saturday, March 16
Do you remember the original Richland Mall? Historic photographs and newspaper articles tell the story of the rise, and fall, of this once-popular shopping mall.
There was the smell of caramel popcorn in the air, the pebble-paved plaza underfoot, and the sun coming through the open roof courtyard. I and many others who remember the original Richland Mall recall it with great fondness. I don’t know why it had such appeal, but something about the combination of stores, food, and the outdoor central courtyard blended to create a mini-mall heaven. You didn’t have to spend a fortune in order to pass a pleasant afternoon shopping, or just people-watching, at the original Richland Mall.
Early Plans
So how did this lovely little shopper’s paradise come about? A grainy sketch published on October 4, 1960 in the Columbia Record shows a plan for a J. B. White & Co. department store anchor with 30 smaller stores grouped into 5 separate clusters surrounding a central passageway. This central passageway, or “mall,” was partially covered by a series of pointed arches that would provide partial cover from the elements.
Developed on 36 acres with 14 acres for expansion, it was the largest shopping center in South Carolina when it opened in 1961 and the only one that included a full-sized department store. At an original cost of $2.75 million, it was owned by Liberties Property, Inc. and designed by architects Toombs, Amisana & Wells of Atlanta and K. S. Espidahl of Columbia. It was constructed by McCrory Construction Company who also managed extensive alterations to the sloped and wet building site. Stores were leased by Caine Realty and Mortgage Company of Greenville and Walter Taylor in Columbia.
When plans were announced, Forest Acres Mayor W. J. Stubbs was quoted stating that Forest Acres residents were fortunate to have such a “complete and attractive” shopping center located in their growing community. The original design included a paved and lighted parking lot that could accommodate 1,500 cars, a department store, and partially covered shopping center complex that allowed shoppers to move from store to store without being exposed to the weather. The covered pedestrian area, or “mall” was a unique feature designed for this shopping center that gave it a stylish, new twist. Richland Mall was thus an intermediate step between open, street-facing shopping centers like Boozer, Rosewood, Forest Lake Shopping Center, or the Trenholm Plaza, and the completely enclosed malls to come like Dutch Square, Woodhill, and the Columbia Mall.
Like other U.S. cities, Columbia’s development in the 1960s was shifting from a focus on downtown living and shopping to the suburbs, as more residents had cars and desired sleek new homes, wide lawns, and new schools. In order to lure more home buyers to their neighborhoods, suburban developers added commercial districts with ample parking to provide car-bound shoppers with a convenient shopping experience.
Planned decades before the mega-mall of the 1980s would emerge, the Richland Mall offered Columbians a unique and modern commercial concept blending ample parking with pedestrian-friendly shopping in a suburban landscape. Placed near the well-traveled intersection of Beltline Boulevard and Forest Drive, it was a winning combination, for a while.
Originally, the site was owned by the J. Manning Evans family, owners of the Evans Motor Company, who planned to develop the corner of their long-held family property into a commercial site to be called Evans Shopping Center, along with some other initial investors and a capital investment of $300,000. According to an article published February 1, 1959 in The State, Evans Shopping Center was first planned as a single strip of stores including 2 supermarkets, a department store, a variety store, drug store, small shops, and ample parking, positioned along Penn Branch Creek near the intersection of Forest Drive and Beltline Boulevard. It was billed as "gigantic" and offering "4 times as many parking spaces" as other shopping centers in the area, and with stores "as large or larger as those on Main Street."
Then on June 15, 1960, The State reported that plans for the Evans Shopping Center had expanded into a double-sided shopping center with a partially covered central mall. J. B. White and Company committed to constructing a full-sized department store on the east end of the covered walk.
Though the Evans family and investors had made steady progress in their plans for the Evans Shopping Center and new store occupants were announced through the summer, in August 1960, the Evans investors sold the entire site and plans to Greenville insurance executive Francis M. Hipp, CEO of Liberty Life Insurance Co., for $456,532. By October 1960 the site had been rebranded as the Richland Mall and Columbia architect K. S. Espedahl’s original design was given some enhancements by the Atlanta-based architectural firm Toombs, Amisana & Wells. Site clearing began in early 1961, and on January 9, 1961, the McCrory Construction Company was awarded the contract to build the mall with a bid of $2.1 million.
Groundbreaking and Ribbon Cuttings
An aerial view in our library’s photograph archives shows the site under construction. But before building could even begin, several streams needed to be culverted and the site drained, thousands of tons of dirt were shifted to level out the area, and large swaths of timber were cut and sold. When the construction bid was announced, several design elements of the mall were heralded as new and modern. These included an unusual “folding plate” design on the roof, white brick and white concrete flooring, the “mall” connecting all buildings, and the use of 25 ft. and 100 ft. movable concrete forms as the basic building material. The folding plate roof design in particular was novel and would allow the roof to need fewer internal support beams, opening up the building interiors to more usable space and expansive views.
As construction continued over the summer of 1961, numerous ads for new homes featured being near the Richland Mall as a selling point, no doubt raising property values for the homes in its vicinity. In July the merchants and investors in the mall, representing some of Columbia’s top business leaders, formed the Richland Mall Merchants Association. The Association’s leaders announced that when the Mall opened in October it would be the first shopping mall in South Carolina, only rivaled by the Charlottetown Mall in Charlotte, N.C., which was the first enclosed shopping mall in the United States when it opened in 1959.
Several Richland Mall stores cut their ribbons on October 26, 1961, though the formal grand opening for the Mall was held on November 2. Local TV personality Cactus Quave was on hand to entertain at the new Equitable Savings and Loan branch near the mall, deals and specials were advertised, and Columbia Mayor Lester Bates and Forest Acres Mayor W. J. Stubbs, Jr. attended the ribbon cutting ceremony. There were initially 21 commercial entities in the mall including the J.B. White Department Store, Woolworth’s and Eckerd’s dime stores (both with luncheonettes), Winn Dixie and Colonial Stores grocery stores, and local businesses such as Berry’s Department Store, Sylvan Brother’s Jewelers, S. B. McMaster Sporting Goods, Cayce TV and Stereo, and others.
The clean and refreshing look of the mall was noted at the grand opening, and the central mall courtyard was described as providing the shopper with a “continuous garden terrace” that created a “relaxed shopping atmosphere” far superior to the traffic and hustle and bustle one encountered when shopping downtown. Basically, they created a shopping paradise.
This relaxing shopping experience was similar to what I remember, though my earliest memories of the Richland Mall were more than a decade on from the grand opening. I even recall the old-fashioned luncheonettes, though to my young eye they seemed like they were from a bygone era. I shopped at Meri’s Record Shops, got my picture on Santa’s lap in the photo studio, ate Mr. Popper’s caramel popcorn with a cherry-flavored Icee, and saw many movies at the Richland Mall Theatre, which was added in 1966, and I loved the Happy Bookseller bookstore (and later the Barnes and Noble Book store). But, when I entered my teenaged years in the 1980s, there was a newer, and much cooler, mall in town, and Richland Mall was feeling the pain.
Fickle Shoppers
Just as Main Street merchants saw their bottom lines decrease as shoppers left for the suburbs, the Richland Mall saw an exodus of shoppers when a larger, sleeker, and more 'gigantic’ mall with even more expansive parking lots was constructed a little farther out of town. The grand opening of the Columbia Mall was held on August 10, 1977, and this new mall had all the bells and whistles. When Richland Mall opened it touted 200,000 square feet of commercial space and 21 retailers. The Columbia Mall at its opening covered 1 million square feet and had an estimated 140 stores. It had multi-levels, it was completely enclosed, surrounded by parking lots, extensive landscaping, several central courtyards with fountains, trees, elevators and escalators, it had a food court and a playground. It was a mall on a new magnitude.
Since it was conceived, Richland Mall was owned by numerous entities. It was first sold by the Evans family to Liberty Properties Company in 1960, then to Hardaway Development Company of Columbus, Ga. in 1973, then to U.K. Properties, Inc. in 1976, then to the Keenan Company in 1983, and then to the Australian firm Hooker/Barnes in 1986. It was this company that had the bold plan to remake the mall.
The Richland Mall tried to compete with other malls by attracting new, higher market stores and entirely renovating the mall. In 1988, it was rebranded as the Richland Fashion Mall, and the high-end Bonwit Teller department store was added to the east. The mall was enclosed, elevators and escalators were installed, a food court, fountains, new buildings, multilevel parking deck, basically the works were added to try and remake the Richland Mall in the style of the new, modern mall of the 1980s. These renovations may have helped forestall the end of the mall, but they cost over $150 million, and they didn’t bring the numbers of shoppers back that they needed. Though hopes were high, in reality the renovations were too much, too late. Bonwit Teller exited the mall after only two years. Investors lost money on the deal.
New Future
The Richland Mall continued to change hands several times since then, and in 2023 it was sold to Augusta-based development company Southeastern, who plan a $100 million redevelopment to include a mixed-use living and shopping community and a park. I’m looking forward to seeing this new concept and the park sounds especially enticing. But many of us that live in Forest Acres really miss that old mall. I have to wonder if keeping the mall smaller would have helped it to weather the coming storm of the Columbiana Centre, which opened in 1990, and online shopping that put the final nail in the coffin of it and many other malls in America. I can imagine that original style working well in our Internet age with a combination of small retailers, grocery stores, open air cafes, and bookstores. Add a park, and it sounds like a shopping heaven to me.
Explore More
Read more about the story of Richland Mall via NewsBank. Sources used for this blog post are below. Images are from the Walker Local and Family History Center's collections. View more shopping mall images online in the Local History Digital Collections.
- Big shopping center to rise near Columbia, The State, February 1, 1959, page 1A, 13A
- Evans Shopping Center set to start, The State, June 15, 1960
- New shopping center plans not complete, The State, August 21, 1960 page 11A
- Plans for Richland Mall, Columbia Record, October 4, 1960
- New shopping center work to begin soon, The State, October 5, 1960 page 12B
- Richland Mall construction work begins here today, Columbia Record, January 9, 1961 page 12A
- Richland Mall shopping center contract awarded, The State, February 13, 1961 page 6A
- Richland Mall merchants organize, Columbia Record, July 21, 1961 page 9B
- Richland Mall center set to open in October, Columbia Record, July 26, 1961 page 4A
- First in State Richland Mall plans opening in October, The State, July 26, 1961 page 9A
- Richland Mall Shopping Center will open formally Thursday, Columbia Record, November 1, 1961 2C
- Richland Mall opens today, The State, November 2, 1961 page 2D
- Coming together, grand opening set for expanded mall, The State, June 19, 1988 page 1G