It has been a while since the blog has been active. Here is a second post for the day to make up for the long delay in activity. To see the first post of the day, click here https://southernretail.blogspot.com/2025/12/almeda-mall-with-macys-closing-sale-feb.html
Here is a revisit to one of the few remaining small-town malls in Texas. As of this blog post, the mall is still operating and does not appear to have been affected by the heartbreaking flooding that occurred in this area earlier this year. Unfortunately, the mall is changing as there is a 48,862 square foot Academy under construction within the mall.
If any locals see this post, can you comment below and provide any updates on the mall?
This old mall walker sign shows the route through the mall. The main corridor goes from JCPenney to Belk with mall entrances at each anchor and the main entrance in the middle. It is a simple layout that was repeated in many Texas small-town malls.
The mall still retains the old school look of the past. Besides tenant changes, little has changed over the years besides some new paint and cleaning. And this mall is really clean.
Retro Hibbett Sports store with the JCPenney annex on the left. Hibbett Sports is still open as of this post.
Burke's Outlet changed to Bealls.
As you can see from the photos, this mall corridor only has spaces for stores on one side. One half of the corridor is taken up by the JCPenney annex and Bealls.
Retro Bath and Body Works. Sadly, this store left the mall a few months ago.
The amazing center court with a clean and running water fountain. Hopefully this will remain intact when the Academy is added onto the mall.
RAC dressing company was in the former Bealls space. EntertainMART is now located here as of February 2025. To see the old location in a former Hastings store click here. The old EntertainMART building is set to be demolished for new businesses.
The Belk half of the mall is the quietest. Just a handful of businesses left down here. If I had to guess, this is where the Academy will go. As I researched this article, this appears to be the case as the businesses in this side of the mall have all closed.
This Belk store like the Nacogdoches Texas location is located in a former Kmart space.
The retro Arcade was at the mall entrance next to Belk. We will see the inside of the arcade in a bit.
Maurice's was one of the few stores left near Belk. It has since closed.
The retro arcade was still going. This picture looks more like the 1980's than 2024. Sadly, the arcade left the mall in October as what appears to be a clearing out of the Belk corridor. It looks like they will reopen at some point in a new location, but they auctioned off a lot of what was here.
More photos of the mall as we wrap up the tour.
Elevate Pure Foods was a small healthy snack and drink shop. It looks like they have since left the mall and are looking for a new location. On their Instagram they mention an upcoming demolition of their mall location. Seems like the Academy will go up on this side of the mall
A very retro Claire's storefront that has since closed.
The next three photos are on the side of the mall where the Academy will presumably be built. If they cut off this half of the mall form Academy, hopefully they will still keep the JCPenney corridor open.
Real trees planted in the mall! A rare sight in 2024.
More shots of the exterior to finish up this post.
Nighttime shots.
I hope you enjoyed this mall revisit. While it is sad to hear about the demise of yet another small-town mall in Texas, at least we got to see it and document it before it changed forever. While new businesses are always good for a city, this redevelopment has displaced some local businesses. Hopefully everyone affected will come back stronger than before.
Earth tones malls like this were once so common, but are now increasingly becoming rare and it seems like this mall might be somewhat endangered by the upcoming Academy addition. While the mall still has a few shops of note in the 2024 photos, it seems like things have taken a downhill turn in the last year with Maurices, Bath & Body Works, and others closing. Oh well.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you were able to check this mall out and photograph it for us while things were still reasonably intact. While part of the mall being demolished isn't good for those of us who like vintage malls, the addition of Academy will be good for the local residents. They certainly need a bit of a break after the events of the past year.
Speaking of partial mall demolitions, I saw a recent permit indicating that Memorial City Mall is tearing down a significant chunk of the mall and probably replacing it with a lifestyle center type thing. I think this is expected to be the old Sears wing of the mall since it looks like the mall has been trying to move the tenants from that area to other parts of the mall.
Somewhat on the topic of EntertainMART, I was recently tasked with finding some movies on VHS as a gift for someone. The thrift stores are pretty useless for VHS these days and so I tried the NASA Half Price Books. Wow, that was disappointing, they hardly had anything and what they had was tucked under the LP and CD bins so they were hard to even get to with other customers wanting to browse the music items (admittedly, I was doing the same too).
The North Oaks and Rice Village larger HPBs were reliable sources for this kind of stuff at one time, but the only larger HPB left in this area is the Humble one. I had not been to Humble in a very long time for non-airport purposes, but I decided to make the trip over there and I was not left disappointed. I was happy to see that the store had carpeting, something I didn't remember from my previous trip there (which, admittedly, was around 2011 or so). It might be the only Houston HPB, at least from the 1990s on, to ever have carpeting. The VHS selection in Humble was significant and most of it was on regular bookcases and it was sorted. The audio cassette selection was twice as big as what I had seen at any other HPB, including the old North Oaks one, and they had some nice CDs which I bought too. I found some VHS movies for the gift which I think will work well, but we'll see. At least I can't say they didn't have anything, I certainly had options in Humble. The HPB in your area is certainly a gem as far as current Houston HPBs go. Maybe it'll draw me to the Northeast side a little more often.
The days of these small-town malls seem to be numbered. This mall very closely resembles the University Mall in Nacogdoches Texas before it was chopped up for Big Box redevelopment. I hope they are keeping the water fountain intact.
DeleteAcademy will be a big addition to the city. Academy has been expanding to smaller cities with populations of around 20,000 like Kerrville and Corsicana.
The last time we were at Memorial City mall in the Summer, the Sears corridor was clearing out. I figured something like this was going to happen. The Dillard's corridor has a few empty spaces that businesses could move to. The playground could also move down there as well. The old Sears space has really dragged down that side of the mall, but it was a good place to park and enter the mall quickly.
The Humble HPB seems to be one of the few large HPB stores left in the area. They have been pretty good for the last decade or so when you want to find an old movie. I fired up my late Sears era Sony boombox the other day to listen to some cassettes. The last time I looked at their music selection the prices had gone up. Gone are the days of 25 and 50 cent cassettes. Antique stores seem to be the way to go for older physical media these days.
Half Price Books seems to charge a blanket price of $2 or $2.50 each for audio cassettes. That's certainly more than the $1 they were charging some years ago or the $0.50 Goodwill was charging years ago, but I suppose there aren't many great alternatives these days. VHS movies and CDs seem to be based on market pricing. Things like major Disney movies are so plentiful that they aren't too expensive, around $3-$5/each. More rare movies might well be north of $10 though. The most expensive movie I bought was 'Snoopy Come Home' at $7.50 (it was on a special display), but everything else were Disney movies and were quite a bit less.
DeleteOne of the weird things about the market pricing on used CDs is that HPB often charges less for new CDs they sell now than they do for used ones. With that in mind, I often don't even look at the used ones and look for new ones instead. They often have a lot of new, sealed jazz and classical CDs and I look for those. I bought 2 new BIS classical hybrid Super Audio CDs (SACDs which can also be played in standard CD players) on clearance for $3/each and a new, sealed hybrid SACD/Blu-Ray Pure Audio combo pack classical release for ~$5. It's hard to beat that pricing. I've never tried a Blu-Ray Pure Audio album before so it'll be interesting to try that. I'm glad I found it at the Humble HPB! The funny thing is used CDs at HPB are often $5.99-19.99 so those new CDs are certainly the better buy.
I'm a bit out of touch on antique stores and which ones are good for things like VHS, audio cassettes, and CDs. There is a small antiques store on Jones Rd. just north of FM 1960 near me which sells VHS and CDs, though the prices are hardly bargains and I'm not aware of any other antique stores which sell that stuff in great quantity. Do you have any recommendations?
You may get a laugh out of this, but I was tasked with buying VHS movies for someone's 20th birthday who likes VHS. A few months ago, I was tasked with figuring out how to get their VCR to work with their newer TV which does not have analog inputs. I recommended a composite video-to-HDMI converter from Walmart and I tested it for them and it works well in the few minutes I had to test it. It didn't have any problems with Macrovision-encoded tapes, which was a concern of mine, and the image quality seemed good enough. The only problem I had is that a Walmart-brand Onn HDMI cable was bought with the adapter and the cable was a dud and was causing a big headache because the initial assumption was that the adapter was bad since I assumed the cable wasn't the problem. Once I tested it with a different HDMI cable and saw it was working fine, I figured out the problem. Upon closer review, the Walmart HDMI cable had a bent pin in the connector. Ugh, Walmart quality I suppose!
I had an old Fry's Electronics $1.99 HDMI cable special on hand from around 2009 and it worked just fine.
It is good to hear that you're still listening to cassettes on your Sony boombox. I still use my similar Sony boombox which I got from the Mall of the Mainland Sears. I think Sony discontinued those boomboxes a year or two ago, but Walmart sells an Onn one with a cassette recorder and a CD player for around $40. I saw a whole wall full of them at the 290 & W Tidwell store so they must have expected to sell a lot of those for the Christmas season.
Yeah, we stopped by the Highway 6 Copperfield area HPB and they had a Metallica Black tape for $25 along with a lot of other tapes for $2 plus. Not sure how they came up with $25 for that particular tape, but it was sticker shock for sure.
DeleteI may need to stock up on CD's as they are becoming more difficult to find. It was brought to my attention that there is one less store that sells CD's in the area. FYE at Katy Mills Mall is closing already. Barnes and Noble has really downsized their CD selection at Deerbrook and the Woodlands. It seems like vinyl is the preferred physical format now by far. Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Barnes and Noble, all have robust vinyl selections now with only a few CD's left. I also noticed some tiny vinyl singles at Target that are about the size of CD's, for the low price of $14.99 for 2 songs!
A lot of the newer HDMI cables seem to have issues with corrosion, and I have thrown a lot of the lower quality cables out recently. Even a couple of Nintendo Switch HDMI cables have the same issue. I have bought a handful of DVD's this year after not buying anything for a long time. I also found a VHS cassette from Blockbuster at a Pawn Shop and a Hollywood Video VHS cassette at an antique shop. You never know what you can find out there sometimes.
On another topic, I came across my photos from Almeda Mall in October 2024 that show a lot more of Macy's before the store closing sale. For some weird reason, I almost missed the photos for the blog. I took 120 photos vs. the 66 I had for the Macy's store closing post.
I am not sure about any good local antique stores. On our road trips the past couple of years, we have stopped by a lot of them outside of the area in small towns.
It might be worth picking up one of the Onn boomboxes to have on standby if parts become hard to find for the Sony boomboxes. I haven't looked on the Sears Parts Direct store for a long-time, maybe they still carry some of those parts.